Alejandra Lagunes says that psilocybin mushrooms could be a benefit to the country’s mental health crisis.
MEXICO CITY—When Mexican Senator Alejandra Lagunes was in her late 20s, she was living in a world she describes as “gray” with depression and anxiety.
“I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t laugh, I didn’t cry,” she remembers now.
She could barely get out of bed, or muster the will to eat. Her weight dropped to 34 kilos (75 pounds). Her doctor told her that amenorrhea would leave her unable to have kids. She thought that she was always going to be that sad girl who never did anything.
When a cousin told her that a Peruvian shaman was coming to Mexico City with his “sacred medicine,” Ayahuasca, “it felt like a sign…I didn’t even have to think about it.”
She took the Ayahuasca trip. The plant-based brew contains the psychedelic drug DMT, as well as other substances.
“My perspective of my own life changed. My mind changed. All my negative thinking patterns shifted. It was as though there was a different light illuminating my mind and I saw things differently. I stopped taking medication.
“It changed my life.”
Lagunes, who is now 51, is convinced that her region’s psychedelic “medicines”, and particularly psilocybin mushrooms, which are native to Mexico and have long been used by Indigenous communities here, could be the answer to her country’s mental health woes which worsened during the pandemic.
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