Psychedelics helped him deal with terminal illness anxiety, but getting them was a long, strange trip

Pete Pearson had three reasons for trying psilocybin, or “magic mushrooms,” for the first time at age 75. 

“I hope it will keep me from losing my mind,” he told CBC’s White Coat, Black Art. “I hope it will keep me from being a complete jerk to everybody, and being so hard on Susie” — his wife.

Pete had been diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a progressive lung disease that makes it difficult to breathe. The average survival prognosis is three to five years and he’d already passed that. Now, the physical limitations were triggering a toxic stew of anxiety, frustration and depression known as “end-of-life distress.” 

“I just feel so useless,” he told CBC’s Dr. Brian Goldman when they first spoke in October 2024.

So, on Jan. 3, 2026, at about 11 a.m., Pete drank a tea containing five grams of natural psilocybin. He stretched out on the hide-a-bed in the front room of his house in Mooretown, Ont., facing the St. Clair River. 

Eight hours later, he emerged from his psychedelic trip with a new lease on the time he has left. “I cannot believe how much my outlook on life has changed.”

And the anxiety? “It’s gone.” 

But that “complete turnaround,” as Pete describes it, happened only after a futile attempt to access psilocybin legally through Health Canada — a process that lasted the better part of a year and caused Pete’s already debilitating anxiety to go “through the roof.” In the end, he got psilocybin illegally for about $40. 

A painful path to psychedelics

By summer 2024, Pete had been living with IPF for going on six years. The more he had to fight for every breath, the less he could do things that gave his life meaning — like spending time with his kids and grandkids. 

Blake Pearson, himself a family doctor, says while his dad’s shortness of breath itself is “quite distressing,” when layered with his anxiety, “it really was getting out of control.” 

Pete had read about psilocybin and thought it might help. 

Throughout that summer, he and Blake worked with his family doctor to apply for legal access to psilocybin through Health Canada’s Special Access Program (SAP), which grants health-care providers access to drugs that aren’t otherwise approved in the country when conventional treatments have failed or aren’t suitable. 

They weren’t prepared for how onerous the application process would be, but they thought he’d be approved after the SAP application was filed in October 2024.

He even began sessions with a psychotherapist trained in “psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy,” in which the psychedelic trip is contextualized before and after to give the experience more impact. 

Pete hoped his “trip” would happen with Health Canada approval in early 2025.

Waiting in vain

Instead, after multiple back-and-forths with the agency, Pete and his doctor were sent a 14-page letter of denial in July 2025. 

Pete shared the letter with CBC. Health Canada’s main reasons for its decision were that “the request does not meet SAP’s criteria for emergency treatment,” and that “several marketed conventional and other therapeutic alternatives remain available.” 

But Pete had already tried at least three different medications for depression and anxiety, as well as psychotherapy and meditation — all of which were documented in the SAP application. 

“My interpretation of the 14 pages is essentially, ‘You’re not sick enough,’ ” said Blake. “To me, that’s absurd, because when is it the right time to process your own death? Is it six months before you die? Four months?” 

According to data from Health Canada, 525 requests for psilocybin were made through the Special Access Program from Jan. 1, 2022 to Feb. 25, 2026. Of those, 338 (64 per cent) were authorized. The majority of authorized requests were for depression, and 28 per cent were specifically for end-of-life distress.

In a statement to CBC, Health Canada says it has “great compassion and understanding for individuals diagnosed with end-of-life anxiety and depression.”

MAiD approved in 3 weeks

Pete says the nine-month wait “just made me a wreck.” 

“I was getting worse and worse, panic attacks and everything else, because of these dummies at Health Canada.”

I was getting worse and worse, panic attacks and everything else, because of these dummies at Health Canada.– Pete Pearson

Pete’s worsening physical symptoms and mental distress prompted him to apply for MAiD in early fall 2025 after he says his doctors told him dying from IPF is “the worst way you can go — just gasping for air.” 

That application was approved in three weeks. MAiD and Health Canada’s SAP are governed under different legal and clinical criteria. 

Still, when he found out, Pete says he couldn’t believe that he spent a year fighting the government to try psilocybin “and then they say ‘We can kill you faster.’ ” 

Psychedelics ‘not ready for prime time,’ psychiatrist says

Dr. Joshua Rosenblat, a psychiatrist at University Health Network in Toronto, applied for SAP access to psilocybin for his patients so many times that Health Canada recommended he launch a clinical trial. So he did. 

The results, published in 2024, showed psilocybin had significant antidepressant effects when combined with psychotherapy. Now, he has seven separate clinical trials underway for psilocybin and depression — all federally funded. 

Rosenblat led Canada’s first national consensus statement on psychedelics in 2022, which he says made “very clear” that “they’re not ready for prime time yet.”

Though millions in funding for trials like his may be moving psilocybin in that direction, Rosenblat says it shouldn’t be used to treat people for depression or end-of-life distress “until we have more evidence.” 

While he acknowledges that psilocybin is readily available, he doesn’t recommend patients use it on their own “because of its unpredictable nature.”

In his clinical trials, Rosenblat says side effects occur close to 100 per cent of the time, mostly during the actual psychedelic treatment or “trip.” 

Physical symptoms include changes in body temperature, nausea, shortness of breath and heightened blood pressure, while psychological side effects include heightened anxiety, panic, fear and even suicidality. 

That’s also why Rosenblat says it’s essential that a mental health professional be present to help. 

Pete’s eventful trip 

The morning of Jan. 3, Pete’s psychotherapist and an additional sitter arrived at his home for his treatment where he prepared and drank a tea made from the mushrooms he’d procured. 

After, the therapist and sitter helped him to the bathroom because “the floor was moving,” as Pete recalls. They also recorded the whole trip and made a transcript he could read later. 

Pete’s eight-hour trip was a powerful recap of his life. He visited with his whole family, including his late parents and favourite grandmother, as well as childhood neighbours and friends. But most meaningfully, he also saw his late son Andrew, who died as a baby. 

Throughout the trip, Pete also repeated the phrase “let it go.” 

“That means let go of all my ugliness, my being ticked off at the world and, you know, ‘Poor Pete, useless son of a gun, I can’t do anything,’ ” he explained. “I was trying to get all that evil stuff out of me.” 

Pete’s wife, Susan, was “blown away” at how effective it was. “He has had no signs of any kind of depression since.”

Blake wishes his dad’s experience could’ve happened sooner, but knowing that it helped him relax and brought him peace “was just the best gift ever.”

Enjoying the little things

Pete had a follow-up session with his psychotherapist several weeks after his treatment, where they went over what happened. Neither thinks another psilocybin treatment is necessary. 

These days, Pete says he’s enjoying what he can do, rather than cursing what he can’t. 

“I just can’t believe how good I feel for being a sick person that’s supposed to be dying.”

Now that his end-of-life distress has been resolved, Pete still intends to use MAiD when his difficulty breathing gets to be too much to bear. 

But for now, he says that thanks to the psilocybin, “I’m back in the groove, so I’m hoping I can stay there for as long as I can.”