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Chapter 1: What personal experience led Eleanor Mills to explore psilocybin?
Just before I was made redundant from the Sunday Times, I had been on a retreat in Jamaica where I'd taken some magic mushrooms. And during, it was a kind of therapeutic retreat. It wasn't just like taking them for larks. It was medicine. It was medicine.
It was seen as a medicine where you could learn from it.
It was a properly spiritual journey where you were going into taking the magic mushrooms, asking it some questions, and you do three heroic doses in a week. And they call them heroic doses because they want you to reach that point of healing. kind of singularity where your ego dissolves. Does that mean the amount? So it's quite a lot. A heroic dose is really going to be.
So I took eight grams of psilocybin and, you know, then I know. And everyone was doing that too. So it was a lot. And what it did was it kind of, on the last day, they said, you know, take away, throw away everything you no longer need in your life and all kind of blow it up. And I had the sense of completely melting.
When I took the mushrooms, I had the sense of completely kind of melting into a golden, it was like being, at the time I described this being like in a big bowl of golden cream. And I felt like I'd been recharged by the universe with this kind of golden light.
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Chapter 2: What is a heroic dose of psilocybin and its intended effects?
And what I came out of the trip with was just this really strong sense of the possibility of renewal and reinvention at this point. And I came out of it with a sense that that was what I wanted to do, that I wanted to help people to catalyze that change.
Would you mind if I asked you a bit more about that retreat? Because I think there might be lots of people watching who have no idea about what Magic Mushrooms do, what a retreat would be like. Had you ever had experience of that before?
Well, I'd taken loads of ecstasy and stuff back in the 80s. Yeah, you know, back in the day.
Back in day.
Back in day. We all did our, like, jumping around. I did a lot of jumping around in fields. We were doing it together. Yeah, exactly. We were the rave generation. So, yeah, back in the 90s, I did my hands in the air. But not since then. Oh.
work and everything not really and i'd always been scared of taking acid so we took e and that kind of thing but i'm not hallucinogenic no hallucinogens seemed a bit scary we were really brought up with you know we had xamo just say no didn't we on yes totally and then we had on on acid everyone said if you took acid you'd try and jump out of a window yeah you jump out of a window and think you could fly so i was like i don't think i want to do that so but you went from nothing to hero dose in jamaica
Yeah, I went with a friend who'd had really bad PTSD and she wanted to go because she'd read the Michael Pollan book, How to Change Your Mind, which is all about... And there's an amazing documentary, isn't there? Incredible documentary which people should watch on Netflix, which is basically the book kind of in film version. But he talks about the...
What actually the neuroscience of what the psilocybin, which is the active bit of magic mushrooms, does in your brain. And I've talked to a lot of neuroscientists about it as a good journalist. And what they say about it is it's a bit like if you're going skiing and there were really deep ruts in the snow because it's all been carved up and there hadn't been snow for a while.
What the taking the psilocybin does is it kind of like a fresh fall of snow and it allows you to create new parts in your brain. That's brilliant. Which I think is a really clever way of describing it. It really stuck with me.
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Chapter 3: How did Eleanor describe her transformative experience on psilocybin?
And so it's very good for people. If you're on PTSD, you're kind of stuck in grooves or it's good for people who are anorexic or obsessive compulsive or depressed where their brain has got into deep grooves. And this just allows you, and when you see it under brain scanners,
You can see new connections being made because it takes offline something, the default mode network, which is the front bit of your brain, which basically tries to control everything all the time. And it allows your brain to make new connections. So I think it's a really worthwhile thing for people to do at this point. And it is quite scary.
But I think if you go and do it in a therapeutic way and what they have is they have what they call trip sitters or psychedelic ninjas who are with you all the time, who are there to kind of be as your guardian angels. And you do it. So they talk about set and setting. So you do it in a very careful place where you can't jump off a balcony and somebody kind of looks after you.
But I think what it allows you to do is to really kind of reset your sense of yourself. And for me, it opened me up to a whole kind of spiritual aspect of the world, which I think I'd been very resistant to.
So because... What I find interesting is that you're not somebody who would naturally go out and seek narcotics. No. But this was something completely different. And I think it is worth knowing for people. Obviously, it's not legal here.
But in Jamaica, it is legal. It's a class A drug, but in Jamaica, it is. They never got around to making it illegal. And so you can do it there. But if you're going to go and do it, I would really recommend doing it under controlled conditions because it can be quite frightening. Okay. And you want to be in a situation where you can completely surrender to what you're being shown.
And that capacity to kind of open up. I mean, I've done it a few times since. And every time I've been shown something which is then maybe I didn't even understand in the moment, which has gone on to be what Coleridge or Wordsworth would describe as a vivifying virtue, which is it kind of stokes your capacity for kind of joy or aliveness in your life afterwards.
So how long did the effects of that trip stay with you? Did they expand and grow?
I think they're still with me.
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Chapter 4: What insights did Eleanor gain about renewal and purpose after her trip?
Wow. And actually quite a lot of research which they've done in America shows that for a lot of people, they put this experience of having done psilocybin up there with like giving birth or getting married, that it can be completely transformational in terms of how you see yourself and your place in the world. And for me, it gave me a great sense of connectedness
to everything, the sense of a life force chugging through me, but also through the insects and the trees and the waves and the sunshine and just feeling linked to it all. What I discovered was having been given a glimpse of that sense of connectedness and goldenness, I could find it again. Without the mushrooms. You could recall it. I could recall it.
So really, I started meditating and I would think about the golden light and the light that I'd seen through the waves or that sense of connectedness. And I could find my way back to that place through meditation and I did silent retreats and I've done kind of... I've done all sorts of silent retreats, constellations.
I decided I quite like my silent self because you stop telling yourself stories. You stop having to tell a story about yourself all the time and everything becomes quite still. I quite like Silent Eleanor. She was quite chill.
So I just want to get on to magic mushrooms because we were talking about that being put in Class A. Yes. And I was absolutely astonished to see LSD and mushrooms right at the bottom. Mushrooms being the least risky or that causes the least harm. The least harmful. That's it. The least harmful to you and to society. In fact, I think, would I be right in saying no harm to yourself?
Well, no, nothing... Nothing is completely harmless, as I like to point out. Between about five and ten people a year in Britain die of water poisoning. Right. But at least a million people a year are using mushrooms. The government's own data going back the last 20 years says there might have been one death. Right. I mean, you know, tiny, tiny.
If you take that as obviously the most serious, some people have panic attacks, some people get anxious during the trip. But the thing is that they tend only to be used once, two, twice, three, four times a year. So you don't get dependent. And, you know, if you don't like them, you don't use them. And that's why... that the safety is proven by this very, very wide use. The first
clinical study we did with with psilocybin which is the active ingredient magic mushroom juice the first scientifically study we did we started in 2012 and to get a clinical study approved you have to go to an organization called the MHRA the medicines and healthcare regulator authority and we'd like to do this study and they said well how do you know that psilocybin is safe and
because you haven't done any animal research. You know, typically drugs, you've got to do animal research, toxicology. And we said, well, no, we're an academic group, and we can't afford to do that. And actually, I don't think we need to, because we know from your own government data there's a million people a year using it without harm. He said, okay, that seems sensible.
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Chapter 5: What scientific evidence supports the therapeutic use of psychedelics?
I had to have a special safe put in my office, bolted to the floor and the wall with a camera to make sure I wasn't going in there and licking my shoes. And I said to the... Hang on, guys. There's a pharmacy here that's got heroin and fentanyl. Why can't I just put it there? And they say, oh, no, no, because there's a Schedule 2, there's a Schedule 1.
I mean, if anyone's going to break in, they're not going to steal washrooms. They're going to file a sign, but they're going to steal. But is this unthought, you know, the perverse consequences of regulation?
So you know that to be true now? That psilocybin can help treat depression?
Yes. We've done two studies. Not only have we done studies showing it treats depression that other treatments don't work for, but it works in a very different way in the brain. It's actually another way of lifting depression. It's an alternative. I mean, I think that's quite important, really. If you've got high blood pressure,
You've got a choice of five different kinds of ways of lowering your blood pressure. And if one doesn't work, the other might. For depression and two psychedelics, you have one. Or ECT, which most people don't want. Now you've got two, and they work in different parts of the brain on different receptors at different speeds. Psychedelics work... almost immediately.
So they're potentially transformational. But we can use them genetically, except in research. And so we can only treat people who are in a study. And people, well, we haven't got money to keep. You can't keep doing studies because you know the answer.
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Chapter 6: How do psychedelics like psilocybin affect brain connectivity?
So you've got to change the regulations and get it to more people.
I saw something where somebody had cancer and it was a young man and he was really struggling with leaving his wife and child. Um, and he talked through this experience that he'd had where he turned into a tree and his kid and his wife walked past and touched him. And it helped him so much realize that he would still be there even when he'd gone.
That is what, I mean, historically, psychedelics were often used to help people come to terms with death and dying i mean it generally not known but but hopefully you know the great the great intellect the great writer of about a psychedelic thing he his partner gave him lsd as he died because and to me that's actually
Something I think should be available to anyone at once and they're happy studies that they've been to control studies done in the States people with terminal illnesses like motor neurone disease or the down cancer And who've been given Sinus I mean and it's helped them come to terms of dying for the exactly the reason you elucidated there Under psychedelics you see
That you are part of the universe. But under psychedelics, you see they're much bigger. People often talk about their bodies sort of atomizing. They're going into another universe, another place, often just somewhere like heaven or a mountain. And that...
realization that you know you you never disappear you know and it kind of i suppose it's a bit back to the old uh you know sort of christian thing you know you we come from the ground and we go out but we don't we never we don't completely die we just we configure somehow and that people find that really quite reassuring
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