“I was a heroin addict for 20 years,” says Todd Youngs, a recovery coach who helped lead that session, as he does a much larger group called the Seattle Psychedelic Society. "I've been clean for 10 years. Ayahuasca [an Amazonian infusion that contains the powerful hallucinogen DMT] was largely responsible for aiding that process. It delivered to me the key ingredients of willingness, honesty and open-mindedness, which are not compatible with addiction. It gave me hope that I could actually change, that I could follow through on my principles."

In the nearby Capitol Hill neighborhood, a dozen people gathered at a bagel shop for a "psychedelic meetup," informally swapping tales and tips from their own drug-assisted seeking and finding. Only one even remotely fit the old-hippie stereotype of a happy holdout from the “psychedelic revolution" of the 1960s; he found he was able to replace Adderral, a common prescription for ADHD, with regular microdoses of psilocybin, which “didn't mess up my life the way Adderral did.”

Another attendee, a former police officer and crane operator who definitely doesn't fit the stereotype, wondered if psychedelic therapy and diet will do for her degenerative myelitis what doctors who "just want to throw pills at problems" have failed to do.

These gatherings and thousands more like them are instances of the “psychedelic renaissance,” as hailed by author Ben Sessa in 2012 and popularized by Michael Pollan’s hugely influential 2018 book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, the movement gained more steam in June when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and National Institutes of Health gave cautious encouragement to using psychedelics in research, even though they fall under the most severe federal prohibition. Then, in September, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine announced the creation of a new center dedicated to researching psychedelics.

Meanwhile, in an elegant bungalow in northeast Seattle, a small circle of activists and "psychonauts" — among them a medical doctor, Youngs and another recovery coach and a veteran journalist who now devotes himself full-time to the psychedelic healing cause — gathered under the rubric Decriminalize Nature Seattle to hash out a political strategy.

Should they try to persuade the Seattle City Council to decriminalize magic mushrooms and their active ingredients, psilocybin and psilocin, as Denver voters did in May? Should they seek decriminalization of all "plant-based" psychedelics — including ayahuasca, peyote and igobaine — as the Oakland City Council did soon afterward? Or should they go for broke and try to decriminalize personal possession of all illicit drugs — for which they have to look all the way to Portugal for a precedent?

As it did years before with marijuana, Seattle is preparing to step up to the vanguard of drug-war reform. At their meeting, the Decriminalize Nature Seattle members made three decisions: They would attempt direct persuasion rather than public pressure, trying first to bring the King County Board of Health to their side, then the Seattle City Council. At the urging of former Seattle City Councilmember Nick Licata, who is advising them, they decided to wait until 2020, when the new council elected earlier this month will be seated. And, by a 4-3 vote, they decided they would seek decriminalization of the personal possession and use of all so-called recreational drugs, not just psychedelics.

That last choice remains controversial even within the group. “I preferred to just go for psychedelics,” says one member, journalist-turned-campaigner Eric Swenson, “to have a sure win rather than a probable loss through overreach.” Recovered addict Youngs opposes “laissez-faire decriminalization of all hard drugs. Trafficking groups will hide under that cover.”