Hunt for Psychedelic Mushrooms Faces DEA Hurdle to Right to Try

Erinn Baldeschwiler is facing death and trying to focus on the things she can control. She wants that list to include the care she receives.

Listen to the narrated article, read by Alex Ruoff.

Baldeschwiler is looking into new treatments for the metastatic breast cancer she’s been battling, the cancer doctors have said will take her life. For the past year she’s been pushing the Drug Enforcement Administration to decide if she can get access to psilocybin, the hallucinogen found in psychedelic mushrooms, to help ease her depression and anxiety.

“I can’t control the cancer in my body,” Baldeschwiler, 50, said, but “there are things I can control. To be able to make decisions about my treatment and my care is just incredibly important.”

Baldeschwiler is one of two terminally ill patients seeking access to psilocybin under Right to Try, a federal law and an array of state laws meant to grant people facing death access to experimental drugs outside of a clinical trial.

Her case is being closely watched by supporters of Right to Try and the research community because it has long-reaching implications for end-of-life care and the role of the DEA. The case also showcases the difficulties people face in managing care in their final years, when some seek as normal a life as possible.

A container of Psilocybe mushrooms, right, alongside the final product in pill form at the Numinus Bioscience lab in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, in September 2021.

Photographer: James MacDonald/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Baldeschwiler and her allies have gathered support from both left-leaning and libertarian groups, as well as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle—all pushing to give people more control over their care at the end of their lives.

“There’s a fundamental question being asked here about DEA’s authority and Right to Try,” said Jayashree Mitra, a former neuropharmaceutical researcher at Yale University who now works as an attorney in the legal cannabis and psychedelics field. “Does Right to Try apply to anything the patient needs without judgment, or is there some requirement that the product you’re seeking is going to alleviate your condition?”

Can of Worms

When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, Baldeschwiler, of North Bend, Wash., said she wasn’t interested in chemotherapy. A doctor told her, statistically, with stage four breast cancer she would likely die in the next few years. She didn’t want to spend those years suffering, she said.

Baldeschwiler said she began immunotherapy, meant to use the body’s own immune system to fight the disease. The cancer shrank, until it didn’t. She started looking for new options and eventually went to the Seattle-based Advanced Integrative Medical Science Institute PLLC, which advertises a combination of conventional and nontraditional therapies for patients with chronic and serious illnesses.

There, Sunil Aggarwal, a palliative care doctor, suggested psilocybin to treat her anxiety…