Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Johns Hopkins researcher Albert Garcia-Romeo about magic mushrooms and psilocybin.

Silocybin is the compound that makes them so magic. They discuss the history, what researchers are

learning today about its therapeutic use in clinical trials for patients with a laundry list of

health concerns, and why he worries some states where

voters have legalized it may be getting ahead of the science. Let's listen.

Albert Garcia-Romeo, thanks so much for joining me. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

So today I want to talk to you about magic mushrooms, about research into psychedelic

drugs like psilocybin. And I know that this is a long history in our United States and around

the world, the use of magic mushrooms, as many people call them familiarly.

But talk to me about sort of why they fell out of favor as a research tool and where things are going.

Yeah.

As you said, there's a long history of use, indigenous cultures of uses, going back hundreds or thousands of years.

And then really it wasn't until the mid-1950s that they were discovered by Western science. And at the time,

there was already quite a bit of buzz around psychedelics, particularly LSD, which was a topic

of interest in psychiatry and neurosciences.

However, as that research progressed, there was also a parallel track of countercultural use,

recreational use to these psychedelics, outside of laboratory settings, of course.

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