Excerpt from Ocregister.com, November 27th 2020
When Ian McCall retired in 2018, at age 34, from a 16-year career in mixed martial arts, he dedicated himself to a new kind of fight.
He wanted relief from the depression and anxiety that had plagued him since he was growing up in Dana Point, where he was known as a bully, a gang member and a self-proclaimed “savage.” His initial mental health issues had been compounded over the years by personal traumas and brain injuries that McCall sustained from a snowboarding accident and years in the octagon.
He’d sought refuge in oxycontin, fentanyl and cocktails of other substances. At times McCall contemplated suicide, once going so far as putting a loaded gun in his mouth.
But today, two years into his retirement, the Mission Viejo resident says he’s found solace. He’s off painkillers. He says his mental health issues are “in check,” and he no longer struggles to accomplish simple tasks. Most importantly, he said, “I don’t want to kill myself anymore.”
The improvement, he says, has come from his controlled embrace of psychedelics.
In this, McCall is not alone.
Psychedelics — everything from ayahuasca, a psychoactive brew with Amazonian origins, to psilocybin, the mind-altering compound produced by more than 200 species of mushrooms — are at the center of the kind of burgeoning image and legal makeover most recently seen in America’s relationship with cannabis.
Though psychedelic drugs remain illegal under federal law, and in most states, a handful of cities across the country have decriminalized psilocybin. Oregon on Nov. 3 became the first state to decriminalize all drugs, while voters also approved a measure that will legalize and regulate psilocybin for therapeutic use in special clinics.
There’s a push to do the same in California. Both a revived ballot measure and promised legislation from State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, could open access to hallucinogenic mushrooms and perhaps other psychedelics in the Golden State within the next two years.