Not All Laws Exist to Serve and Protect Us
Recently it was reported that a 49-year-old Victorian man had been arrested and charged over an 11kg haul of Psilocybin mushrooms. According to reports, it was likely that he had intended to sell these illicit drugs for profit, and so he was charged with drug trafficking.
Psychedelic communities have reacted to this news with disappointment and anger because we all know how beneficial these fungi are for a multitude of issues. Outside of psychedelic communities, people with more closed minds see it as due course: a law is broken and therefore you must pay, without any consideration of how or why this law even exists in the first place.
This frustrates me no end.
As a child, I was sexually abused by my then stepfather for six years. I was left severely traumatised from this and spent many years with treatment-resistant complex post-traumatic stress disorder (c-PTSD), a condition that results from re-occurring traumas, with symptoms including flashbacks, depression, dissociation and anxiety disorders. The man who did this to me, to this day walks free only twenty minutes from my home. In my early twenties and then again in my late twenties, I went to the police and had detectives work on my case, only for them to tell me I’d never see this man convicted for what he did to me, even though they told me they believed me.
‘But he broke the law!’ I would cry. They knew it, I knew it, and he knew it. He broke the law. He broke the law so badly that despite not having him put in jail for what he did, the South Australian government recognised my suffering at his hands and paid me $50,000 in victims of crime payments. Then they sent me on my way, with me signing away my chance to ever reopen the case.
Fast forward 17 years after the initial traumas and I now had a family of my own, but I was a mess; my mental pain was immense. And nothing was helping, other than the prescription pain meds I regularly acquired, the anti-psychotics and the alcohol.
I feared that one day I would die and my three children would grow up without a mother.
That’s when my partner heard about the healing benefits of magic mushrooms and LSD on a podcast, and I began my year-long research rabbit hole regarding the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics and plant medicines.
It was here that my journey to true, lasting healing began… but first I had to find a drug dealer. Because, well, my doctors weren’t going to help me get psychedelics, and mental health crisis centres would only load me up with the things I had already been loading myself up on. And my friends would only take me out for drinks.
I had no choice but to take this into my own hands. And as a mother, who already felt she was at the bottom of the swamp, this felt like an outrageous thing to do. Not only that; the dominant, stigmatising narrative about those who use illicit drugs fed my negative thoughts further. But I also couldn’t keep living the way I had been, and I was scared to do so.
When I finally acquired the psychedelics (from a guy we didn’t know that well, who eventually landed in jail), I was naturally terrified. Prior to this, I had been anti-drugs, due to the propaganda I’d been exposed to. All of the research and reading I had done prior was not soothing me; this was so against the mainstream medical/psychology path I had been following that everything about it scared me.
I was terrified because of the what if’s: What if I lose my mind? What if I die? What if it isn’t what he said it was? What if someone finds out and takes my kids away? What if I get addicted? What if it doesn’t work? What if, what if, what if…
But at the forefront of my mind was a genuine fear of death. This made me hopeful, because if I was fearing death then I wanted to live, and that was exciting but scary too, because what if this ‘drug’ caused my death after all? But if I lived, what happened if someone found out and I ended up in jail? All these what if’s and stigmas created by a mass of people who simply didn’t understand…
Do you know what happened after that first psychedelic experience, where I sat with my partner in a therapeutic setting and talked about my childhood experiences from a different frame of mind? I healed myself.
After that first experience, my flashbacks stopped; after the second, I forgave myself; after the third, I forgave the perpetrator; after the fourth, I forgave the world; and after the fifth and sixth, I thanked the universe for this entire experience.
Since then, I have been free of prescription medications and alcohol, and no longer suffer from anxiety, depression or c-PTSD.
It’s likely that the same arrested dealer’s mushrooms had previously provided relief to many people who had not been able to heal via mainstream methods of medicine and therapy. And I don't doubt that some of those people merely had some fun, but it’s no secret that many people continue to use psychedelics to maintain and manage their mental health conditions caused by a restrictive and oppressive society they have no choice but to be a part of.
Psilocybin mushrooms have been well researched and have been found to have many benefits, and while I know that this field is still new, preliminary studies only ever rule in psilocybin’s favour. To me, it seems ignorant to ruin people’s lives with jail time for possession of a fungus that grows in the ground. While I don’t disagree that many laws should be abided by, the man who abused me broke laws multiple times in horrific ways that many of you could not begin to understand, and he never stepped foot in a police station, while the man who possessed the key to my healing was arrested, and will receive a harsher punishment than the man who raped me.
This experience has taught me that not all laws exist to serve and protect us.
Human beings should be allowed to decide how they would like to treat the human condition. We should be allowed the freedom to experience our own mental states. We should be allowed to explore our own psyches, have fun and heal using anything that suits us as individuals. And we should be allowed to pick mushrooms from the forests, we should be allowed to enjoy the substances nature provides us.
Written by Antanika Muscaria
