You can track almost to the day when New Zealand officially changed its mind about psychedelic drugs. The headine of a 1960 wire story in the Christchurch Press hails the “dream-making drug” LSD as a “new weapon against mental illness”.
By 1966, it was local news: Press stories reported the delivery to Sunnyside (psychiatric) Hospital of shipments of both LSD and psilocybin, and how Calvary private hospital psychiatrist Dr David Livingstone wrote in the New Zealand Medical Journal that “proper use” of LSD almost always resulted in “very significant acquisition of insight and self-understanding”.
Then, in a court report published on July 21, 1967, an Auckland magistrate tells 26-year-old Mark Young that in possessing LSD he is “helping to foster a nefarious public evil”, one “prostituted by one of the most vicious rings in the history of crime”. Young’s arrest had taken place on July 11, the day after LSD was banned under the Narcotics Act.
The prohibition of LSD and mescaline (psilocybin would have to wait until the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975) did not curb social use of psychedelics, which really only took off here after they were criminalised, to the point where New Zealand by the late 1970s was thought to have the highest per-capita use of LSD of any country. But it did – here and worldwide – bring the curtain down on formal research into their therapeutic properties.
Yet in 2025, we are amid the so-called “psychedelic renaissance”, in which research into psychedelic-assisted therapy has not only restarted, but been bankrolled with billions of dollars’ worth of investment. This rekindling of interest has been reflected in New Zealand, too, which is what our two-part documentary Mind Menders is about.
“We’ve got the Lotto lady on LSD,” I quipped to friends somewhere along the line. It doesn’t hurt to have a presenter who is in the nation’s living rooms every week, but the real reason we approached Sonia Gray is that she was good at talking about brains.
Her own documentary, Kids Wired Differently, was an insightful look at neurodiversity in families, and her ADHD podcast, No Such Thing As Normal, goes further into what makes some of us different. She has also lived with mental illness – manifesting principally as near-constant anxiety – since childhood.
We did, in fact, get her on LSD. Dr Suresh Muthukumaraswamy, the genial intellectual figurehead of psychedelic research in New Zealand, helped get Sonia approved as a participant in the second phase of the LSD microdosing trials he is running at the University of Auckland School of Pharmacy exploring microdosing as therapy for depression. She came in with almost no experience of illicit drugs and certainly none of LSD.
Things didn’t go entirely smoothly. As our first episode shows, she did experience benefit – but she was still on the trial when overwork sent her into a crash, with exhaustion and disabling anxiety.
On most productions this would have been a major problem; in ours, thanks to Sonia’s willingness and ability to share her experience, it became part of the story.
Mind Menders also looks at the use of psilocybin, and the “magic” mushrooms that contain it, through the trial run by Christchurch psychologist and health researcher Professor Cameron Lacey – and, on the far side of the law, by brother and sister Zach and Michaela Cotogni, whose book, Blue Honey, collects their own and others’ experiences of self-administered therapy with mushrooms containing psilocybin.
Like LSD, those mushrooms remain Class A controlled drugs under our current law, meaning some peril for the Cotognis in even talking to us.
Native psilocybin mushrooms are also at the heart of Tū Wairua, a tikanga-based trial at Rangiwaho Marae near Gisborne, which is testing them as a potential therapy for methamphetamine addiction. Research into psychedelics’ potential for treating addiction goes back to the 1950s, but Tū Wairua’s real significance may prove to be the way in which it bucks the neo-Freudian psychology on which American advocates have founded the psychedelic renaissance. The extent to which white dudes and their bankers have sidelined thousands of years of indigenous practice with plant psychedelics is a hot issue in the field.
We also look at the work being done with ketamine – a dissociative anaesthetic rather than a classic psychedelic, but very much part of the new wave of research – as a treatment for depression by Professor Paul Glue at the University of Otago. He is no one’s idea of a shaman.
There were two trials we weren’t able to fit into our allotted time, both aimed at testing the potential of psychedelics to help ease the anxiety that plagues some people nearing the end of their lives. One explores LSD microdosing as an adjunct to meaning-centred psychotherapy and the other is based on one or two significant doses (enough for a good night at the club) of MDMA, the drug that fuels our summer festivals. We conducted a moving interview with a participant in the latter.
We came across fascinating stories we weren’t able to tell, for one reason or another. One of our directors visited a woman in London who, in her 80s, may be the last surviving patient to have been treated by Livingstone in the 1960s. She received a single large dose of LSD for depression (her father, a surgeon, intervened to prevent any further treatment) and recalled that the weeks following her experience had been bright and purposeful.
We also spent months looking for an episode of the current affairs show Compass about psychedelic therapy, which New Zealanders watched in the same week LSD was banned and Mark Young busted. For whatever reason, it has disappeared from the archives.
As Auckland University’s Dr Rachael Sumner explains in the documentary, modern brain imaging techniques have shown that the old stories about LSD and other psychedelics causing brain damage were myths.
In larger doses, they actually do the opposite, stimulating the growth of new and more complex neural connections. The common experience of a mental “reset” after psychedelics similarly has a neurological basis.
A 2023 University of Otago study ranked classic psychedelics near the bottom of the drug harm scale – between kava and vaping, with alcohol and meth at the top. Another Otago study this year highlighted the importance of intent: people taking psychedelics for self-exploration or therapeutic reasons had more positive and fewer negative experiences than those who simply wanted to get wasted.
That does not mean psychedelic drugs are without risks. How we respond to those risks is an important matter, and one we’re still learning about in both a clinical context and the wild.
Does it make sense to criminalise people for exploring their own minds? Even under our existing law, things are moving. The Ministry of Health has for the first time approved an application to administer psilocybin outside the context of a trial. To find out more about that, you’ll need to watch episode two of Mind Menders, but it would be fair to say the psychedelic future is upon us.
Mind Menders is on Sky Open, Sunday, June 8 & 15, at 8.30pm.
