well first it was marijuana now lawmakers are turning their attention to legalizing medicinal use of psilocybin it's better known as magic mushrooms a psychedelic drug that a growing body of research shows has therapeutic benefits in treating mental health conditions the bill got a hearing before the Senate health committee today as supporting lawmakers try to build the framework for a Statewide program but it's not getting approval without a few changes first legislators eliminated Provisions that would have decreed criminalized the drug and dropped expungements for people with past convictions related to it a bulk of the research informing the decision-making comes from a Stockton University study which looked into the effectiveness and public support for magic mushrooms psychology Professor Justin Ostrofsky led the team of researchers and joins me to share their findings Justin great to talk to you your research has really informed a lot of the work that's going on on the legislative side with this and so I want to talk about a few elements of it specifically what you found about the efficacy and I think even more importantly the safety of using psilocybin to treat these mental health issues yeah so based on a series of multiple randomized clinical studies looking at how professionally supervised use of psilocybin can help treat symptoms of clinical depression and anxiety what we found was one or two doses of psilocybin under professional supervision um has impressive longlasting and immediate effects um a lot of these clinical trials have shown that you know just these one or two sessions of taking psilocybin can reduce depression and anxiety for up to six months if not even years later uh as one clinical study showed and Justin is that in tandem with someone who's taking a depression or anxiety uh medication or on its own it has that type of lasting effect um so in many of the clinical trials they actually had people taper off their um anti-depressants if they were taking them um uh before the psilocybin session so they weren't under the influence of both simultaneously there was another clinical trial that showed that it doesn't really matter whether you're taking more traditional anti-depressants along with the psilocybin or just the psilocybin alone that the effects are pretty comparable in both situations why did you decide to look into this um obviously it's being talked about in the legislature for the past couple of years but why dive into the research um mostly because um you know New Jersey uh introduced this bill to the Senate um and one of the big motivations was that we identified that no one had looked into whether or no one had looked into the degree of public support for uh this type of legalization of medicinal uses of psilocybin so the real novel contribution of our study was being the first uh public poll of New Jersey residents to see if they actually support this type of legalization and do they where do they stand yes so what we found overall was that 55% of our sample uh expressed support report for using psilocybin under professional supervision to treat mental health issues whereas 20% opposed and 24% were uncertain um we also found that this varied depending on how aware the person was of the medicinal use of psilocybin so for people that reported being very aware of the use of psychedelic drugs for treating mental health purposes 75% said that they would uh support such legalization whereas those that said that they weren't aware of the use of psychedelics for um mental health treatment only 41% said that they were in support of that legalization so it seems like uh education on this issue is a key predictor of how much people would support it so um which is certainly the path we saw uh for medicinal marijuana once more uh research came out Justin Ostrofsky is the professor professor of a professor of psychology at Stockton University who's led research into psilocybin thank you so much for sharing thank you support for the medical report is provided by Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey an independent lensee of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association [Music]