New Hampshire GOP Lawmaker Asks Colleagues To Legalize Psilocybin Because It Can Treat Headache Disorder She Suffers From

A GOP New Hampshire lawmaker shared a candid personal story about why she supports a bill to legalize psilocybin at House committee hearing last week, disclosing her lifelong struggle with intractable pain from cluster headaches that the psychedelic is known to treat.

At a meeting of the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety on Wednesday, Rep. Kathleen Paquette (R) spoke in favor of the proposal from Rep. Kevin Verville (R), which would remove criminal penalties for possession, buying, transporting or using psilocybin for adults 21 and older.

Paquette said her support for the legislation is informed by her own intimate understanding of a medical condition she suffers from that could be effectively treated by the psychedelic.

“I’m going to share something with all of you that’s deeply personal to me. It’s a side of me I don’t share too often, and usually only with those that I’m closest to,” the lawmaker said. “I want to share with you the most intimate part of my life: My pain.”

“I suffer from a chronic, excruciating pain condition called trigeminal cephalalgia, also known as cluster headache. They’re called cluster headaches because they tend to cycle and come in clusters,” she said. “When I’m in cycle, I have unbearable attacks of burning, piercing, stabbing pain behind my eye, the pain is so violently severe that I cry, I rock, I pace and I usually end up rolling around on the floor, clutching my head and sobbing. My nose runs, my eye swells and it’s not unusual for me to be vomiting.”

Psilocybin is “believed to help people like me by potentially interrupting and preventing headache cycles,” she continued. “It is thought to reduce inflammation in the brain, alter pain perception and reset the neural pathways that interrupts these painful cycles.”

“Very occasional use of small, non-hallucinogenic, microdoses—and at times, even a single dose—has been known to increase remission periods or even stop a cycle completely in its tracks,” Paquette said. “As little as a single dose has the power to allow someone relief when there hasn’t been any for years or even decades. It has the power to give someone back their ability to be present for their family, to give someone back their dignity and, most of all, making psilocybin available to someone like me has the power to save lives.”

“I’m asking for you to consider passing HB 528—at least make an effort to try some form of making it work—because people like me shouldn’t have to make a choice between living our lives and breaking the law,” she said.

Prior to Paquette’s testimony, Verville, the lead bill sponsor, defended the psychedelics reform proposal, emphasizing that legalizing psilocybin for adults represents a drug policy “compromise” that he hopes his colleagues will welcome.

Another committee member asked why he chose to focus the bill only on psilocybin legalization, rather than put forward legislation to more broadly legalize the therapeutic use of multiple psychedelics as he’s proposed in the past.

Verville said that he’s “smart enough to know” that pushing for broader reform “is a big bite, and I get a lot of feedback from people that were sympathetic but didn’t vote in favor, and and so what I’ve what I’ve done this year is I’ve rolled this back to only be psilocybin.”

“I dream of a day when we have medical psychedelics available. I dream of that day,” he said. “There are demonstrated medical benefits with depression, post-traumatic stress syndrome—interestingly enough, addiction. So psychedelics can be used to cure addiction to a very high rate.”

This bill, however, is “a discussion” and the beginning of a “debate that we really need to start having in an honest, forthright manner.”

Verville also said that he expects the psilocybin bill to die in the first part of the two-year session, which is what he strategically took into account so that he could get another bite at the apple—or cake or pie, as he adjusted the metaphor—with follow-up legislation next year.

“If there’s a cake to be had, and you have two chances to eat the cake, it’s always worth it,” he said. “Like a pie eating contest, right? If I could eat the pie in one bite, that’s preferable to having to nibble away at this. This is the big bite, right?”

“I don’t know that I will be bringing a therapeutic bill forward next year, but I am quite certain that there are individuals that will so you will see that, and I think that’s a worthy bill,” he said, referencing a therapeutic psychedelics proposal. “What I would beg this committee is to not give this an [inexpedient to legislate] recommendation, knowing fairly certainly that there’ll be a therapeutic bill.”

“I will make the commitment that if this bill passes by the grace of god, and all of a sudden we have a magic mushroom problem in this state, I will be the first one to run back to this committee and bring common sense legislation to tighten it up—to bring it back under control,” he added. “But I already know that psychedelics are readily available in all 50 states at very competitive prices on the black market. So the prohibition is doing nothing.”

The latest hearing comes months after another New Hampshire House committee declined to move forward with a bill from Verville that would have established a state-regulated therapeutic psychedelic program modeled after the current medical marijuana system.

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Image courtesy of Kristie Gianopulos.