Whatever reservations Jacob Ramirez might have had about his “therapy” session last year using the hallucinogen psilocybin —“magic mushrooms” — he couldn’t possibly have anticipated severe head and chest injuries, months in the hospital and $2 million in medical bills. 

Of course, he also didn’t expect to fall from a fourth-floor window onto the pavement below while tripping on the substance at a hotel in Colorado Springs. He’s lucky to be alive, in fact.

As noted in news reports last week, Ramirez filed a negligence suit Wednesday in 4th Judicial District Court against the counselors involved in the incident. He contends he was served psilocybin tea during the session — and then was left by himself in the hotel room. 

Among the allegations in Ramirez’s lawsuit was that counselor Rachel McGuire wasn’t licensed to administer the hallucinogen under the state’s Natural Medicine Health Act, adopted by voters in 2022.

As if a license would have made a difference. 

In reality, the licensure requirement, along with the entire act — and hallucinogen therapy itself— are a farce. 

Proposition 122 conned Colorado voters into decriminalizing hallucinogens. The national legalization lobby, which bankrolled the slick campaign for the proposal, duped the public into believing it would help veterans and others suffering from the likes of PTSD. It was really a scheme to launch yet another lucrative recreational drug industry in Colorado alongside retail marijuana.

Under the near-meaningless standards of the new law, licensed “natural medicine facilitators” at “healing centers” may dish out psychedelic drugs as whole mushrooms, teas, capsules, tablets and tinctures, and even as chocolates and gummies. 

The healing centers can’t charge for the drugs — a technicality rendered moot by the act’s provisions allowing the centers to charge fees for the services rendered. In other words, it’s a new drug trade cynically wrapped in sanctimonious, touchy-feely packaging.

The wink-wink disingenuousness of the law serves the segment of the market that just wants a legal way to take a magical mushroom trip. 

But an arguably greater danger is to those, like Ramirez, who might think they’re getting therapy for real mental maladies. They’re not.

Hallucinogens are not medicine. They are not approved for use in treating PTSD, depression, schizophrenia or a host of other psychological disorders. No licensed medical professionals prescribe them as part of a treatment regimen.

Indeed, the act’s supposed licensure standards neither confer nor require any kind of credential recognized by the medical profession. The facilitators and healing centers have no connection to legitimate health care or to medical science.

Anyone claiming a scientific basis in using hallucinogens to treat physical or mental illness is a dangerously naive quack, or more likely, a huckster. They are akin to the snake-oil and hair tonic pitchmen of old — except the oil and tonic did little harm other than to rip you off.

Hallucinogen “therapy,” on the other hand, just might leave you seriously injured. Or even get you killed.

Real medical science views the therapeutic value of hallucinogens as, at best, debatable. In 2024, for example, an advisory committee of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration concluded the proposed use of the hallucinogen MDMA is not an effective PTSD treatment.

And if any therapeutic value is established for hallucinogens through bona fide research and regulatory review by the FDA, the drugs should be left to licensed medical professionals to prescribe and administer. 

Leaving such potentially perilous, mind-bending “therapy” to Colorado’s “facilitators” will heal no one. It only will leave unsuspecting patients like Ramirez in a world of hurt.