MIAMI — In South Florida, innovative ideas are being employed every day to deal with climate change threats. Start-up tech companies are 3D-printing sea walls, turning seaweed into fertilizer and even building houses out of recycled plastic.
One group that gathered recently in Miami has a more unorthodox idea for coping with what may well be an existential crisis for South Florida in the coming decades. They are pitching the notion that tripping on some magic mushrooms or other hallucinogens might inspire “consciousness shifts” in the populace to do better for the planet.
Major legal hurdles aside — psilocybin, the substance in mushrooms that triggers trips, is a controlled substance and using it or selling it is a crime in Florida and many states — the idea is that if more people transcend into the psychedelic realm it could encourage more awe and appreciation of nature and a deeper personal connection to the world. Psychedelics for Climate Action (PSYCA) hopes that maybe, just maybe, humankind might learn to live in harmony “like a flock of birds.”
“Psychedelics teach, that we are all one and that we are all family on this planet, and we need to collectively protect our home,” said Marissa Feinberg, PYSCA’s founder.
Members of the group met for the first time in Miami last week with the goal of demystifying psychedelics that have shown promise in treating several mental issues like depression and addiction. The night consisted of talks followed by meditation and dancing at the Climate Innovation Hub in Little Haiti. Speakers included locals from the Miccosukee Tribe and a Miami-based ketamine therapist as well as visitors who came from as far as Switzerland.
Yadira Diaz, who leads the Miami chapter of the group, said while she was living in California working for Pepsi “selling plastic for a living” she had a life-altering trip on a psychedelic drug called DMT and mushrooms that inspired her to pivot careers. She moved back home to Miami and built a climate start-up, Gradible, where she works with clients like the event venue, Factory Town, to identify ways to cut waste and energy that will ultimately save the business money.
“It can be a really beautiful, powerful awakening,” Diaz said. “When we feel our best we do our best.”
Psychedelic trips can produce intense emotion or “out-of-body experiences” including hallucinations. It’s been described as feeling like time stops. On good trips, users say nature can appear more saturated and vibrant and move in a way that almost looks like its breathing.
Just last weekend Diaz said she was in the Florida Keys with some friends kayaking, they took some mushrooms, then went on a hike and snorkeled. During the psychedelic experience, she said they talked about how the Keys could be the first to go from sea level rise and how lucky they were to experience it.
“That’s one example where it was just a beautiful experience with a beautiful group of people with the right environment, with the right doses, and we were just all frolicking and having the best time,” Diaz said.
Psychedelics are illegal in Florida but some, mostly mushrooms AKA shrooms, are also fairly widely used and all bills introduced to try to decriminalize them have died. Although there was a Florida bill introduced last year currently in committee that could require the Department of Health to conduct a study on alternative mental health treatments like psilocybin and ketamine.
The FDA has also approved a form of ketamine, a drug originally approved as an anesthetic for children, as a treatment for depression in adults with treatment-resistant depression.
Francesca Cerchione, a holistic therapist now living in Miami, said she has clients who suffer from anxiety over the implications of climate change. Ketamine, that patients order online and put under their tongue, has been particularly helpful with one of her longtime clients from New York who lost her home after Hurricane Sandy.
“Ketamine helps reorganize activity in the brain and process trauma,” Cerchione said. “It’s a way [for patients] to connect with the oneness of the world and do something outside of themselves.”
The events PSYCA has hosted so far in New York and the launch event in Miami are “medicine-free” — although they did offer drinks micro-dosed with Delta-9, a legal cannabis less psychoactive than weed, and functional lion-mane mushroom.
“I consider these events to be like integration, for these people to come together, connect with each other, build community, support each other,” Feinberg said.
There are, for those interested, six-day mushroom coaching retreats in legal jurisdictions — the last two being in the Netherlands. The program called Connected Leadership is the first to study psychedelic creativity, and decision-making in business leaders observed by University of Maryland professor, Bennet Zelner. The group says small business founders and even managers of multinational companies have paid around $10,000, not including the flight, to get dosed with psychedelics.
Reverend Houston Cypress, who read a poem during the event, said he grew up benefiting from the Miccosukee Tribe’s plant-based medicines. Afterward, he told the Miami Herald those very plants were threatened by development or bad policy. He wants to guard the conditions for the plant medicines to grow:
“Let’s make sure these plant medicines are available for the future. Let’s make sure they’re available for the next generation,” he said.
A debate that has been brought up in psychedelic science conferences is whether Indigenous plants, like peyote, for example, can be respectfully taken from the ground and Indigenous people to bring to the mainstream. Cypress thinks there’s a way it could be done ethically:
“We can use science to produce these medicines in forms that are not so extractive or not so destructive to the ecosystem,” Cypress said. “We can make these available in ways that are respectful of nature, that are respectful of Indigenous communities, and are not appropriative of Indigenous communities either.”
This is certainly not the first group to suggest psychedelics could make the world a better place. In the 1960s, the band talked about the inspiration of psychedelics – mainly LSD —on their music and about how they felt that giving it to all our leaders would put an end to wars. The hallucinogenics also inspired multiple hits, like Come Together. But they later, according to Rolling Stone, stopped extolling its virtues.
Veterans have also been at the forefront of fighting for psychedelics for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) treatment. The Department of Veteran Affairs allocated millions of dollars for a psychedelic therapy program to treat PTSD. Some veterans didn’t wait for the funding to come through and went to Mexico to receive treatment. But there also are significant questions about its long-term use and potential side-effects.
Florida State Senator Jay Collins, a Republican from the Tampa area, sponsored a project at USF Health that funded a clinical trial into the efficacy of psilocybin as a treatment for PTSD in veterans. But, counter to PSYCA’s goals, he’s also introduced bills that would erase the word climate change from state laws.
Next steps for the group in Miami are still being figured out. One idea PSYCA has is to create a climate action guide to help people, once they have tried mushrooms or other psychedelics to actually get involved in sustainable projects in their community.
“The big, hairy, audacious goal would be to actually help to create a consciousness shift, to help catalyze this with this community, and make ourselves obsolete,” Feinburg said. “We shouldn’t need a whole climate action movement. It should be a way of life.”
