A new podcast from Colorado Public Radio shares the story of a patient undergoing treatment using psychedelics.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
For the first time in decades, research into psychedelic drugs is having a moment. The federal government has started funding medical trials, spending tens of millions of dollars to test whether substances have therapeutic value. One of the biggest experiments is happening in Colorado. A new podcast from Colorado Public Radio shares the story of a patient undergoing treatment. Here’s reporter Andrew Kenney.
ANDREW KENNEY, BYLINE: I’ve never been in a house that tells me as much about someone as Kate Showalter’s place in Denver.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KATE SHOWALTER: I just don’t – I don’t see how I could live in a place that didn’t – that wasn’t funky.
KENNEY: Her paintings hang on the walls.
SHOWALETER: You know, I haven’t touched a lot of these in many years. But there’s some that I will go back to and finally finish.
KENNEY: There are collections of gemstones, her husband’s musical instruments and so many plants. They’ve taken over a sunny room at the front of the house.
How many plants do you think are in this room?
SHOWALETER: I don’t know.
KENNEY: If you just had to guess.
SHOWALETER: I definitely – over a hundred.
KENNEY: But lately, Kate has struggled to remember the names of those leafy friends. That’s a side effect of her intensive chemotherapy.
SHOWALETER: That’s the most difficult with chemo brain is that i can picture it in my mind, and I can’t bring them up at the moment, but I know how to take care of them all.
KENNEY: Even worse is the anxiety Kate feels. Her doctors told her a couple years ago that her cancer could be fatal. Kate’s been struggling with panic attacks.
SHOWALETER: Your adrenaline is pumping, and you feel like – you do feel like you’re having a heart attack. And you just – it’s just – your hands are sweaty and just – you’re having a hard time. You can’t catch your breath.
KENNEY: This feeling is so prevalent among cancer patients and so intense that it has a name, existential distress. And for Kate, it really centered on one thing, her daughter, Runi.
SHOWALETER: My biggest fear was, was she going to remember me?
KENNEY: Kate had lost her own mother to cancer when she was just a teenager.
SHOWALETER: I don’t want to die. But my main concern is Runi. You know, I don’t want her to go through what I went without mom.
KENNEY: Runi was a toddler when Kate got sick. Now at 5, she’s intuitive and curious.
RUNI: I have a sister, too. It’s a fish. Do you want to come and see? She’s a beta. She’s blue, pink and purple. This is one of my special stuffies.
KENNEY: Kate wants to be present with her family, not agonizing over whether she’ll survive.
SHOWALETER: Yeah. You know, it has been debilitating, this anxiety. It’s been a constant companion. Before cancer, I had this endless well of patience for my daughter. And when cancer came, I lost that. And – yeah. So I wanted to see if there was something I could do to kind of have that go away.
KENNEY: That’s why she jumped at the chance to enroll in a major new study with psilocybin at the University of Colorado. She’s one of up to 200 cancer patients being treated with a combination of talk therapy, placebo drugs and large doses of psilocybin. A few smaller studies have found significant improvements in morale and mental health for up to 80% of patients. Kate’s study is the largest one yet, and the scale of it could prove more conclusively if the drug has real medical value. One of the researchers in Colorado has been waiting for this opportunity for 50 years. His name is Jim Grigsby.
JIM GRIGSBY: It’s been there all along, abd a lot of people knew it but couldn’t couldn’t do the work.
KENNEY: Back in the ’70s, he’d planned to go to grad school to join early experiments with psychedelics for medical purposes. But the war on drugs and tighter research standards put an end to that first wave of research. He has since built a career in neuroscience, and behind the scenes, his psychedelic interests have lived on in his personal life at a rustic mountain house in the foothills of Boulder.
GRIGSBY: This is – it’s nominally part of the town of Ward, but we like it up here, so…
KENNEY: This is where he’s continued to read about and occasionally experiment with psychedelics. Over the years, he started to think he might never get to really research these mysterious substances.
GRIGSBY: Well, it was kind of lonely. You kind of had to keep it quiet. You know, you’ll be branded as a nut or, you know, just a dangerous person. Nobody at work knew. It was a secret.
KENNEY: After that long pause, the window for psychedelics in medicine is finally reopening. Researcher Jim Grigsby is working with a well-known figure in palliative care at the University of Colorado. Stacy Fischer had zero personal interest in psychedelics until she read an article by Michael Pollan. She wondered, could it help ease the end of life?
STACY FISCHER: I would say my hope is the psychedelics were the first promise of something that could really shift that feeling of demoralization, hopelessness and despair.
KENNEY: Research participant Kate Showalter got to try this drug that’s been forbidden for so long. The psilocybin she took wasn’t from mushrooms in a baggie. It was a little white pill with a therapist by her side.
SHOWALETER: We were just chatting, and within 15 minutes, I was like, whoa (laughter). I think I could feel it in my fingers.
KENNEY: She put on dark eye shades.
SHOWALETER: And then all of a sudden, all these rainbow, beautiful colors started to seep in. Like, it was like the colors would come from, like, in between my eyes. Or they would rush up from below or come from above and come through me. And then they turned into, like, geometric patterns and, like, fluid, just chaotic everywhere, but, like, beauty in the chaos and just, like, geometric fluid going into wormholes. And it was very interesting.
KENNEY: Amid that kaleidoscope of light, she could sense a dullness on the left side of her face where the cancer had started.
SHOWALETER: So I would – with my breath, I could send the color, the rainbow, beautiful colors over to that side of my visions.
KENNEY: And in some abstract way, toward the end, she felt her mother’s energy draw near, a moment of reconciliation with her family’s earlier battle with cancer.
SHOWALETER: You know, I was with her anger and her sadness and my anger and sadness and just, you know, and just her pride in me. And then I came out of it. My brain kind of came back to my body.
KENNEY: We talked a month after that psychedelic experience, and Kate said that while she was still scared, the grip of the anxiety and fear had been broken. She had renewed energy and patience for her daughter, Runi.
SHOWALETER: Oh, there’s just so much more room for everything. Just – I feel a sense of peace, calm, tranquil.
KENNEY: That aligns with the findings of the earlier, smaller trials. But the researchers cautioned that not everyone is going to have some transcendent moment. It’s also very difficult to conduct true double blind scientific research on an experience this intense. And this is all happening under clinical supervision, which is especially important because some psychedelic trips can turn into nightmares.
The experiment will continue at sites in Colorado and at New York University for several more years, with scores more patients volunteering for this grand inquiry into death and life. Kate Showalter has done her part to help with the science and to change her own experience with cancer. On a spring afternoon, she picks Runi up from kindergarten. They walk home, and Runi opens the gate.
RUNI: This one is really. This is really hard to open. Here’s my dog, what I was talking about earlier.
KENNEY: Whatever time they have, they have it together.
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