REALITY SHIFT
Psychedelics still have limited legal use for mental health, but that could be changing.
You don’t need to travel far to realize Baltimore is an epicenter of psychedelic research. Johns Hopkins Hospital has a research center that’s been dedicated to psychedelics for the last two decades and at Sheppard Pratt, the Institute for psilocybin has been exploring uses since 2022. And beyond those institutions, there’s a local community exploring the potential mental health benefits of psychedelics’ mind-altering power.
David Jun Selleh, a psychotherapist and licensed clinical professional counselor at Inner Path Wellness in Mt. Washington, for instance, is a part of Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s task force—established in 2024 as the seventh of its kind in the U.S.—due to deliver policy recommendations for psychedelics from mushrooms and plants to state legislators by the end of July.
“Generally, all psychedelics induce neuroplasticity in the brain,” Selleh explains, “the growth of new cells—which allows for new ways of thinking and new perspectives. When you combine that with [talk] therapy, it breaks everything open to possibilities.”
He’s sitting on a couch at Inner Path, alongside University of Maryland, Baltimore alumna Lauren Going, who co-founded the city’s first psychedelic-assisted therapy center in 2022.
Here patients are given an eye mask, headphones, a mat, and a private room to sustain them on their travels, and as soon as four minutes after receiving a supervised injection of the psychedelic drug ketamine, they usually experience the peak of what’s typically a 45 minute to hour-long “journey,” says Selleh.
It’s a hallucinogenic trip often described as an out-of-body experience. Ketamine, primarily a synthetic drug used legally for decades as a general anesthetic, creates a surge of the neurotransmitter glutamate in the brain. At Inner Path, ketamine is used off-label for treatment-resistant depression, suicidality, or other mental health disorders.
With a low psycholytic dose, people can think and speak clearly while they’re under the influence. With a higher dose, after patients return to reality, a second hour of talk therapy follows, the idea being the trip can spur more lasting change.
Times and tastes have changed since the heyday of the Grateful Dead and in the roughly 50 years since most psychedelics were outlawed by President Richard Nixon in what became known as the War on Drugs. Names like “magic mushrooms,” (psilocybin), LSD, or MDMA still get a bad reputation. Ketamine is also still known as the “Special K” party drug.
But psychedelics, which some archeologists say humans may have experienced tens of thousands of years ago, delivered in a supervised clinical setting have shown great promise.
In 2019, the FDA approved a ketamine nasal spray for major depression. The Department of Defense is funding psychedelic research for veterans with PTSD and traumatic brain injury. Additional legal pathways for uses could be coming. The 19-member state task force of which Selleh is a part won’t directly change the regulatory status of any psychedelics, but their recommendations could be a catalyst.
“There is rising support,” Selleh says. “People are hearing enough to know there’s something to this.”
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