The power of psychedelics: an alternative approach to recovery

The following article is part of INSP’s Changing the Narrative series. It has been written as the result of the new journalism training academy, established in 2025 by INSP to provide people with direct experience of homelessness and poverty the opportunity to learn about journalism and the media, and to enhance their storytelling and written abilities. The training academy has two ambitions: to challenge media and public misconceptions about homelessness; and to tackle the lack of representation and diversity in newsrooms. The training academy will run again in September 2025 in INSP’s hometown of Glasgow, Scotland.

I would like to ask the Scottish government a question – but I’m asking for a friend, of course. This friend has been experimenting with psychedelics and studying religious plant use in all faiths. Unfortunately, historic records are hard to come by – we burned our witches, and the Romans drove our traditional practices of worship with plants underground. The only places that my friend can draw on for inspiration are other cultures that have preserved methods of connecting with the divine through plants.

In this country, the law is clear about this form of spirituality – it’s illegal. But my friend identifies with a “remembering” form of neo- shamanism, so why is he not extended the protection of Scotland’s Hate Crime Act? His religious identity is persecuted by the state rather than being protected.

My friend views plants with reverence, treating them as a sacrament. Ceremony and ritual are methods used to hold these beautiful plants within a spiritual context. What threat does he pose to society by worshiping nature, or occasionally eating some mushrooms foraged locally to then pray, sing, dance, chant and cry?

This approach is in stark contrast to Scotland’s more common drink and drugs “sesh” culture: a culture that is often an escape into a spectacle of excess. Joining in with a sesh can lead to unmindful choices, often adding to the emotional baggage that we already carry. Plant medicine ceremonies encourage the opposite – unpacking your baggage, inviting those brave enough to be like the bison who charges headfirst into the storm, knowing that it will be first out the other side.

The prevalent culture of the sesh has left my friend with a graveyard full of amazing friends gone too soon. Like in the movie Scarface, illusion interacts with our need to get smashed to escape the stark realities around us. Sadly, that illusion is often shattered by addiction and even violent state control.

Because of my friend’s experience, I want to make a case for reclaiming nature’s medicine as something we do to enrich community, rather than staying with the status quo, which perpetuates Hunger Games-like narratives for the proceeds of crime. All that achieves is dirtier drugs, more death, violence and corruption, and more non-violent offenders filling our already overflowing prison system.

Further, we currently have a system of individualised medicine managing the alienation of individualism. Causation and feeling the pain behind suffering has been lost to underfunding, replaced by CBT, RBT and other acronym therapies and medication.

Alternatives to 10-minute appointments to discuss how the sedatives are sedating are needed. For my friend, a part of that solution is plant medicine in community. Dr Anna Ross, lecturer at Edinburgh University and co-founder of the Scottish Psychedelic Research Group, has put forward a vision to that end.

“I would like to see a network of churches and community centres right across Scotland offering ceremony using the liberty cap mushroom,” she says. “This form of collective healing could help restore interconnectedness to our communities and nature.”

One of the oldest treatment methods for substance addiction is the 12-step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous. This model was founded by Bill Wilson and Dr Bob Smith, but a little-known fact is that Wilson used belladonna treatment to get sober – a treatment made from the belladonna or deadly nightshade flower. The plant contains the psychoactive alkaloids atropine and scopolamine.

This plant medicine facilitated Wilson’s spiritual experience, enabling him to create Alcoholics Anonymous. When Wilson hit troubles in his recovery, falling into depression, he was in communication with the writer Aldous Huxley, who in turn suggested LSD. Wilson found the LSD experience incredibly helpful and suggested integrating LSD into the 12-step programme. His suggestion was shot down on the grounds that it would be admitting that the programme doesn’t work entirely by itself.

This fork in the road has recently been revisited with the creation of the Psychedelics in Recovery (PIR) network. My friend attended Cocaine Anonymous in the past only to leave feeling dejected by the view that abstinence is the only path to progression. PIR helped him to heal that hurt and make peace with a programme that has had a massively positive impact on his life.

It also offers much needed peer support for those in recovery according to Kevin Franciotti, co-founder and Board President of PIR. “Psychedelics in Recovery offers a vital bridge for people who are working to maintain or deepen their sobriety while exploring these powerful tools in a mindful, ethical, and spiritually grounded way,” he says.

For those who aren’t in recovery from addiction, there are also in-person groups supporting psychedelic integration in both Edinburgh and Glasgow.

My friend and I weren’t always friends. If I’m honest, we spent over a decade trying to kill each other. Now, when we pass each other in a window or a mirror, we meet each other with a look of acceptance that recognises the pain of the struggle to be here today, sometimes even with a smile. We thank plant medicine every day for its part in allowing us to be able to feel that smile.