In 2012, Iraq war veteran Jen Marshall was at a low point. For nearly the past decade, she’d been tormented by an image she’d seen serving in Iraq: the corpse of a man, dried by the wind, kneeling as if praying in the desert outside of Baghdad. He was missing his head, and had maggots crawling out of his back side.
Since she ended her military service in 2007, Marshall bounced around security jobs in the American West, drinking herself through long nights, plagued by images of the war and accompanying suicidal thoughts.
When she tried to get help from the Department of Veterans Affairs, she reluctantly agreed to have herself committed to a psychiatric ward. She eventually got out, but the experience of being forcibly treated traumatized Marshall.
“I kind of felt like I was at the end of my rope, so to speak, as far as options,” she said.
Then, while living in Austin, Texas, a friend recommended a healer who conducted ceremonies with ayahuasca, a plant-based brewed drink used for millennia by Amazonian people for spiritual and psychological healing.
She drank the brew — an opaque reddish liquid — and laid down next to 12 other people who had also done so. In the ensuing hours, an overwhelming power took over her mind. She cried. She hugged others in the room. She felt gratitude for who she was, despite the terrible memories she carried from war.
“For the first time in so long I was able to feel connected again,” she said. “I realized that all of these terrible things that had happened to me didn’t in any way diminish me or dim my light or take away who I am.”
Marshall’s following experience was profound, and had lasting impacts. She now lives in Anchorage and runs a successful online vintage clothing store. She credits much of the transformation to her experience, and is now part of and a growing group of advocates are renewing a push to legalize the substances in Alaska as the decriminalization movement gathers momentum around the country.
Recently, a growing body of scientific research has spurred state governments and grassroots groups to take another look at the potential for ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms, and other psychedelic-inducing drugs to treat depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, anorexia, and other mental health conditions. Oregon is set to start legal, licensed psilocybin sessions, while Colorado has a similar program in the works, though several years behind. A group of advocates, and at least one lawmaker, are gearing up for a push to decriminalize the substances in Alaska.
“We did a ton of work during the session,” said Rep. Jennie Armstrong, a West Anchorage lawmaker who is planning to file a bill on decriminalization in the upcoming session. “This is the right time.”
Marshall’s experience is common for users of ayahuasca, but the drug is currently among the most highly penalized drugs under U.S. and Alaska criminal codes. Selling of ayahuasca — specifically its active compound dimethyltryptamine or DMT — can lead to a felony conviction of five to 99 years in jail in Alaska under current statute, the same as the hyper-lethal opioid fentanyl.
Possession or delivery of the substances is rarely prosecuted, but the risk is enough to keep many therapeutic users underground. As a result, few users are willing to share their stories publicly like Marshall.
Armstrong said she’s visited colleagues’ offices to educate them about the potential benefits of decriminalization in a state that has both a higher prevalence of mental illness than other states and lower rates of access to care.
“We have such high rates of mental health problems of suicides, of addictions,” said Armstrong. “We are truly the place where legalization of these drugs can have the biggest impacts.”
The bill would also automatically reclassify psychedelic drugs to lower levels of prosecution based on federal standards, which still list most psychedelics as Schedule I, meaning they have no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.
Clinical trials of MDMA have shown it can be extremely effective in treating PTSD, and is expected to get FDA approval by 2024. Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, is also in final clinical trials.
Public health officials say despite the promise of the drugs, there are still public health concerns among vulnerable populations like youth, pregnant women, and people with existing medical conditions.
The state health department said up to 60 people were treated in emergency rooms after ingesting psychedelic substances, though many of the visits also involved alcohol or other illicit drugs. In at least the past 10 years, no deaths in Alaska have been attributed to psychedelic substances, according to the Alaska Department of Health. More than 1,300 people have died from overdosing on other substances in the same time period.
A 2004 analysis found that on average, someone would have to take 1,000 times the standard dose of a psychedelic drug to fatally overdose. Conversely, in 2021 an estimated 16,000 people in the U.S. died from prescription opioids, representing just 24% of overall opioid-related deaths.
“Psilocybin is not the same as heroin,” said Mason Marks, a researcher on psychedelic policy at Florida State University. “People don’t realize psilocybin might help people stop using heroin.”
The National Institute on Drug Abuse similarly supports research on the benefits of substances like psilocybin, and believes they could help curtail drug abuse.
Armstrong’s bill would set up a task force to advise the state on how to safely and equitably set up programs for administering psychedelic drugs.
“I feel very very strongly about the use of psychedelics,” said Armstrong. “I want to make sure the second this is legalized, people have access.”
Meanwhile, a grassroots group led by Regina Randall is reviving an education and advocacy campaign this summer and fall about the benefits of natural plant medicine. Randall is the founder of the Alaska Entheogenic Awareness Council, which has hosted a monthly speaker series with guests from around the world that has had a surprisingly strong turnout, despite minimal advertising.
Two years ago, Randall started a similar campaign, but saw only a trickle of audience members show up. A recent event with a speaker from Peru speaking about the use of wachuma — the mescaline-containing San Pedro cactus — drew more than two-dozen audience members.
“It’s been a little overwhelming because I don’t think we were really prepared for it,” said Randall of the turnout.
Randall, who is Athabaskan and originally from Holy Cross on the Yukon River, spent years living in Peru at a retreat center learning about the use of ayahuasca and wachuma. Her group is planning an educational campaign this fall where volunteers will visit different events and pass out flyers and talk to the public about the potential benefits of decriminalization.
Eventually, she said, the group itself will take a more active role in pushing for legal decriminalization of plant-based medicines. Still, there are plenty of challenges for the effort.
Armstrong said that while she’s heard from some younger Republican lawmakers who seemed amenable to decriminalization, there is still stigma about the long-maligned substances. The drugs have long been associated with liberal counterculture, but a new generation has been working to recast the substances for intentional therapeutic use.
“Even a more liberal lawmaker in my caucus who has used psychedelics was very wary of this,” said Armstrong.
Armstrong said her bill takes the most conservative approach possible, waiting for FDA approval and federal reclassification of any substance. But that is a “minimal achievement, for decriminalization,” said Marks, the FSU researcher.
There is also limited value in federal rescheduling, since it would only apply to a proprietary formulation of psilocybin or MDMA, which could be marketed and produced by the manufacturer.
“They’re only going to reschedule that specific formulation of psilocybin; magic mushrooms will remain in Schedule I,”said Marks. That means the pharmaceutical company that patented the drug can ramp up prices, keeping the substances out of reach to many.
Concerns about equity have undermined Oregon’s fledgling psychedelic decriminalization effort. The state will open its first legal psilocybin centers, but a treatment could cost $3,000 — out of reach of many people, and much more expensive than traditional Western therapy methods.
“Monetizing to get rich off it goes against some of the foundational rules of how medicine works in the Indigenous perspective,” said Meda DeWitt, an Alaska Native healer and plant medicine specialist.
DeWitt said Alaska Native use of psychedelic compounds largely went dormant during colonization, but there is an ongoing tradition of using them in healing.
She said that having an ethics board with representation from Western doctors, the Alaska Native tribal health system, and traditional healers would be a good way to ensure people have access to it.
DeWitt is also worried about the risk of overregulation, which could put in place too many regulatory hoops in front of traditional healers who are following practices that have been used for centuries or even millennia.
“Everybody’s worried about hippies — the actual appropriation is the Western medicine taking over and monetizing it,” she said.
Despite the concerns, advocates of decriminalization say the benefits are so enormous, that decriminalization in any form is worth the risks.
“It’s in our best interest to be able to share this with community members,” said DeWitt. “Our veterans, they need this more than anybody.”
