Shawn Blymiller spent 10 years of feeling mostly numbed while prescribed traditional anti-depressants, trudging through his day-to-day life as a suburban Salt Lake City father of two kids balancing the obligations of family and work selling technology software.
When his son was diagnosed as having special needs a few years later, the stress became increasingly difficult to endure. So like many with treatment-resistant depression, Blymiller, 39, sought out alternatives and found one he said worked: Psychedelic mushrooms.
Under a therapist’s supervision, Blymiller took psilocybin — the most popular of the hallucinogens known broadly as “magic mushrooms” — and for several hours, was able to confront past traumas, work through mental illness and ultimately become a better father, husband and friend, he said.
“It’s almost revealing. These curtains in your psyche are being opened and you feel like, ’Oh my gosh, this is how I operate; this is how I present myself,’ ” he said after a sunrise mountain hike in the Salt Lake City suburb where he lives.
A group of patients like Blymiller would be able to use them legally for their ailments under a new Utah proposal that would create a pilot program for the medical and therapeutic use of magic mushrooms. Currently, magic mushrooms are illegal under federal law, and therapists who guide patients like Blymiller through trips typically require they find them on their own out of fear of jeopardizing their licenses. Blymiller declined to say how he procured them. He said like a lot of plant-based medicine, it wasn’t difficult to find.
ILLINOIS LAWMAKER SEEKS LEGALIZATION OF PSYCHEDELIC MUSHROOMS
Amid growing acceptance of psychedelics, advocates in blue states like Colorado and Oregon began their pushes with ballot measures proposing to decriminalize psychedelics like magic mushrooms. Advocates in red states like Utah and Missouri are starting in a different way, proposing studying them or first making them legal for medical…
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