“This is a careful bill for people, our veterans and first responders, who have carried extraordinary burdens.”
By Rebecca Rivas, Missouri Independent
After four years of trying, the Missouri House passed legislation Thursday that would require the state to conduct a study on using psilocybin—also known as “magic mushrooms”—and other alternative therapies to treat depression, substance use or as part end-of-life care.
Veterans and first-responders would be able to possess the psychedelic if they’re enrolled in a study, where it would be administered by a facilitator.
Despite overwhelming support for the idea in past years, Thursday marks the first time the House has sent the bill on to the Senate, with a vote of 137 to 11.
Lawmakers amended the legislation last week to include ibogaine, a powerful psychoactive compound derived from an African shrub that’s used to treat addiction, PTSD and traumatic brain injury.
Republican state Rep. Renee Reuter of Imperial gave an emotional account of her husband’s struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder during House debate last week. After serving overseas in the U.S. Army in 1993, her husband’s PTSD has “enticed him to do certain things” that have destroyed their marriage and lives.
“When he left in 1993 I told my husband, ‘You do whatever you have to do, but come home,’” Reuter said. “In ‘94 when my husband came home, he didn’t come all the way home.”
Her son has also been deployed three times overseas and experiences PTSD as well.
“Let’s do this for those men and women,” she said. “Let’s give them whatever it is that we need to give them to help them and their families continue to live and be productive members of society.”
While the bill was originally focused on helping veterans, Republican state Rep. Matthew Overcast pushed to expand the bill to also include first responders.
In 2020, Overcast worked for a company that handled staffing for nurses in New York hospitals, and he saw how the pandemic impacted the hospital workers.
“I can tell you from walking through some of those nursing wards,” said Overcast, who is also a veteran. “There was more death that they saw in those few months when it first hit, than even some of our own soldiers have seen in a war.”
This bill requires the Missouri Department of Mental Health to provide grants totaling $2 million for the research on alternative therapies, subject to lawmakers approving the appropriation.
The state would collaborate on the study with a Missouri university hospital or medical center operated by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Missouri. The focus of the treatment is on veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, substance use disorders, or for those who require end-of-life care.
The suicide rate among veterans in Missouri is nearly double the state rate and one of the highest in the country.
“This is a careful bill for people, our veterans and first responders, who have carried extraordinary burdens that most of us could only be we can’t really even imagine,” Overcast said, “and they endured significant trauma, not only in service to our communities, but to our country as well. It is measured, it is compassionate and it is accountable.”
The bill’s sponsor, Republican state Rep. Richard West of Wentzville, said as a former police officer, he was skeptical of alternative therapies at first. But he’s read the study results and believes states should support furthering the research.
That includes studies done by psychiatry researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, who were the first in Missouri to give a legal dose of psilocybin in 2019.
They have been using a brain-imaging technique to learn how psilocybin affects certain networks in the brain.
Republican State Rep. Dave Griffith of Jefferson City, a veteran who has supported the measure for several years, said it was appropriate to add first responders as eligible participants.
“I think the most important thing about this bill is going to be done under a controlled atmosphere,” Griffith said, before the House passed the bill Thursday. “There needs to be safeguards put in place for them. [West] set up all those guardrails for us, so I’d ask somebody to support this bill.”
