8 MAY 1-7, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | thing in your awareness or biology says, ‘Oh, I remember that,’” Fluck continues. Fluck is not a person of resources, and he doesn’t currently work with or plan to open a licensed healing center. He’s not a licensed natural medicine handler, either, but because he gives away the mushrooms he grows, he’s operating within Colorado’s regulations. He gives away the natural medicine “so there is no barrier to entry for something I think every human being should have access to,” he explains. “Our trauma was free, why should we have to pay to heal?” According to Fluck, his dosing and thera- peutic protocols are individualized for end- of-life patients, as some are medicated and disabled. “Almost everyone starts out with microdosing, and sometimes that’s all that’s needed,” he says. “I take time to get to know people and hear their life story – at least the things that aren’t too painful to revisit. Ev- erything is organic and not rushed.” He meets with individuals at least twice before proceeding with dosing, and stays in contact with them until they transition. Colorado’s state-authorized pathways for people to access psilocybin mushrooms – being gifted the fungi or, soon, paying for a healing center’s services – have little guarantee of medical oversight, and Fluck is aware of his limitations. He admits that “a lot of this end-of-life space, hospice and stuff, isn’t quite ready to let this in.” Still, he hopes to see integration with the medical community someday, envisioning a Center for Conscious Dying where physi- cians also have a role. “One day when I can collaborate with medical professionals, I will feel supported enough to hammer out protocols,” he notes. “I would love to move forward in this role with a lot of intelligent pieces, because me having to assess whether somebody’s body can tolerate this experi- ence or not. I don’t really have anything more than just intuition and ‘go low, go slow’ on my side. “I feel like my job is concierge,” he ex- plains. “Everything is happening between the medicine and the person. The mushroom is the guide, the mushroom is the facilitator. I’m just there to get somebody water, help ‘em to the bathroom.” The Process Fluck is his own favorite case study when it comes to psychedelics. He recently took his fi ftieth intentional dose of shrooms, “and I can tell you that there’s still more to be cooked,” he says with a slight grin. He tells vivid stories about his own hero- ically-dosed mushroom trips, many of which sound life-altering. When he narrates how he took a large dose of mushrooms to be with his dog as she was dying, it’s both sad and rather beautiful. “The medicine showed me how we mutu- ally arose into each other’s lives to do some work,” he says. “I had needs. She had needs on a soul level, and we worked it out in a con- spiratorial kind of way. I got to basically give my dog that good girl, but for her whole life.” In one of his volunteer assignments as a psychedelic death doula — he never charges for his work — his patient was a dying woman; her grown daughter joined her mom on the mushroom journey. The daughter had supplied the mushrooms, and Fluck sat with them as they had the experience. The mother “got really angry, and she wanted me to leave,” Fluck recalls. “It was really intense for me; she was processing a lot of anger.” But Fluck stayed, promising he’d leave when the experience was over, and watched the mother-daughter dynamic evolve as they tripped together. “She was in her walker moving around,” he says, “and her daughter’s like, ‘Oh, my god, I haven’t seen her move around in six months.’ She was moving around, even if she was wagging her fi nger at me.” Another time, he worked with a man suf- fering from prostate cancer, bedridden and homebound, and “I could tell that his body just couldn’t handle a journey,” Fluck says. Instead, he gave the man microdoses of psilocybin mushrooms, along with cordyceps mush- rooms — a non-psychedelic variety thought to increase adenisone triphosphate, or ATP. “Even after the fi rst microdose, he just started talking about things that were repressed; his son and his partner were blown away by that, it lubricated some- thing,” Fluck recalls. “One day they decided to go to Walmart, and he goes with them to Walmart, then he goes out to eat with them for a meal. And I think within 48 hours of that little last burst, he transitioned.” In examining how the mushroom works as a medicine, Fluck has pinned down three main elements. “The fi rst thing it does is it lets people process unfi nished business,” he says. “Most people have a life event or two that has completely shaped the course of everything, with a lot of regret and rumina- tion. The mushroom goes right to it. “The second thing it does is it gives people the felt sense that this isn’t an end, there’s more here,” he continues. “And the third thing, which is pretty wild, is that other people keep us in our bodies with their thoughts and prayers. They don’t want to let go of us. And that creates a cord – and the mushroom goes in there, cuts those cords and gives the person permission. It quiets the insulation that our programming has created and allows innate intelligence to do what it does.” The Clinical Trials While Fluck’s perspective on how psilocybin works for patients facing the end of their lives may sound like wook science, the establish- ment scientists, doctors and psychologists who work with psychedelic treatments in studies and trials have an essentially similar understanding. “You’re having experiences which sort of defy verbal description,” says Kumar, the clinical psychologist who has integrated psy- chedelics into palliative care and developed psilocybin therapy protocols for stage four melanoma patients nearly twenty years ago. “Sometimes people experience childhood events which were very formative, traumatic or hurtful, and they’re able to reintegrate these profound childhood experiences or traumas in a meaningful way. “We try to prepare people for having an unpredictable experience that defi es verbal description – that’s a hard sell for a lot of scientifi c-minded folks,” he adds. Yet the medical establishment is delv- ing into the world of psychedelics. The CU Anschutz Medical Campus is one of two sites nationwide for a clinical trial studying the use of lab-synthesized psilocybin to ease psychological distress in late-stage cancer patients. The $2.1 million study funded by the National Cancer Institute is led by University of Colorado Denver psychology professor Jim Grigsby, who’s also the director of the CU Center for Psychedelic Research, and Dr. Stacy Fischer, a CU Anschutz internist, palliative care physician and researcher; Dr. Steve Ross, a psychiatrist at NYU, runs the other trial site. “People at the end of life oftentimes have a lot of existential distress,” Fischer says. “Some- times even traditional therapy approaches are not successful in resolving it, and this is where a lot of the promise and excitement is in the psychedelic space. We don’t fully understand all the mechanisms that are involved in help- ing people feel better [with psilocybin]; neuro- plasticity has been proposed as an important mechanism and probably allows the therapy to work better and faster – at least that’s what we hypothesize.” Operationally, Fischer adds, psilocybin fuels a feeling of connectedness, “that it’s not just an emotion, but people are seeing this connectedness as an objective truth. Our place in the world and connection to other things and beings, the fact that there’s something greater than us, can really help resolve this feeling of meaninglessness and demoralization and hopelessness that some- times people experience when they know their life is coming to an end.” “The Trip Treatment,” Michael Pollan’s 2015 story in the New Yorker, inspired her interest in psilocybin therapy’s potential and led her to partner with Grigsby and Ross on the study. To qualify, recruits must have a diagnosis of serious cancer, a stage three or stage four disease with the potential to be life-limiting, and they must have signifi cant anxiety. Once a patient is enrolled in the trial, they receive three preparatory therapy sessions over the course of two weeks prior to the dosing day. On the patient’s dosing day, they lie on a couch in an aesthetically pleasing but windowless room with eyeshades and a curated playlist common to all participants. A therapist is present, but does not guide or psychoanalyze the patient; the therapist is really just there to ground people. Some patients receive a placebo, the vita- min niacin or B3; Fischer acknowledges the ineffi cacy of the study’s blinding integrity and hopes to shift to low-dose psilocybin rather than niacin in future studies. After the dosing day, the patient has four integrative therapy sessions, and at the end of the three-month data collection, every patient, whether they received the drug or placebo, can participate in open-label dosing. The Disparity Fluck has his doubts about the CU study’s process; he says he doesn’t believe that lab- synthesized psilocybin accurately recre- ates the experience of taking the whole mushroom. On this point, Kumar agrees. “We should probably be using whole mushrooms – and granted, it’s very diffi cult to standardize doses with that,” he says. “But the most ex- perienced people working with psilocybin therapy are not mushroom providers in Oregon (where it is also decriminalized) or Colorado or the people with clinical trials. It’s the Indigenous people of the world, and they used mushrooms for a very long time and I think we should trust that.” For her part, Fischer says she’s of two minds about the availability of magic mush- rooms in Colorado. “I think when people are exploring per- sonal growth or understanding our place in the universe, I don’t have any problem with people seeking out those experiences,” she says. “Where I get a little hesitant is if we start making claims to improving suffering, improving symptoms treating illness without a scientifi c evidence space. “What we know is the tip of the iceberg and what we don’t know is all the rest,” she continues. “I understand that this is going to be moving into practice at a faster pace than the science can move right now, but my hope is we won’t forgo the science altogether.” “It’s really interesting to think about the life cycle of the mushroom itself and how it’s a fruiting body out of mycelia that sort of uses different elements of a substrate to grow the mushroom,” Kumar muses. “I think maybe wook science and hard science can be part of that substrate in states that are opening up these healing clinics.” In the meantime, Fluck speaks to the mushrooms themselves to answer his ques- tions. “The more I am in relation to this organ- ism, I see it as an energetic signature,” he says. It knows exactly what to do when we com- mune with it, it knows exactly where to go.” Email the author at [email protected]. News continued from page 6 Dr. Stacy Fischer and Dr. Kumar Sameet both study the science of mushrooms. CU HEALTH SCIENCES MEMORIAL HEALTH CARE SYSTEM
