This is a really interesting discussion piece. It talks about several studies in which psilocybin (apparently an active ingredient of shrooms) was given to participants with terminal diseases in order to ease their anxiety related to dying. 

While I wouldn’t see a problem with it, there are certainly major ethical issues to giving illegal substances to patients with terminal or chronic diseases. However, from what I know about psilocybin (and it’s not much) it’s that it does’t not have a potential for addiction/abuse and it has a relatively high LD50 (which I think was somewhere around 280mg/kg when given orally but I’m recalling this form a textbook from last semester so i could be wrong). 

While the studies did show that anxiety of the participants were reduced, there is not a lot of external validity to the studies since they are in such tightly controlled environments, making it necessary for them to be replicated several times to find a causal relationship. 

It would be interesting to see a matched pair subject design, but that would present ethical problems as well.

Anyway, interesting article and all of y’all should read it