6 westword.com WESTWORD MAY 1-7, 2025 | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | The End Is Near PSYCHEDELIC DEATH DOULAS — AND A PSILOCYBIN CLINICAL TRIAL AT CU ANSCHUTZ — COULD UNLOCK THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION FOR TERMINAL PATIENTS. BY BRENDAN JOEL KELLEY Sitting cross-legged in the upstairs gathering space of Plant Magic Cafe, a nexus of metro Denver’s psychedelic community, Travis Ty- ler Fluck, a psilocybin educator and psyche- delic death doula, recalls his fi rst heroic dose of shrooms back in August 2019: 7.6 grams of the extremely potent Penis Envy strain. “I took this giant dose to break through and just see what the other side was like,” Fluck says. “And the mushroom obliged me and gave me this vision, this very direct perception.” In his “non-ego-identified space,” Fluck says he encountered Jesus (though he doesn’t identify as Christian) and Bud- dha. “I realized that far upstream that both of those things were essentially the same thing,” he recalls. Earlier that spring, Fluck had been a leader in the successful citizens’ initiative to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms in Denver, but his work with the natural medi- cine was about to take a tangent. Between his life-altering shroom trip and the arrival of the pandemic, the International End of Life Doula Association brought a training course to Denver, and Fluck signed up to become a death doula, “someone who provides companionship, comfort and guid- ance to those planning for death, diagnosed with a terminal illness or facing imminent death,” according to the group. “It just felt like a very organic thing,” he says. “I had been hanging out with people in these high-dose experiences and really watching this [ego] death process and then this rebirth part. It felt like something in a former life or my ancestry was pulling me that route.” The Dying The existential distress of an incurable ter- minal disease piles anxiety upon injury. Preparing mentally for your own demise is its own massive psychological burden. Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, has shown promise as a treat- ment for major depression and anxiety in dying patients. However, Colorado’s legal framework created after the passage of Proposition 122 in November 2022 has the medical establishment researching the hal- lucinogen’s promise in a silo, while local shroom proponents who can now legally give the natural medicine to the dying operate without medical guardrails. Using psilocybin as a tool in palliative or end-of-life care isn’t a new idea, but as the state begins licensing healing centers, Coloradans will have unprecedented access to use shrooms to treat their own conditions. But they are very unlikely to be medically supervised in the process unless they’re part of a clinical trial. This lack of academic knowledge is a critical gap, according to Sameet Kumar, a palliative care psychologist at Memorial Cancer Center in Florida and the author of several books on dying, grief and bereave- ment. Kumar is also certifi ed in psychedelic therapy and research by the California In- stitute of Integral Studies. “I feel pretty confi dent that people even with advanced illness, advanced cancer, can safely take mushrooms and have benefi cial ex- periences,” Kumar says, “but we need to know what kind of screening they’re doing – are they looking at blood work? Are they looking at medical records? What if their blood pres- sure goes up sky high or if there’s a seizure?” The University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus issued a document titled “Legal Issues Surrounding Psychedelic Mushrooms for Palliative Care” in early Feb- ruary. It notes that “outside of an approved research protocol with a DEA waiver, there is no current federally legal path for licensed medical providers to provide a patient with psilocybin-containing mushrooms. How- ever, in both Oregon and Colorado, there are state-approved pathways for patients to access such products.” In our state, at least at this particular moment, both pathways are open for some dying patients. A National Cancer Institute- funded study on treating late-stage cancer patients with psilocybin-assisted therapy is underway at the University of Colorado and is now recruiting patients for clinical trials; others can chart their own course of pallia- tive psilocybin therapy by legally procuring the mushrooms themselves and receiving care from a psychedelic death doula. The Mushroom Travis Tyler Fluck’s relationship with the mushroom stretches back three decades; he says he fi rst took shrooms at age fi fteen, provided by a friend’s parent at a biker party back East. Fluck knew he’d found his muse imme- diately, and over the course of his teenage years he taught himself to cultivate the fungi. “I learned a very rudimentary technique,” he says. “That way I could get mushrooms when I wanted them.” By the age of twenty, Fluck owned a head shop in New Hope, Pennsylvania, that sold fancy glass pipes and other accessories. That’s when he was pulled over in Maryland with a jar containing “a few fl akes of green,” according to Fluck. “The cop says to us, you know in Maryland if you get caught with a seed, you’re going to jail.” Fluck was arrested and his house was subsequently searched, which landed him on probation. He kept his head shop open, though, until he was arrested again for can- nabis possession and mushroom cultivation, eventually spending a year in jail from 2005 to 2006. “It really positioned me against society,” Fluck says. In jail, his cellmate had a CD by Phish — a band Fluck didn’t care for previously. In 2009, though, he began following the psychedelically inclined jam band from show to show. In 2010, when the band played Telluride, Fluck fell in love with Colorado. He moved to Denver in 2017, where he already had a community of heads he’d met on the road over previous years. In 2020, Fluck earned a certifi cate of completion from the International End of Life Doula Association and became one of a burgeoning number of psychedelic death doulas who facilite psilocybin therapy for patents with terminal illnesses. (The organi- zation notes that it does not educate directly on the use of psychedelics at the end of life.) “We’ve become estranged from nature, and because of that, we have so much ap- prehension around dying because we don’t have the direct perception that something about us goes on,” Fluck explains. “But in this plant medicine realm, we get the opportunity to have felt sense, direct expe- rience, something that surpasses our ability to codify it into language. It’s this direct transmis- sion and then some- NEWS continued on page 8 KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS Travis Tyler Fluck is a psychedelic death doula... and a fan of magic mushrooms. EVAN SEMÓN
