The walls may drip into a puddle, there might be faces in the sky for a few hours, but when your trip's over, you're not going to want a cigarette.
You already knew that the benefits of magic mushrooms included useful life skills like the ability to see sound and feel the pulsating energetic threads that connect all of humanity, but thanks to a recent study, you can add smoking cessation to that list.
Researchers at John Hopkins found that a carefully administered dose of psilocybin, the active compound in shrooms, was correlated with a whopping 80 percent smoking cessation rate in a group of lifelong smokers who'd been addicted to nicotine for at least 30 years each.
By contrast, other non-psychedelic cessation programs and drugs like Varenicline have, at best, a 35 percent success rate at getting people to quit.
That's a huge difference. If that difference was a car, it would … be a train.
No one's quite sure about the physiological mechanisms that underlie shrooms' ability to kick your Camel habit, but researchers hypothesize that it's less of a chemical phenomenon and more of a spiritual one. Of course, that sounds unbearably hippie-ish to everyone involved, but bear with us: because mushrooms can bring some people to a level of objective consciousness where they can observe their original reasons for smoking, and also help to elucidate the things that are truly important in their lives, shrooms can give users a new perspective on the habits and addictions they want to change. That, more than anything, seems to be what causes people to quit.
“Quitting smoking isn’t a simple biological reaction to psilocybin, as with other medications that directly affect nicotine receptors,” lead author Matthew Johnson said in a news release. “When administered after careful preparation and in therapeutic context, psilocybin can lead to deep reflection about one’s life and spark motivation to change.”
For the same reason, shrooms have also been found to battle depression and alcoholism, as have other psychedelics like LSD and mescaline.
Given these results, shrooms can be seen as a proactive means to rewire addictive pathways in the brain, replacing the need for harmful pharmaceutical drugs with holistic mental programs that bring about lasting health and vitality.
Of course, they could also cause you to vomit uncontrollably for five hours into a toilet that seems like it's talking to you, but that may or may not just be a personal experience.
Here's a little video about the study to ensure that you spend even less time doing whatever else you're supposed to be doing right now.
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