A Dose of a Hallucinogen From a ‘Magic Mushroom,’ and Then Lasting Peace:

None of those possibilities fit Kevin, who had a bone-marrow transplant for acute myeloid leukemia. It sent his cancer into remission, but left him with graft-versus-host disease.

Suffering from chronic pain and fatigue, Kevin, 57, who lives in central Michigan and asked that his last name be withheld because he had been in law enforcement, had to retire. Four years after the transplant, he despaired.

“Going through a near-death illness is similar to returning from combat,” he said. “It damages who you are, to the core of what it is to be human.”

“I was hoping to get out of this funk of waiting for the other shoe to drop,” he added. “You’re looking up to the heavens, saying ‘What else can I try?’ ”

In 2013, Kevin entered the Johns Hopkins trial. During his session, he saw spirals of iridescent spheres that folded in on themselves.

The experience did not restore him to his former life, he said, “but I have a greater sense of peace of what might come. I’m very grateful, beyond words, for this trial. But you have to approach the session with the right intentions of why you’re doing it. Because you’re going to meet yourself.”

This is incredible news for people who suffer from anxiety and depression.

The last time I ate ‘magic’ mushrooms (aka ‘shrooms’) was over 16 years ago in college. It was truly a mind-opening experience.

Even Steve Jobs raved about the profound effect LSD had on him:

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.

To be clear: shrooms and LSD, while both hallucinogens, have widely varying effects on different people.