Last summer, Gaetano, a 35-year-old financial adviser from New Jersey, traveled with his wife to the rainforest outside Sayulita, Mexico, near Puerto Vallarta, where they stayed in a well-appointed villa overlooking the Pacific Ocean. For five days they did what any couple might do on a wellness retreat. They practiced yoga with the handful of other guests and tried a sound bath, lying on the floor and feeling vibrations produced by a local healer. They watched the sunset from their balcony every evening and dined on five-star cuisine.
But twice on their trip they also consumed something else: psilocybin, the hallucinogen more commonly known as magic mushrooms. No longer just a recreational drug favored by club kids and Grateful Dead fans, psilocybin and similar psychedelics are increasingly gaining acceptance by psychiatrists and other mental-health professionals as genuine treatments for all manner of ills. Any skeptics need only consider the spate of respected academic institutions that have recently founded research centers to study their efficacy, including Johns Hopkins University, New York University and Harvard University’s Massachusetts General Hospital.
“Human beings, for thousands of year's, have intentionally changed their brain chemistry to think about things a little differently,” reasons Gaetano, who asked Robb Report not to publish his last name to protect his privacy. He was on a mission for self-improvement. Specifically, he wasn’t happy with his tendency to anger quickly. “I could be combative, and I kind of recognized myself as an angry person. I never really ran from confrontation, and in my mid-30s this started not serving me.”
In 2019 he had picked up the No. 1 New York Times best seller How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan. He couldn’t put it down and after finishing it read another half dozen books on psychedelics. “Some of them were mainstream books like Terence McKenna,” Gaetano says, referring to the late ethnobotanist who advocated the use of plant-based hallucinogens. “Others were more under the radar. I was fascinated by it.”
In May 2021 he and his wife were celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary. She had been suffering from anxiety and depression,
