Thirty-Year Habit: Psilocybin and Alcohol Recovery

I want to be careful about how I describe this, because I've heard too many miracle cure stories about addiction and I don't want to add another one. This is what happened to me specifically. It may not be what happens to you.

I'm 47. I've been drinking heavily, with some dry periods, since I was 17. I've done three inpatient treatment programs. I've been in AA and found community there, even when I couldn't maintain sobriety. I've tried naltrexone, acamprosate, and disulfiram at various points. None of it stuck. The drinking was the thing I could not dislodge.

A friend sent me information about the NYU clinical trial — psilocybin for alcohol use disorder. I was skeptical but enrolled. Two sessions over eight weeks, surrounded by 12 weeks of Motivational Enhancement Therapy.

The first session was the beginning of something I don't fully understand and don't need to. In the session, I experienced — there's no word for this that doesn't sound mystical, but — a visceral encounter with what my drinking was protecting me from. Not in an analytical way. In the way of direct experience. Thirty years of avoidance telescoped into about two hours of confrontation.

I came out of the session crying and then laughing, which confused my facilitator until I explained. I had seen, very clearly, that I didn't want to die drunk. That the thing I'd been running from was survivable. That I'd been running a very long time.

I've been sober for nineteen months. I know that nineteen months is not a lifetime. I know the studies show effects persisting at 8-12 month follow-up, not 20 years. I am not telling you this is permanent. I'm telling you that something is genuinely different — in the quality of the desire itself, not just my management of it. The want has changed.