(Photo: Ryan Vellinga/Nevada Public Radio)
In December 2020, Ben Strahan thought he’d lost the will to live. It had been a long, isolating year for the Reno-based wildland firefighter. The COVID pandemic was still in full swing, and that year’s fire season had been extreme.
“My central nervous system was smoked,” he says. “I hadn’t seen my family in 20 months, and I was just exhausted.”
Strahan had recently been promoted to supervisor of a “hotshot crew,” the name given to firefighters who battle the hottest and most complex wildfires across the country. It was his dream job. He could handle high-stakes pressure, including that year’s one-million-acre fire in the Mendocino, California, area. But once fire season had waned, he confronted internal demons and unaddressed trauma.
“I found myself sitting on the edge of a bed, on a chilly winter morning, the sun pouring through the windows, and the heat hitting my back, and I just remember it felt so good,” he recalls. “I remember putting on my running shoes like I would every morning, just to combat the struggles that I would be feeling. And in that moment, I decided to put the gun to my head and pull the trigger.”
He continues, “Luckily for me, the gun didn’t go off.”
The moment served as a wakeup call for Strahan; he needed to do something. But he was hesitant to embrace antidepressants, fearing potentially nasty side effects and the possibility of being on medication indefinitely.
So, he began researching alternative treatment options. He came across something touted as nonaddictive that could offer near-instant results: psychedelic medicine.
“That idea of them being drugs, kind of, like, gave me a lot of fear,” he says. “But here I am at the end of my rope, basically, and I’m saying to myself, ‘Well, I have to try something.’”
STRAHAN IS FAR from alone. He’s one of a growing number of people turning to psychedelics to treat mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and addiction. But he had to seek this treatment in another country.
That’s because psychedelic-assisted therapy is currently illegal nearly everywhere in the United States. But there is growing momentum in the states to legalize certain psychedelics — namely psilocybin, the active ingredient in what people often call magic mushrooms.
That push is well underway in Nevada, where at least two bills dealing with legalization of psychedelic-assisted therapy are expected to be introduced into the Legislature this year. The legislative session begins February 3 and runs until early June.
Jon Dalton is a retired Navy SEAL and president of the Nevada Coalition for Psychedelic Medicines, a nonprofit working on legislation with Nevada State Senator Rochelle Nguyen and Assemblyman Max Carter, both Democrats from Las Vegas. Like Strahan, Dalton started off skeptical about psychedelic medicine.
“This to me sounded like an extension of, you know, the hippies’ generation of drugs and, you know, the ’60s and ’70s.”
But when a fellow SEAL implored him to seriously consider it, Dalton obliged out of respect. He discovered that scientific research into psychedelics as mental health treatments predate the Woodstock era by multiple years. And that Indigenous populations across the globe have used psychedelic medicine for thousands of years.
Dalton decided to travel to Mexico to try psilocybin mushrooms and address the traumas from his 23-year military career, which included seven documented traumatic brain injuries.
“The results were absolutely transformative,” he says.
Two years later, Dalton co-founded the Nevada Coalition for Psychedelic Medicines with Kate Cotter, a lifelong creative, whose own struggles with depression and anxiety led her to psychedelic medicine.
During the Nevada State Legislature’s last session, in 2023, their coalition successfully lobbied to establish a working group to study psychedelic medicine legislation. This year, they are hoping lawmakers will take action and approve a small, highly regulated pilot program allowing for controlled use.
Many of the loudest voices in the push for psychedelics are veterans and first responders, groups whose rates of depression and suicide are significantly higher than average. But the coalition Dalton and Cotter have grown is broad. It doesn’t fall along clear politically ideological lines.
“It tends to cross demographics, age, young people, seniors, retired folks, professionals, artists, across the board,” she says. “It’s really beautiful.”
THE SHIFT IN public perception of psychedelics in recent years is similar to the broader cultural embrace of marijuana, which remains federally listed as a Schedule 1 controlled substance but is fully legal in 24 states.
Dustin Hines, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas, professor who researches psychedelics, remembers years of being jokingly referred to at academic conferences as “the shroom guy.” But now, much to his delight, whole panels and conferences are dedicated to the potential of psychedelics.
“There’s been a change in how we look at what these plant molecules, what CBD, can do to actually save lives, and people are now open to that idea that some psychedelics can have that, too,” Hines says.
Prominent public figures have come out in support of psychedelics. President Donald Trump’s pick for U.S. Department of Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has said psychedelics should be legalized in some form. More mainstream conservative politicians, including former Texas Governor Rick Perry and U.S. Representative from Texas Dan Crenshaw, have also voiced their support for psychedelic-assisted therapy.
Some states have begun exploring legalization. In 2020, Oregon became the first state to legalize psychedelic-assisted therapy, though there has been pushback from cities. Colorado became the second state in 2022. In both states, voters changed the law through ballot questions.
Other states are actively considering legislation. Utah lawmakers last year approved a pilot program, though it has yet to come to fruition.
Nevada could be next. One piece of legislation the Nevada Coalition for Psychedelic Medicines is pushing for would create a pilot program that could be scaled up over time. A companion bill would tweak criminal laws to allow for the pilot program to be legal.
The 2023 bill to establish a psychedelic medicine working group passed the legislature with widespread bipartisan support and was signed into law by Republican Governor Joe Lombardo. But legislation proposing the consumption of any psychedelic substance will likely meet more resistance than anything simply studying it.
Opponents argue that psychedelic-assisted therapy proposals are a gateway to allowing full recreational use, especially among teenagers or young adults whose brains are still developing. Erika Ryst, a child psychiatrist, was one of several people who spoke in opposition of an early version of the 2023 bill.
“We do have a large body of research that indicates that hallucinogens are harmful to the developing brain up to the age of 25 years and can predispose to long-term psychotic mental illness like schizophrenia. And secondly that teenage substance abuse is driven by the perception of safety and low risk, which is in turn driven by legalization. By decriminalizing these substances we are, in effect, telling our young people these substances are safe, and they’re going to believe us on that. We will see an increase in use of these substances, which unfortunately, although there is some research, it’s not quite as glowing as I believe was presented today,” Ryst said in testimony before the Legislature.
Law enforcement groups are also wary of decriminalization of hallucinogenic substances.
The Nevada coalition is adamant that their goal is not to have shroom shops next to every pot dispensary. Ben Strahan, the wildland firefighter who almost became a number in his profession’s higher-than-average suicide statistics, opposes full legalization. In his eyes, psychedelic medicines must be regulated because of how profound the experience can be for those who partake.
Strahan tries to be careful with his words when describing his experience with psychedelic mushrooms.
He says, “I don’t want to say it fixed me. I don’t think that’s the appropriate way of speaking about these, what I would call, medicines and/or technologies. I would say that what they do is they give you a key to a door, and behind that door is realization of things that you already know.”
Individuals’ experiences are unique. For Strahan, it began with a conscious setting of intention. Then, ingesting the psilocybin mushrooms. Then came the presence of a feminine energy and a visual experience he says he doesn’t know how to put into words. He asked existential questions about his purpose. He received a divine answer that he was asking the wrong questions.
Then, Strahan says, he experienced what’s known as an ego death — “a disintegration of my ego, like straight up.”
“Coming out of that, I entered into a very beautiful, beautiful place, beautiful experience, feeling a lot of emotions, of love and self-love mostly. … It taught me to surrender, and it taught me how to love myself again.”
Strahan believes those who want to try psychedelic medicines should be able to without having to leave the country like he did. He knows it might be a tough sell for some.
“No matter what you think about what this might be, you cannot take the experience I had away from me. The healing that I was able to accomplish — the man that this helped me become — is something that nobody can take away from me.”
PEOPLE USING PSYCHEDELICS often describe their experiences through spiritual language. They describe divine presences, as Strahan did. They say they feel at one with the universe or nature or God.
But there is science behind the shrooms.
Rochelle Hines, who, like her husband, Dustin Hines, is a UNLV professor focused on psychedelics, is an expert in it.
“If you look at the chemical structure of the molecules inside psilocybin or mescaline, and you compare them to other chemical structures, we know they actually look a whole lot like neurotransmitters in our own bodies,” she says.
You’ve probably heard of some of the neurotransmitters Rochelle Hines is referring to: norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin. Pharmaceutical antidepressants such as Prozac and Zoloft attempt to regulate the levels of these neurotransmitters in the brain.
“And so, you know, just based on the chemical structures of the compounds, we get some insights about what these molecules might be doing.”
Studies have shown that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, better known as SSRIs, are not effective in a majority of patients.
Psychedelics have been shown to improve neuroplasticity. Michael Pollan, author of How to Change Your Mind, famously uses the metaphor of the mind as a snowy hill. Each time a sled goes down the hill, the grooves it leaves deepen, and it becomes more likely the sled will be pulled into that path the next time it goes down. Psychedelics reset the snow, allowing new paths to be created. Paths that could be happier or healthier.
What the world could do with a better understanding of psychedelics is an emerging issue. Could these cellular and molecular effects be isolated and used to develop something non-hallucinogenic that could help people in clinical settings? Some companies are already exploring those possibilities.
Rochelle Hines isn’t sure.
She says, “It is, I think, a real open question as to whether that’s going to work or not. … A lot of people do actually really confirm the idea that rehashing of the past, seeing yourself in a new light, seeing the world in a new light, feeling that interconnectedness with something greater, with nature. All of those things are part of that psychedelic experience.”
Dustin Hines is equally unsure. And that’s part of what makes his and his wife’s research so compelling.
“We don’t even have the words for this yet,” he says. “Is it mind? I don’t know that it’s mind. Is it spiritual? I’m okay with that. Is it magic? I’m okay with that, but we might not even have the tools as scientists to really get at what this is.”
Only study — in a controlled environment — may be able to get at it. And that, advocates argue, will require some form of legalization.