Can psychedelics help to restore consciousness in a patient whose awareness is impaired or seemingly gone? Can these powerful drugs give the brain a chance to reorganize and rewire itself? After David’s wife, Sarah, was hit by a car, she suffered severe brain damage; she became unresponsive and remained in a coma, and David explored many treatments with no success. Working with a neuroscientist in Belgium, whose research involves using psilocybin and ketamine in patients with “disorders of consciousness,” he decided to give a dose of distilled liquid psilocybin high enough to induce a psychedelic experience. In this fascinating read, Jonathan Moens recounts the experiment and the science behind it, and poses important ethical questions surrounding consent.
On August 25, 2023, exactly 336 days following Sarah’s tragic accident, David, who is based in Colorado where psychedelic mushrooms are decriminalized, obtained a tincture of distilled liquid psilocybin. He had already given Sarah low and moderate doses of the drug over the course of several months and it had a “remarkable” affect in her bodily movements.
This time, however, he would go all in, using the equivalent of 2.5 grams—a dose high enough to provoke a powerful psychedelic experience and which is often used in clinical trials for therapeutic purposes. At this dose, both Gosseries and Carhart-Harris said an awakening was theoretically possible.
The legalities of what David was about to do were unclear. Colorado’s decriminalization of certain psychedelics in 2022 means that psilocybin is easy to access and magic mushrooms can be grown and consumed. But whether David was crossing a line by giving Sarah the drug, when she could not consent, was not obvious.
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