Scientists who have studied psilocybin for alcohol addiction get excited about this medicine. Magic mushrooms that contain psilocybin as a substance that produces a psychedelic trip regularly produce shockingly positive results in patients with alcohol addiction for reasons that are, as yet, poorly understood. Nonetheless, psilocybin combined with an integrative psychotherapy session after the trip, is one of the most important cures for alcohol addiction that currently exists.
Psilocybin for Alcohol Addiction
Of all of the sacred medicines, psilocybin magic mushrooms are some of the easiest to self-administer. But that being said, with psilocybin, set and setting is the most important consideration. If you take magic mushrooms in a party-like environment or even with a friend in a social context, the mushrooms will enhance your ability to feel what the people around you are feeling. They will not, however, give you insight into how you feel yourself. So if you decide to work with psilocybin for alcohol addiction, just be aware that ceremony matters and the setting within which you take the magic mushrooms can make or break your experience.
We encourage people to work on their own to overcome the problems that afflict them whenever possible, but often people mess up with psilocybin when they take them at home by themselves or with other people. For example, one alcohol addiction client microdosed with psilocybin for a short period of time and then took a full dose of the mushrooms while listening to music. This young man used the music to avoid his own feelings and essentially accomplished nothing on his trip. Afterward, he contacted us to find out why his trip didn’t work the way he’d hoped. It was because he set himself up to avoid himself.
People who are suffering with addictions are often taking a particular substance in an effort to get close to the emotion and the trauma that ultimately caused the addiction. Unfortunately though, people also tend to inadvertently choose substances that cut themselves off from their own emotions. Psilocybin is a medicine that is incredibly gentle and yet also powerful at the same time for the permanent release of trauma. It works by helping people feel the feelings that have gotten trapped inside their bodies.
While psilocybin is extremely straightforward in terms of dosing (2 grams is a “threshold” dose) and administration (most people take psilocybin capsules or the dried mushrooms), it’s the set and setting that are most often awry when people work with this medicine. In the industrialized world, we’ve been heavily socialized to view mushrooms as “recreational” and they can, in fact, be used to improve social connections in recreational settings. But, if you’re trying to overcome alcohol addiction, mushrooms should be administered in a natural environment where the shrooms can easily speak to you using flowers, grass, the soil, trees, and other elements of the natural environment. Though music can be wonderful on shrooms in some contexts, if you are overloaded with trauma that’s caused you to become addicted to alcohol, psilocybin mushrooms should be allowed to speak to you without any kind of emotional interference that might gum up their message.
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Microdosing Psilocybin for Alcohol Addiction
We work with a lot of people who microdose with psilocybin while taking Mucuna pruriens at the same time to reduce cravings and regrow dopamine receptors. While psilocybin can literally speak to you as an Inner Counselor, the Mucuna pruriens heals the brain and the nervous system to make messages clearer.
Microdosing with psilocybin helps the brain produce more neural connections. If you’ve been struggling with addiction for a while, your brain has a lot of “dead-end” neural connections that make it hard for you to come up with solutions to your problems. You may spend a lot of time trying to overcome your addiction-related behaviors, but time and again, you end up at a dead-end. What psilocybin does is help the brain build more neural connections so that dead-end thoughts can tunnel to escape, providing you with new ways of solving your problems in a productive way.
Microdosing with psilocybin is calming in addition to its nervous system-healing effects and it helps you overcome your anxiety or depression by getting rid of toxic thought-connections and replacing those thought-connections with positive ones. When combined with macrodosing, psilocybin microdosing can help you make progress very quickly in overcoming addiction in a permanent way.
Macrodosing with Psilocybin for Alcohol Addiction
Many people ask us why full macrodosing trips are necessary with psilocybin if they’re already microdosing. It’s a good question, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done psilocybin trips where I began my slow descent into the Mushroom World by wondering if I’d taken a high enough dose. When a macrodose isn’t high enough, you end up in a halfway-there mentality that’s prone to doubt versus a full-trip mentality that allows the mushrooms to present new ideas to you that you can open yourself to and fully accept.
Psilocybin is a sacred medicine that can help you change your mind and open your heart in regard to negative thoughts (either conscious or unconscious) that make it hard for you to give and receive love. In other words, psilocybin helps you overcome whatever it is that makes you isolated and whatever challenges your connection to the Divine. Macrodosing with psilocybin needs to be done using the proper dose so that you are able to hear what the mushrooms are telling you without resisting them.
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Integrative Psychotherapy for Psilocybin Macrodosing
Psilocybin has been well-studied in terms of its impact on alcohol addiction. When people do full trips (macrodosing) with psilocybin followed by integrative psychotherapy, decreases in heavy drinking days are significantly and robustly reduced in comparison with a placebo or with talk therapy. As such, psilocybin-assisted therapy for alcohol addiction is highly recommended. However, in order to get the results from working with psilocybin, it’s vital that you work with this medicine with ceremonial respect and the proper set and setting.
Psilocybin is one of the most powerful of the sacred medicines for alcohol addiction even though it does not directly heal the physical issues in the pancreas, liver, or gallbladder as Ayahuasca does. Nonetheless, in those with alcohol addiction a recipe known as psilohuasca offers patients who wish to work with psilocybin to overcome their addiction, a means to do that without the famous Ayahuasca-purge.
Resources:
Bogenshutz, M. P. et a. (2022). Percentage of Heavy Drinking Days Following Psilocybin-Assisted Psychotherapy vs. Placebo in the Treatment of Adult Patients with Alcohol Use Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial. Retrieved June 24, 2025 from https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2795625
Jensen, M. E. et al. (2022). Psilocybin-assisted therapy for reducing alcohol intake in patients with alcohol use disorder: protocol for a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled 12-week clinical trial (The QUANTUM Trip Trial). Retrieved June 24, 2025 from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9577917/
Pagni, B. A. et al. (2024). Psilocybin-induced changes in neural reactivity to alcohol and emotional cues in patients with alcohol use disorder: an fMRI pilot study. Retrieved June 24, 2025 from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-52967-8