Wade Trammell recalls the time he and his fellow firefighters responded to a highway crash in which a beer truck rammed into a pole, propelling the truck’s engine through the cab and into the driver’s abdomen.
“The guy was up there screaming and squirming. Then the cab caught on fire,” Trammell says. “I couldn’t move him. He burned to death right there in my arms.”
Memories of that gruesome death and other traumatic incidents he had witnessed as a firefighter in Mountain View, California, didn’t seem to bother Trammell for the first seven years after he retired in 2015. But then he started crying a lot, drinking heavily, and losing sleep. At first, he didn’t understand why, but he would later come to suspect he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
After therapy failed to improve his mental well-being, he heard about the potential benefits of psychedelic drugs to help first responders with PTSD.
Last July, Trammell went on a retreat in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, organized by The S.I.R.E.N. Project, a nonprofit that advocates the use of psychedelics and other alternative medicines to help first responders. He took psilocybin mushrooms and, the next day, another psychedelic derived from the toxic secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad. The experience, he says, produced an existential shift in the way he thinks of the terrible things he saw as a firefighter.
“All that trauma and all that crap I saw and dealt with, it’s all very temporary and everything goes back into the universe as energy,” Trammell says.
Abundant research has shown that psychedelics have the potential to produce lasting relief from depression, anxiety, PTSD, addiction, and other mental health conditions. Many universities around the United States have…
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