8 JUNE 5-11, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | “Divine” Intervention BEFORE CANCER KILLS JAMES WELCH, A PSILOCYBIN CLINICAL TRIAL HAS SHOWED HIM HOW TO LIVE BY BRENDAN JOEL KELLEY James Welch has a passion for concrete. He’s a sculptor, an artist at heart, but working with metal has its downsides. “The thing I didn’t like about the metal was I’d be blowing my nose at night, and it was just black,” Welch says via Zoom from his home in Steamboat Springs. “And I just thought, from a longevity standpoint, this doesn’t make sense.” Welch turned to working with concrete, and has owned his own residential and com- mercial concrete company for a couple de- cades now. “So the consequence of concrete work is back pain,” he says. “But I’ve always kind of lived with back pain.” Welch has undergone acupuncture for around twenty years. He also practiced hot yoga and used a chiropractor. He saw his doctor annually, was screened for prostate and colon cancer, and by all indications two years ago, he was a healthy, middle-aged man with work-related back pain. But the pain near his spine was getting worse. He saw a physical therapist, went back to the chiropractor, got massages weekly, to no avail. “I tried to chiropractor it out, I tried to acupuncture it out, and I fi nally said, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to see the doc,’” he says. An X-ray of his spine revealed nothing — a surprise to Welch and his doctor. “I’m not happy about [the clean X-ray], because that means it’s not the answer,” he recalls the doctor saying. The next step was an MRI. The tech per- forming the exam said he saw something in Welch’s bones and needed a better picture, so he injected contrast to highlight the fi ndings. The Disease “Like, three hours later, I got a call from my primary health care provider. And, thank God, I was at the dog park with my two dogs, and she says, ‘I’m really sorry to tell you this, but you have cancer in your bones. You have cancer in your spine,” Welch remembers. “And I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh. I’m fucked.’” The MRI was followed by a PET scan to reveal the extent of the cancer. After seeing around fi fteen spots identifi ed in his body, Welch couldn’t read the scan report anymore. “It’s in my fucking everywhere. It’s in two or three bones in the lower spine. It’s in the paraspinal muscle. It’s in the liver. It’s in the right lung. It’s in the humerus. It’s in the hips. It’s in three of the right ribs on the lower half of the body,” he recalls. Doctors traced the cancer to his lung and then sequenced the cancer’s genome, and Welch began taking a medication that costs nearly $18,000 a month; thankfully, he says, he had good insurance. Welch asked his oncologist how long he had if he didn’t take the medication. A few months, was the answer. On the medication, the average lifespan for a person presenting with his symptoms was three years. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh my god, three fucking years?’” Welch says. “I’m gonna do what- ever I can, look anywhere that I can, try anything that I can, within reason, to live longer than that.” The diagnosis was two years ago come this June. Welch began radiation treatment along with his medication that summer, and at Shaw Cancer Center in Edwards, he could add acupuncture, massage, sound bath therapy, and yoga to his palliative treatment. But the mental toll the cancer has taken on Welch needs to be addressed, too. He started seeing a therapist for anxiety at the Yampa Valley Medical Center in Steam- boat Springs. After a few conversations, the therapist told him about a study funded by the National Cancer Institute happening at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Denver in partnership with New York University. Over the course of the study, researchers hope to learn more about psilocybin therapy in palliative care for stage-three and stage-four cancer patients, the most advanced levels of the disease. Concurrently, some individuals dealing with end-of-life scenarios have turned to Colorado’s mushroom gifting protocol and psychedelic death doulas under the 2022 Natural Medicine Act. But the clinical trials were intriguing to Welch. “I have some experience with hallucino- gens, and I deal with anxiety,” Welch says. “I don’t think any of us know exactly what happens when we die. I just don’t think we know that. Since I know I’m going to die, and it may be sooner than I thought, I’m now spending a little more time thinking about dying and death, and also the poten- tially shitty journey that I’m going to take between here and there. They give you stuff that’s pretty hard on your body and starts killing cells.” Welch applied to be part of the trial in October 2023, and was accepted. Although the study isn’t complete yet, Welch says he’s already felt the impact. His psilocybin dose, a the trip that changed his life, happened in April of last year. “I did the trial and I’m so glad I did. It changed my mental paradigm of life,” he says. “It’s like I got hit with a million volts.” The Trip Welch wasn’t a psychedelic virgin, so he knew the potentially anxiety-inducing ef- fects a mushroom trip could have. “When we went to a [Grateful] Dead show at Red Rocks, I mean, I want to make it home, so I’ve got to pay attention to where I am,” he admits. But in CU’s study, there would be a medi- cal professional checking his blood pressure and other vitals every half-hour, and he would be supervised. The psilocybin he took was synthetically derived, and not from the mushrooms Welch was familiar with, because of federal drug laws. “They’re taking care of all my health needs, so I didn’t even give one thought to that,” Welch says. “I didn’t recognize that going in, but that’s something that came to me later that was a freedom I didn’t have [on other trips].” The CU trial was blinded and the pla- cebo was niacin, which induces a burning sensation on the skin of some people, and is notoriously ineffective as a blind compared to hallucinogenic drugs. Welch knew immediately he had received the psilocybin. There were two therapists with him. He wore blinders and headphones that piped in a soundtrack curated by the researchers. Welch didn’t expect such an environment. “I’ve got this yoga pose that I’m going to do, and I’ve got my own playlist, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, no. That ain’t going to happen,’” he recalls. Unlike eating shrooms at a concert, the experience was entirely inward. Welch says the researchers’ playlist was integral to the journey he set out on that day. “Turning in was unbelievably different than being out in the world and having all this external stimulation. There was none of that. Zero. One of the fi rst things I realized was, I am awareness, I’m not a body. I didn’t have a body during this journey, I was just awareness. And, honestly, I felt like I was at home,” he recalls. “I’d come to the conclusion that this body, not only is it not me, but it’s not really my home — it’s transient, it’s tem- porary, it’s just mine to use and take care of.” According to Welch, he felt a procession of beings alongside him moving towards something. There was no communication, just geometric patterns changing, propagat- ing, cascading all at the same time, in a com- plexity Welch had never witnessed before. Welch wasn’t agnostic or an atheist going into the experience. “I began to recognize that there was a much greater being than me,” the longtime Christian details. “It was like if the sun came right up to you within the distance of your screen — my entire awareness was fi lled with this unbelievably bright light and a power and knowledge that was so intimidating and overpowering. It just blew me away, and even though I didn’t have a body, I had to turn my awareness away because it was so utterly overwhelming. I recognized that as the Almighty One.” The supreme being he found gave him the grace of distance eventually, Welch says, like it knew he’d had enough. He was fi lled with gratitude, and a realization he was but a thread in a tapestry, NEWS continued on page 10 KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS A study at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Center is shedding light on psilocybin therapy for cancer patients, like James Welch. CU ANSCHUTZ COURTESY JAMES WELCH
