Psychedelic education coming to Roaring Fork Valley

When Ronan Wood, a recent Aspen High School graduate, tried to get educational resources on the consumption of psilocybin mushrooms into his school, he was met with resistance. 

Now, as a graduate, he has partnered with Before You Trip to help pilot a program that gets those educational resources in the hands of the Roaring Fork Valley locals who might be interested in consuming psychedelic substances. 

Before You Trip is an educational campaign aimed at people like Wood, who in high school developed a curiosity around the science of psychedelics. 

“I first discovered the concept of it when I was investigating spiritual ideations during COVID and fell down the rabbit hole of just the notion of spiritual processes,” he said. “I spent about two or three years just researching it as a micro obsession, just learning the science of it all before considering applying it to my life as an experiential thing.”

According to Wood, many of his peers developed similar curiosities, but the available pool of information was filled with harmful advice and misinformation. In some corners of the internet, he said, individuals interested in psychedelics might be directed to take doses far above what is advised by the likes of Before You Trip. 

Now, as an ambassador to Before You Trip, he is hoping to be able to communicate to his peers in the valley about the risks and potential benefits of using these types of drugs before he goes to college in Paris to study psychology. 

The Before You Trip program is not aimed at encouraging or discouraging the consumption of these substances, but rather takes a neutral stance on the consumption of such drugs. 

“Psychedelics can be powerful tools for self-discovery and healing,” Richard Dart, MD, executive director of Denver-based Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Safety at Denver Health, said in a press release about the new program. “The potential benefits are exciting. At the same time, there are risks, and the research about adverse events and the prevalence of harms is emerging.

“Psychedelics aren’t for everyone,” Dart continued. “As policy and public acceptance evolve, public health education is key to mitigating preventable harms.”

Before You Trip primarily gets its resources out to the community through its website, which contains a sort of flow chart designed to help individuals parse out if psychedelics are right for them. If they decide that they are interested in trying mushrooms or other drugs, Before You Trip has sections that expand on commonly asked questions for several common psychedelic drugs, including mushrooms, ketamine, MDMA, DMT, and LSD. 

For Wood, who has fielded questions from his peers about the use of mushrooms, someone’s interest in using these drugs is a prompt for more questions.

“When friends actually do come to you, but the most immediate aspect of focus is just ensuring that they know what they’re actually curious about,” he said. “So I think I always respond to questions with further questions.”

Those questions, many of which are also outlined on the Before You Trip site, include discussions on why the individual wants to try these drugs, what kind of benefits they might be seeking, what kind of fears they might have of these drugs, and more. 

Before You Trip and Wood are taking a harm reduction approach to these drugs, acknowledging that people are interested in them and seeking to arm those people with information that will help them decide whether to use these drugs, and if they do, how to do it safely.

“I’m like a bridge for the whole thing,” he said. “I can help guide these conversations strictly around harm reduction and making sure that these younger kids with questions are not being answered in ways that make them go take a high dose of powerful substances willy-nilly.”

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