Meet the London care providers fighting to prescribe psychedelic mushrooms
CBC
Two London, Ont. healthcare workers are supporting legal efforts to allow doctors, therapists and patients to use magic mushrooms, or psilocybin, for medical needs, stressing the urgency to change the system.
A charter challenge was launched in July 2022 by five Canadians, some of whom are terminally ill, to rewrite the laws around medical psilocybin use.
At the same time, more than 100 individual healthcare professionals and therapists are fighting to be able to experience the drug, so they can understand how to use it and prescribe it.
Psilocybin is prohibited in Canada by the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) and has been illegal since 1975. The health minister has recently used her authority under a section of the act to grant legal exemptions, mainly to people with terminal illness and treatment-resistant depression.
In 2021, just over 60 Canadians had been granted an exemption. CBC News has requested current figures from Health Canada and will update this story when they are made available.
Jared Dalton, a London-based social worker and psychotherapist, said his request for an exemption to receive training to prescribe psilocybin was denied. He's currently appealing the decision through a judicial review.
He says witnessing his mother's death 3-years ago opened his eyes. He described it as difficult and scary for her.
"The amount of distress that she experienced at the end of her life, the available medications just didn't seem to help," said Dalton. "I became really convinced that we need to do better for people."
"I really do believe that something like psilocybin could have made a huge difference for my mom."
End-of-life care was how emergency and family medicine physician, Dr. Ceara McNeil, became interested in the potential benefits of psilocybin.
She was granted an exemption and experienced the psychedelic drug in assisted therapy training sessions with TheraPsil. It's a B.C.-based non-profit that' s doing the bulk of the legal work to challenge Health Canada while supporting health care providers.
"What we're talking about with psychedelic assisted psychotherapy is so very different from someone walking into a mushroom shop, picking up a bag of mushrooms, going off into the forest, and hoping for the best," Dr. McNeil said.
Psilocybin allows parts of the brain that don't normally interact to do so, which allows new paths to be made and promotes neuroplasticity, said McNeil.
"A lot of times the intentions of patients sound something like, 'I don't want to be afraid of dying. I want to know what's waiting for me on the other side,'" said McNeil. She believes the spiritual experiences palliative patients have while experiencing the psychedelic drug can help them come to terms with their mortality.
A Saskatoon judge has now heard about the hours just before and after Taya Sinclair's death.
Two people were taken to hospital after a fire tore through a unit in an apartment building just west of downtown Edmonton Wednesday evening.
B.C. Premier David Eby, who is on a trade mission to India, says that finding new trade partners is critical to ensure British Columbians' standard of living doesn't deteriorate amid the U.S. trade war.
A program aimed at preventing homelessness on Prince Edward Island that was halted last year due to funding issues is back up and running again with support from the provincial and federal governments.
Large crowds of people lined up around the block outside a pair of packed community halls in central Alberta on Wednesday night, to attend town halls focused on the idea of the province seeking independence from Canada.
The sight of a cyclist in January in the Yukon can prompt confusion from some onlookers — but historians say bicycles were being used to get around the territory in winter long before cars.
On Prime Minister Mark Carney's first day of talks in Beijing, the government agreed to co-operate with China more on clean and conventional energy after years of difficult relations between the two countries.
The city says it is one step away from returning the Bearspaw feeder main to full service, with a final water pump scheduled to be turned on Friday morning — if the pipe continues to remain stable.
When David St-Pierre saw the snow outside his window in Brossard, Que., south of Montreal, he decided to chance the metropolitan region's shiny light-rail transit system once more.
A Calgary lawyer who falsified court documents and repeatedly lied to a client, causing the man to miss out on parenting time with his youngest child, pleaded guilty to forgery on Thursday.
The Crown has stayed an assault charge against Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. president Jeremy Tunraluk.
Alberta’s minister of hospitals says a province-wide strategy has begun to ease the strain on the acute care system as frontline doctors continue to declare that provincial hospitals are dangerously overcrowded.
As snow squalls continue to blanket southwestern Ontario, school boards in the London region announced the closure of all schools Thursday morning, and police are reporting closures and collisions across the area roads.