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Oprah Winfrey is highlighting the cultural “shift” around psychedelics, expressing enthusiasm about the therapeutic potential of substances like psilocybin.
In an episode of The Oprah Podcast that was released on Tuesday, Winfrey spoke with author Michael Pollan, who’s helped bring plant-based medicine into the mainstream, about the state of science and policy around psychedelics.
Winfrey credited Pollan for being “part of the shift I’ve seen,” including an increase in media coverage and personal stories about “people who have engaged with the experience of psychedelics.”
“I think something is happening in the culture,” the media mogul, who has previously peddled controversial myths about psychedelics, such as the idea that MDMA causes abscesses in the brain.
Pollan said that “what’s happened since 2018, I never would have imagined how many studies are going on, how much research is being done and how many people are seeking psychedelic therapy.”
Winfrey said that while she’s intrigued by the experiences of others who’ve taken psychedelics, she personally “would be afraid of having a psychotic break” and “losing my mind” and “not getting it back.”
But she did concede that there may be something to the effects of plant medicine on consciousness.
“I’m not conscious enough to know, but I know that there is a oneness—there’s a connection with all of nature. I just don’t know what it is,” she said, adding that, in nature, “the plants aren’t speaking to me, but I know that there is life there. I know that there is something going on that is deeper than what we can see.”
She also equated the psychedelic experience with meditation, saying “it sounds like psychedelics is a higher level of the deepest of the meditations.”
“You’re elevating, enhancing and opening your consciousness to experience life and yourself differently. That’s what I think,” Winfrey said.
However, after Pollan explained the complexities of standardizing psychedelic-assisted therapy as a policy matter, given the restrictive requirements to get federal approval to bring drugs to market, Winfrey said “that’s why I don’t think we’re here yet.”
“We’re certainly not here yet because, like everything, once people start using it, it’s just like the anti-obesity drugs,” she said. “Then people create their own pharmacies for making the anti-obesity drugs, and people are doing it on the side, and it’s not authorized and stuff. I think it’s dangerous for people to have these kind of explorations without a guide.”
While Winfrey hasn’t personally experimented with psychedelics, she has previously disclosed that she’s smoked marijuana, and in 1995 while taping an episode of the famed Oprah Winfrey Show that centered on drug recovery, she talked about smoking crack cocaine in her youth.
Last year, she also spoke with neuroscientist Roland Griffiths about the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics, commenting on the efficacy of certain entheogenic substances in the treatment of depression, for example.
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