As many psychology and neuroscience students have heard in lectures, discussions surrounding psychedelics and their treatment implications have proliferated with increased research into their therapeutic success in alleviating mental health disorders. Even if you aren’t a STEM student, psychedelics like magic mushrooms have entered recreational spaces as more young adults are moving away from alcohol usage and experimenting with hallucinogens. 

As a hallucinogenic fungus, magic mushrooms contain ingredients that interact with the brain and mind to trigger changes in perception. Depending on the dose, it can even alter our metaphysical belief systems. For some, psychedelics are reminiscent of the counterculture craze that dominated the zeitgeist of the 1960s, where liberal attitudes towards love, sex, and politics paralleled a surge in the recreational consumption of these narcotics. 

For many leading Western scientists such as Timothy Leary and Roland Griffiths, psychedelics represent the future of mental health treatment and neurological research. In several studies, psilocybin — the active ingredient in magic mushrooms — has been found effective in treating severe depressive disorders that do not respond to conventional treatment plans like medications and therapy. 

However, psychedelic usage in treatments did not start with Western medicine. These mind-altering substances have been woven into the rich tapestry of Mexico’s Indigenous people’s ways of life, beliefs, and rituals for over 10,000 years. The fungus’ popularity in the Western consciousness is an expression of modern science’s colonial and exclusionary legacy.

The colonizer’s touch: An Indigenous history of psychedelics 

In southern Mexico in 1955, an American banker and ethnomycologist — who studies the uses of fungi in various cultures — Gordon Wasson, made it his life’s mission to explore the sacred uses of psychedelic mushrooms. Wasson and his wife found many Indigenous communities in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, where he saw local communities using mushroom species — later identified as mescaline and psilocybin — in ceremonies and practices. 

Wasson met María Sabina, a local poet and spiritual teacher or medicine woman who used magic mushrooms as essential ingredients during ceremonies to promote spiritual healing, reconciliation with divinity, introspection, and other forms of spiritual insights. As a part of the Mazatec People — an Indigenous Mesoamerican community in southern Mexico — Sabina’s ceremonial duties were exclusive to members of the community, and not for outsiders like Wasson. 

According to University of Sydney postgraduate researcher Anna Lutkajtis, in spiritual ceremonies called velada, a spiritual teacher guides individuals as they eat magic mushrooms to “cure the spirit, communicate with Mazatec deities, ask profound questions, and seek guidance from an ‘ultimate source.’” In the psychedelic-induced states of consciousness, which are marked by hallucinations and striking thought patterns, a cacophony of music and prayers erupt, and tobacco use follows. 

Wasson was fascinated with this ritual. After convincing Sabina to allow him to participate in these ceremonies, Wasson gathered insights on the practices and brought them back to the US, eventually publishing multiple articles in 1957 on these ceremonies. By publishing the details of a closed spiritual practice, Wasson completely betrayed Sabina and Mazatec’s trust and right to privacy. 

The echoes of colonization

Following Wasson’s betrayal, psychedelic use captured the scientific and public interest in the West, kickstarting a mass development of synthetic alternatives of psilocybin and other substances and leading to an increase in publications in the late 1950s. But even so, scientists from leading American and British universities would only begin to explore the surface of psychedelic research as they studied its therapeutic potential in controlled experimental settings. 

Soon after, psychedelics leaked into the 1960s’ cultural landscape, where mostly economically privileged individuals would go on to recreationally use them in ways conflicting with the traditional roots of psychedelics in Indigenous culture and spirituality. Western governing bodies and morals did not care about the ways psychedelics were brought to the West — and how could they, when the very ‘discovery’ of these psychedelics is rooted in theft? 

For the better part of the 1960s, psychedelics bolstered the ‘free love’ movement — an acceptance of untethered forms of love — and other socialist counterculture movements. In Oaxaca, Sabina’s village received an abundance of visitors who wanted to experiment with psychedelics but were unaware of their spiritual significance to the Indigenous experience. 

Thus began a rampage of famous artists, hippies, and other countercultural groups exploiting the spiritual and cultural body of knowledge psychedelics held, turning local beliefs into forms of tourism, entertainment, and faux enlightenment. This continued for many years after Wasson’s betrayal, resulting in immense cultural, psychological, and spiritual trauma for the local Indigenous communities of southern Mexico and beyond. 

Sabina and her fellow villagers reported blasphemous sightings of non-locals in the community disrespecting psychedelics by using them inappropriately through partying, consuming them with alcohol, and performing sexual acts while high. Soon, the region’s Indigenous communities known for safeguarding these psychedelic plants were seen as an annoyance to be overcome for access to the psychedelics.

The medicalization and misappropriation of psychedelics 

Psychedelic-assisted therapies are becoming increasingly popular as a line of treatment and research. They combine talk therapy with the physical and mental health relief effects of psilocybin to treat disorders like depression and PTSD. According to the medical journal The Lancet, this therapeutic approach “has a more direct impact on brain activity, which can result in profound insights and promote introspection, emotional release, and cognitive [thinking] shifts,” especially considering that depression is characterized by absolutist, pessimistic, and black-and-white thinking. 

Many Pacific Northwest and Mexican Indigenous communities recognize sacred plants — including psychedelics like magic mushrooms — as having a sort of personhood, with several Indigenous stories describing the land as a living being. When interacting with Wasson, Sabina called the sacred mushrooms niños santos or the saint children in Spanish. 

The way Indigenous people safeguard and understand their sacred ways is difficult to translate into the West’s mainstream biomedical model of health, which pursues health through a medicalized and individualistic lens. In the West, our understanding of psychedelics is reduced to therapeutic agents that promise better outcomes for our worsening mental health crises. While this outlook can be useful, it also oversimplifies and disregards the role of traditional and community connections in healing, which is as important as the psychedelic substance itself. 

Psychedelics are not an instantaneous magical panacea to mental health and disease. Their success is dependent on multiple factors and ultimately on the capacity to embrace deep, often mystical and uncomfortable subjective experiences. Noo drug can ease this process, let alone be solely responsible for it. 

Is awareness and rectification enough?

As the popularity of psychedelics grows, so will the interest of pharmaceutical companies and other corporations to pounce on the expected financial profit these psychedelics have. As a student in a STEM program, I agree that psychedelics are an important asset in mental health treatment, but there is a cost of pharmaceutical industries pushing the frontiers of scientific innovation.

There is undeniably imperialist baggage, rooted particularly in extractivism and exclusion, that follows the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics enjoyed by the West at the expense of Indigenous communities. 

Even if we urge or mandate scientists and those in the therapy industry to integrate holistic and Indigenous-informed lenses into treatment and research, or to address the colonial history of psychedelics, it still won’t be enough to undo the damage. We can’t work within the margins of a system that is fundamentally disconnected from Indigenous ways of knowing and then expect the same system to honour the spiritual sanctity of psychedelics. 

While there has been no formal apology by institutions or Wasson for the exploitation behind his popularization of psychedelics to a Western audience, many Indigenous scholars and artists have suggested that revisiting psychedelic history is a good place to start. According to Indigenous mental health specialist LisaNa Macias Red Bear, “We can’t start the history of psychedelics in the ’60s in the Americas; that needs to stop. We [Indigenous people] used this medicine before Jesus Christ walked this Earth.”