The majority of Americans think legalized marijuana has made society worse off. But some New York legislators are ready to make the same mistake again—with magic mushrooms.
Assemblywoman and Health Committee Chair Amy Paulin held a public hearing last month on the potential medical benefits of psilocybin, a hallucinogen found in certain mushrooms that produces LSD-like effects. Paulin has sponsored one of three bills in the state legislature to decriminalize the drug and legalize medical use, to varying degrees.
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In a press release, Paulin said that she’s convinced of psilocybin’s “great promise” for treating health conditions and wants it widely available for use. “As we consider legislation to expand access in New York,” she said, “our priority must be establishing [a] framework that maximizes safety and ensures proper oversight for patients and providers.”
Ensuring proper oversight of drug use is necessary to preserve public health and safety. But can New Yorkers trust Paulin and her colleagues to do that? The experience with marijuana suggests otherwise.
New York State has tried and failed to build a system that can support controlled, safe consumption of an unsafe drug. The results have been disastrous. “The accumulating harm is broader and more severe than previously reported, ”the New York Times reports. “And gaps in state regulations, limited public health messaging and federal restraints on research have left many consumers, government officials and even medical practitioners in the dark about such outcomes.”
The federal government continues to restrict psilocybin. The Drug Enforcement Administration classifies it, like marijuana, as a Schedule I controlled substance, meaning that it has the highest risk of abuse and no accepted medical use. The Food and Drug Administration has not yet approved psilocybin to be marketed to patients as a safe and effective treatment for any type of medical condition.
Nevertheless, public discourse around psychedelics like psilocybin has proliferated in recent years. The Trump administration has been bullish, designating psilocybin an FDA “breakthrough therapy” to accelerate research review. State-level legalization in varying degrees has also passed in Oregon, Colorado, and New Mexico.
The tide of expansion has been resisted in some cases. In 2024, the FDA denied an application of the psychedelic drug MDMA for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, citing insufficient evidence for safety and efficacy. That same year, Massachusetts voters rejected a ballot initiative that would have legalized certain psychedelic drugs.
Legalization advocates claim that psilocybin has miraculous medical potential for a range of conditions. While gold standard research shows potential benefits for some people, psilocybin studies are unusually prone to overestimated effects.
Outcome measures used in studies can hide relapse. In one study, for example, 14 of 24 participants were said to be “in remission” a year after receiving psilocybin, but eight had started or restarted antidepressants by then.
Traditional research blinding—that is, not revealing to participants whether they’ve received the drug or placebo—doesn’t work in psychedelic studies because people can tell whether they’re tripping or not. Research samples also often include past psychedelic users, which often inflates self-reported benefits and suppresses disclosures of harm. No one wants to throw cold water on a “potential miracle drug.”
Harm associated with psilocybin is well-recognized, accepted, and serious. Hallucinogens can put users in physical danger, induce suicidal ideation, and trigger prolonged psychosis. More than one in ten users experience continued negative symptoms a full month after drug use. Research safety guidelines consider people with severe psychiatric disorders inappropriate for participation because adverse effects are so probable. In other words, even in the most highly controlled settings with greatest oversight by clinical experts, some patients’ safety is still in jeopardy.
Persisting symptoms were the problem in 2023 when a former Alaska Airlines pilot, traveling as a passenger in the cockpit of a commercial flight, tried to shut off the plane’s engines. The pilot, who had taken psilocybin 48 hours earlier, would have been eligible for legal use under Assemblywoman Paulin’s proposed bill. He struggled with depression, one of Paulin’s 56 “qualifying health conditions,” which include everything from PMS to some debatable diseases or conditions, plus a blanket qualifier for “any novel or emergent health condition not categorized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or known physical health conditions.”
Drug legalization is never solely about marginal health benefits. Other effects on society must be weighed. Opioids are highly effective for medical uses, for example, but their effectiveness did not preclude a crisis that has killed at least half a million Americans since Oxycontin’s FDA approval in 1995. Many who advocated for marijuana legalization did so not because they were especially persuaded of its medical potential but for motives like racial justice and reducing incarceration. These won’t be compelling arguments for psilocybin, used primarily by white, college-educated men.
It’s also evident in retrospect that for advocates, full legalization for marijuana, not just for medical use, was the true endgame. Psilocybin advocates have a similar goal—they barely conceal their even more radical aim of getting all of society on psychoactive drugs. A board member of the psilocybin advocacy group New Yorkers for Mental Health Alternatives (NYMHA), who testified at last month’s assembly hearing, wrote an essay that begins: “How many of us psychedelic users can find some empathy for the idea of ‘putting it in the water supply?’ . . . for the underlying fantasy that, if enough people were initiated into the mysteries, we could save the world together.”
Many go about their advocacy with a cult-like fervor—not just for psilocybin use but for other, more radical policies. A second board member of NYMHA actually formed a church that “provides mystical experience using psilocybin as a sacrament.” The group’s secretary, who testified at the Assembly hearing, has fought to get rid of “punitive and ineffective sex offender registries.”
Psychedelic drug use was successfully suppressed in the decades after the 1960s, because LSD was both illegal and stigmatized. That has drastically changed in the past ten years. Overhyped health benefits and decriminalization efforts have produced a growing public perception that hallucinogens are low risk.
Signs of detrimental effects are already apparent. Psilocybin-related calls to poison control centers have spiked in recent years—by more than 200 percent among adults and a whopping 723 percent among kids 11 and under. From 2016 to 2022, hallucinogen-related hospitalizations rose by 55 percent.
As with marijuana, psilocybin legalization will undoubtedly increase violence and crime. Among users, 11 percent reported dangerous behavior toward others as an effect. Unregulated businesses are springing up; Oregon, where psilocybin is legal, appears to be a hub.
Researchers are becoming more vocal about the hallucinogen’s dangers, and clinicians are flagging cases of prolonged mania, psychosis, and severe depression after use. Their take: “current policy trends, including efforts to render psychedelics widely available for therapeutic use, will place patients at undue risk.”
Drug legalization is a slippery slope. New York lawmakers should have the courage to admit that the state needs to roll things back, not continue sliding downhill.
Photo by JASON CONNOLLY/AFP via Getty Images