She took a stand for medical use of psilocybin mushrooms to treat PTSD and helped empower its advocacy

I am currently free to leave the state of South Dakota for the first time in 18 months. 

I’ve been out on bail for 18 months while I make my case in South Dakota for the medicinal use of psilocybin mushrooms for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD, as illustrated by the public domain U.S. Government photo above, published in wikimedia commons).

In the beginning I was facing two felony counts. The first plea bargain was jail time and supervised probation. My first attorney tried hard to convince me to take it. 

I fought like hell. 

Now, 18 month and three attorneys later, the court agreed with me and believed my set of facts. Not just the judge, but the state’s attorney and the presentence investigator also believed me. 

While a judge cannot toss out a guilty plea and send me home without at least one felony mark on my record, I was otherwise just free to go. No restitution, no probation — not even unsupervised. 

I have to pay for the lab tests and my attorney. But that’s it. Because my story was believed. I had the evidence and the court’s own psychologist’s knowledge of psilocybin all in my corner. And I used it. 

I fought like hell for the truth, to create a tiny crack, to insert a wedge that will pave the way for the medicinal legalization of psilocybin in South Dakota. It was a losing battle, everyone told me that. But I raged and clawed my way through it. 

And when everyone in that courtroom agreed this was a tough case and one they’ve never seen, a sad reality dawned on me: I'm not f’n special. So that means other people who don’t have it in them to fight anymore just took the first plea bargain and never got to tell their story. Because they either didn’t know how, or because they were told by their attorney that it didn’t matter. Just like I was told. 

That’s messed up. And that’s why I couldn’t afford to give up. How this works, how challenging laws and deeply held beliefs by the judiciary works, is that someone has to take one for the team and plant a seed in the minds of judges, district attorneys, lawyers, juries, etc, that you had a perfectly good reason to break their precious laws. Even if you lose, you have to bring it to the end.

While I had to take a conviction, I changed the minds of an entire courtroom and got perhaps the most lenient sentence there is to give. The state’s attorney even started with, “Your honor, I have a special and unique request ...”

Again, I’m not special. But my case was. Now it’s time to use that, to get the word out, and empower self-advocacy and reform in South Dakota. Now someone else has to take their case to a jury.

Also, I am eager for more people to learn about psilocybin’s efficacy on opiate addiction. It’s astonishing. And the connection is related to the same brain trauma PTSD is linked to.

That’s actually what convinced me that mushrooms could really be medicine. I was always scared to take them. After I read the research on opiate addiction, I signed myself up for C-PTSD therapy. Only I did go rogue and chose a specific mushroom never tested in clinical studies before. I did the research and chose a strain not known for strong visuals.

Because like I said, I was scared to ever try them. Now I'm advocating for their use. Eventually, even if it’s not for another decade, there will be a petition to legalize medicinal psilocybin.

Leah Bothamley lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota with her husband and their teenage son. She is a former professional snowboarder and mountaineer and a human rights activist and grassroots organizer.