Breaking down the decrim movement: Discoveries, doubts and personal ins & outs – Aspen Daily News

In her youth, Martha Hammel suffered from severe anorexia, anxiety and suicidality. One chance encounter with psilocybin mushrooms changed everything.

She recalls being in an outdoor atmosphere sitting on blankets with a small group of friends. Soft music played in the background. She and her peers had researched the correct way to engage with the psychedelic compound and designated a sitter the term to describe a sober person who assists others under the influence of psychedelic drugs to accompany their trip.

At the time, Hammel had never drunk alcohol, consumed marijuana nor smoked a cigarette. Eating the entheogenic fungi was her first intake of any sort of mood- or mind-altering substance. And it was done mindfully and respectfully, Hammel said: It was done well.

In that experience, I felt the eating disorder lift, and this anxiety that had been weighing me down for my entire life and this self-hatred intention I had been feeling, it all lifted, Hammel said. And I distinctly remember experiencing this thought of, I dont need that anymore. And it stayed gone.

It would be years before Hammel tried psilocybin mushrooms again, because the initial encounter was such a relief, she said.

Psilocybin is the naturally occurring psychedelic compound produced by more than 200 species of mushrooms. It is among chemicals such as ayahuasca, mescaline, LSD and ibogaine, known as entheogens. Commonly interchanged with the term psychedelics, entheogens refer to a psychoactive substance derived primarily from plant sources when it is used for its religious or spiritual effects.

Entheogenic plants and fungi have been used by humans in indigenous and religious rituals for centuries. These compounds trigger non-ordinary states of consciousness which often include hallucinogenic effects and if exercised in a safe set and setting, Hammel explains, they can produce therapeutic outcomes.

In just a three-hour time span, I found my way out its really powerful medicine, Hammel said. It was actually the moment I decided to become a nutritionist; I had this realization that I wanted to help other women with eating disorders.

Hammel is now a certified nutrition specialist, natural food chef, addiction recovery coach and psychedelic integration coach. She earned a masters degree in nutrition and integrative health from the Maryland University of Integrative Health and has undergone advanced training programs for mindfulness-based psychedelic therapy and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy.

She spends her time between Aspen and Boulder, where she is the nutritionist and guide at the Center for Medicinal Mindfulness one of the first legal psychedelic therapy clinics to operate in North America that offers services in cannabis- and ketamine-assisted therapies.

These plant medicines, they can be profoundly healing in so many more ways than you could ever see possible, Hammel said. And to discount the power of that big experience is dangerous.

From healing her mental health to shaping her career, Hammel commends the power of her own big experience with plant medicines years ago. She has become a prominent voice in psychedelic activism and education across all of Colorado, and right now, her efforts are honed in on Aspen.

Hammel is the lead campaign manager for Right To Heal Aspen, the citizen-led initiative seeking to decriminalize plant medicines within the city of Aspen for therapeutic use.

Following a yearlong collaborative process involving community members, city council members, attorneys and experts in the field of psychedelics, Hammel and fellow representatives Isaac Flanagan and Laura Betti recently presented a citizen-initiated ordinance and petition regarding therapeutic access to plant medicines and the decriminalization of these compounds in the city of Aspen.

On Tuesday, April 12, Aspen City Clerk Nicole Henning officially approved the proposed petition as submitted. According to her acceptance letter, the petition proponents have 180 days to circulate the petitions following the clerks approval. The letter also notes that 925 signatures of city electors will be required to place this matter on the ballot. Hammel said she aims to collect signatures from 1,500 Aspen voters.

With the petition hitting the ground running, Aspen may be the next city to hop on the psychedelic train.

Renewed scientific interest and clinical research involving psychedelic medicine has gained traction in recent years. In turn, a number of U.S. cities and states are revising their legal frameworks around these drugs.

Denver was the first city to decriminalize psilocybin in 2019, followed by similar initiatives surrounding entheogenic plants and fungi in Washington, D.C.; Oakland and Santa Cruz, California; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Seattle, Washington which became the largest city to decriminalize noncommercial activity around psychedelic substances and Detroit.

On the state level, Oregon was the first to legalize psilocybin-assisted therapy and decriminalize the personal possession of such compounds in November 2020. In Colorado, advocates are pushing to get a statewide decrim initiative on the upcoming November ballot. At the same time, Sen. Joann Ginal and Rep. Alex Valdez, both Democrats, are sponsoring a new bill that would create a panel to study plant medicines in mental health treatment.

Whether it be state lawmakers proposing the formation of working groups for research on these compounds or local governments taking steps to enlist the personal use and possession of entheogenic plants among the lowest law enforcement priorities, America has entered an era of psychedelic drug reform, and its only on the rise.

The Aspen movement was spurred just over a year ago in a city council meeting when Councilmember Skippy Mesirow introduced the idea of psychedelic-assisted therapies as a healing modality amid the communitys mental health crisis.

Pictured is a hut located at the Soltara Healing Center in Costa Rica. Skippy Mesirow experienced his first and second ayahuasca ceremonies within this hut.

It was an offhand comment that I think we should be looking at bringing these incredibly beneficial compounds of healing to our community that is struggling with issues of mental health, suicidality, substance abuse and disconnection, Mesirow said. I expected to get laughed at, and surprisingly, my colleagues were really receptive.

Like Hammel, Mesirows passion and support for the initiative stems from his own life-altering experience with entheogenic plants. Having long suffered from acute and chronic anxiety, Mesirow said he tried out different healing modalities for 15 years.

Three years ago, Mesirow embarked on a weeklong retreat in Costa Rica at the Soltara Healing Center, where he engaged in an ayahuasca ceremony. Ayahuasca which can induce a much more intense experience than mushrooms, Hammel explained is an herbal brew that has been used for ritual and healing purposes since pre-Columbian times.

The ceremonial concoction originated in the Shipibo tribe tradition out of the Amazons Peruvian region. Through a series of ceremonies followed by integration, many Western facilitators understand ayahuasca to clear and cleanse past traumas, to put the entheogen in simple terms.

Mesirow explained that while he did not necessarily uncover a clear answer to the root of his anxiety during the first ceremonies, it was the post-integration work that allowed him to hold onto those learnings, and unknowingly, he had created the environment to answer the question for himself.

The moment you set the intention to work with these plants, they begin to work on you, Mesirow said. But the substances are not the answer in of themselves; theyre a tool or the gateway its the setting, the safety and the integration that allows for them to change lives.

A year later, Mesirow returned to the same retreat in Costa Rica for his second ayahuasca experience, where his intention at that point was to put eyes on his childhood.

He describes this go-around as walking through the Great Library of Alexandria of his own mind, recalling memories that he had blocked out before the age of 13. In this second series of ceremonies, Mesirow said he experienced terrifying moments, followed by a distinct feeling of singularity, in which he said he understood everything he needed to heal.

I may have gotten to where I am now in terms of my well-being without that experience, Mesirow said. But, for me, its been very central to my own healing development it changed my life profoundly.

After Mesirow planted the psychedelic-healing seed at a council meeting last year, council held two public work sessions on the topic. Mesirow brought in neuroscientists, psychiatrists and drug reform activists from all over the country to educate council members on these compounds.

In building this network, one of the organizations Mesirow reached out to was the Center for Medicinal Mindfulness in Boulder, where he connected with Hammel and brought her on board.

A patient undergoes a psychedelic-assisted therapy treatment at the Center for Medicinal Mindfulness in Boulder.

During a council work session held last May, it was apparent not all members were sold on the decrim movement. While there was interest, Mesirow said his colleagues were unsure if council was the right body to be putting this forward. The matter was turned over to Aspen citizens.

We put out the ask to our community to see who would be interested, and it was a huge amount of energy that showed up more than Id ever seen on any other topic, Mesirow said.

Spearheaded by Mesirow and Hammel, the Psychedelic Task Force formed at the start of summer 2021. The working group made up of about 30 community members including Roaring Fork residents outside of Pitkin County met twice a month at the Here House Club in Aspen over the course of eight months.

We opened the first meeting by discussing why we were there, and almost everyone in the room had had their lives saved in some capacity by plant medicines, Hammel said. So there was this deep sense of respect for the medicines, and we wanted to really look at: What is therapeutic use?

Mesirow emphasized the groups focus on therapeutic use, stating that this is the first attempt in the nation a municipal legislation around this movement has been so heavily grounded in the therapeutic and healing benefits of these compounds, he said.

The group came together with a very clear why we have one of the highest suicide rates, substance abuse problems and severe cases of depression and anxiety, Mesirow said. These compounds are showing the most profound ability to mediate, heal and in some instances cure those things plaguing our community.

Another significant discussion Hammel recalls emerging early on in the task force meetings had to do with whether they were looking to decriminalize just psilocybin or all plant medicines.

The thing that we kept coming back to was nobody should ever get arrested for possessing or eating a plant ever, Hammel said.

Through working with activists nationwide and analyzing the language of the Denver petition that led to the capital citys ballot passage three years ago, the local task force crafted a proposed legislation. After undergoing changes and tweaks, the initiated ordinance and petition was finalized in early April and is now circulating in the community. The final version and details on the legislation can be accessed through the Right To Heal Aspen website.

The initiatives three-step framework is rooted in a model Mesirow calls The 5 Ss of Psychedelic Success: screening, set, setting, support and sanctity.

If passed upon voter approval, the ordinance will first establish a six-month advisory committee to develop educational strategies to enable the safe, therapeutic access to plant medicines by adults defined in the document as an individual 21 years of age or older.

Six months after the effective date of the ordinance, plant medicines would then be decriminalized in the city of Aspen. According to the legislation, plant medicines include ayahuasca, ibogaine, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), psilocybin, psilocin and mescaline excluding peyote.

Mayor Torre said that while he supports people using plant-based therapies and is all for the petition process in its intention and essence, he believes the ordinance as drafted could still be improved and hes weary about some of the language.

There should be no mistaking the true intention here, and that true intention is therapeutic use, Torre said. The language that decriminalizes it or deprioritizes it was not language that I thought shouldve been in this ordinance.

Torre also said he thinks the six-month advisory committee should go into effect before the actual ordinance, rather than post-approval, emphasizing that there is more educational work to be done in the community prior to the ordinance potentially passing.

One message that needs to be clear is that there is a difference between using any of these substances recreationally versus therapeutically, there is a difference, Torre said. Simply getting some mushrooms and taking them does not always mean that youre going to be using them positively or effectively for yourself.

Aspen School District Board of Education President Katy Frisch expressed concerns on exactly that point when it comes to the youth community.

Im super nervous about having another substance more accessible to kids, Frisch said. No matter what the ballot language is, theres a lot of possible ways that kids will get their hands on this stuff and wont use it in the right way.

Though the school board has not yet held a meeting to discuss Aspens decriminalization initiative, Frisch anticipates this matter as something they will have to deal with which takes more time away from academics to talk about and implement training around yet another substance that is illegal for kids, and illegal for a reason, she said.

Ive already spoken to admin about if something like this passes, we need to think about what well do from an educational perspective for students and staff, Frisch said. A teacher can probably tell if a student is drunk in class, I dont know whether theyre going to be able to tell if a student has taken this sort of drug.

Frisch said she understands why people support the use of plant medicines for mental health issues among adults, but looking at this from the perspective of how access may impact younger community members, she fears the already appalling drug-use levels will worsen.

I can tell you right now, our self-reported numbers for kids drug and alcohol use are extremely high relative to other parts of the country and even the state, she said. We have a huge substance abuse problem here, and the availability of psychedelic drugs is a big question mark for me.

The psychedelic reform movement elicits many question marks from myriad research fields to the legal and political arenas.

As decriminalization efforts meet success in cities around the country, it is worth noting that psilocybin and other psychedelic drugs are still illegal in those jurisdictions under state law. The term decriminalize is technically inaccurate, according to the psychedelic drug policy reform tracker. Rather, local governments have taken steps to deprioritize enforcing criminal penalties on the city level, and these municipal reforms are progressing in different ways based on different cities motives.

With Aspens focus on therapeutic use, the ordinance language around its decrim initiative involves protecting the use of these plant medicines for therapy by deprioritizing the imposition of criminal penalties on adults for therapeutic use.

According to the proposed legislation, therapeutic use includes the possession, storage, planting, cultivating, transporting and noncommercial sharing of these compounds. This does not include the sale of plant medicines for remuneration. Meaning, unlike marijuana, psychedelics would not be displayed publicly nor sold in stores.

To further support that decrim factor, the Aspen ordinance would prohibit all departments, agencies, boards, commissioners, officers and employees of the city of Aspen from using city resources to assist in the enforcement of criminal penalties on adults for therapeutic use of these plant medicines.

Ninth Judicial Chief Deputy District Attorney Don Nottingham said that if this ordinance were to pass in Aspen, not one thing would change in his jurisdiction. Psychedelics like marijuana are still federally illegal, he said, and from his point of view, they would remain illegal.

Aspen can decriminalize all they want, Nottingham said jokingly. My job is to follow state laws, not city laws.

Nottingham did throw in a comment that of all the substance-use related cases that come to the 9th Judicial District Attorneys Office serving Pitkin, Garfield and Rio Blanco counties a very small percentage of those cases involve psilocybin mushrooms.

Like cannabis, psilocybin is considered a Schedule I drug which the United States Drug Enforcement Administration defines as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential of abuse.

Signed into law by former President Richard Nixon, the Controlled Substance Act (CSA) of 1970 established this legal framework in efforts to categorize drugs into five schedules based on their medical application and the drugs abuse or dependence potential. According to the legislation, Schedule I drugs are considered to have the highest potential for abuse and the potential to create psychological and/or physical dependence.

The CSA was a precursor to Nixons War on Drugs, which he proclaimed in 1971, followed by other federal funding for drug-control agencies, such as the Drug Enforcement Agency, and strict drug crime measures under the Nixon administration.

In the two decades prior to the War on Drugs which has been largely condemned as a political campaign motivated by racist ideology rather than medical reasons by many social advocacy nonprofits and academics psychedelic research was rampant, and culture followed suit.

The early 1950s saw breakthrough studies on the therapeutic potential of LSD, for instance. Due to the growing anti-drug legislature, these studies were short lived. By the late 1960s, psychedelic research had halted with only hippy counterculture left in its place.

Thoryn Stephens grew up in San Francisco chasing Grateful Dead concerts and Hunter S. Thompsons lore. While plant medicines were an integral part of his life from a young age, Stephens relationship with the compounds changed after a ceremonial experience involving mescaline (peyote) in the upper Amazon jungles of Ecuador.

Fascinated and inspired, Stephens started ordering plant materials from all over the world, studying and extracting these compounds to understand their nature.

I really began to understand the power of these plants as tools, essentially for us as humans, Stephens said. And thats really what drove me to be really interested in science: molecular biology and biotechnology.

Stephens who now lives in Aspen and was a part of the Psychedelic Task Force is the founder and CEO of the newly launched software company, Eve Health Systems. The digital platform uses data to drive measurement-based care involving mental-behavioral health, which includes case management and data analysis of legal psychedelic therapy and studies.

Connected to plant medicines on a professional, scientific and spiritual level, Stephens is well versed in the nationwide research efforts around these compounds. He mentioned the movement with ketamine-assisted therapies in helping veterans, explaining how many companies are in the process of stewarding different psychedelic drugs through clinical trials. MDMA is in phase three trials for post traumatic stress disorder therapies, Stephens adds, and psilocybin is in phase two trials for multiple indications, including depression, alcohol use disorder and anorexia nervosa.

While it could take years of research and clinical trials to prove any potential efficacies of these plant medicines, many are sold on the anecdotal evidence from their own personal experiences.

Seven years ago, Jim Harris was at a music festival in California. He was in his ninth month of recovery following a snowkite accident on the Patagonian Icecap, where he was paralyzed from the waist down. Given the state of his spine, Harris was not able to stand without a walker on the outdoor field where the festival took place his knees would ache and lock out, and he could not lift up his right foot due to his hamstring and glute lacking functionality.

Harris said his friends were getting loose with booze, but at that point, even a small amount of alcohol would have made it difficult for him to be mobile. He ate half of a small chocolate square containing psilocybin mushrooms.

Jim Harris during his journey to recovery following an accident that paralyzed him waist down. Harris, who is now a printmaker living in Carbondale, once made a living as a mountain guide and photographer.

Harris remembers leaning on his walker in the big-open field with his group of friends, about 100 yards from the stage. He recalls admiring the pink cotton candy patterns in the clouds, feeling slightly stoned in the cannabis sense when all of a sudden, he realized that he was able to pick his right foot up off the ground.

Muscles that hadnt worked in nine months since my accident began firing, Harris said. Through the psychedelic state, some part of my brain was tasked with something it hadnt been.

While the experience did not magically fix the injury, Harris said, that one muscle activation persisted and the recruitment of the nerve pathway stayed, which was a major progression for his walking functionality.

Two months ago, Harris attended a conference on psychedelics and chronic pain. One of the researchers brought up the potential for psychedelics among spinal cord injuries. Harris said he was immediately taken back to the moment at the music festival seven years ago.

Right now, there is a lot of focus in the medical world on different psychiatric uses, and my hunch is, it seems there will be emerging interest in psychedelics and pain management, especially neuropathic pain and phantom pains people have from different nerve damage, Harris said. Psychedelics seem like they have promise to rewire some of that pain reception.

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Breaking down the decrim movement: Discoveries, doubts and personal ins & outs - Aspen Daily News