Retired Sergeant Toby Miller was at one point taking 26 psychoactive pills a day for his complex post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He’s a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, but insists he isn’t a victim.
“I don’t view it as having been damaged. I just survived something traumatic,” he told Canadian Affairs.
That experience was one of the reasons he joined the military in 2002. He wanted to protect people, including the children who were being abused by the Taliban in Afghanistan. He says he’s not the only person in the Canadian Armed Forces to have had abuse as a factor for enlisting.
“There is a correlation that you see with all these guys who’ve been traumatized in childhood, and what they want is to be a protector,” Miller said. “There was no one there to protect them when they were harmed, and so they don’t want that to happen to anybody else.”
Miller quickly proved himself as a skilled soldier, and was selected to be a signals operator in the Canadian Special Operations Regiment. He deployed to Afghanistan three times. “I was there at zero hour in 2003 when the war began, and I was on the last forward-deployed combat team in 2011.”
On that last tour in 2011, on his 41st birthday, Miller’s teammate Boby Eldridge stepped on an improvised explosive device. Eldridge lost both his legs and Miller was badly wounded. The experience haunted him constantly for the next decade.
Miller is one of thousands of veterans to suffer from PTSD. Data from Veterans Affairs Canada shows between 10 and 15 per cent of Canadian veterans have been diagnosed with the condition.
“I used to wake up three times a night screaming from nightmares. My wife has been hit in the middle of the night. There wasn’t a single wall in my home that didn’t have drywall over holes that I’d punched in it,” he said.
Miraculous recovery
By 2022, Miller decided to make a change.
He started weaning off pharmaceutical drugs, in anticipation of an Ayahuasca ceremony in Peru. Ayahuasca is a plant-based psychedelic that elicits intense visual and auditory hallucinations. Its main active ingredient, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), is the strongest psychedelic chemical known to man.
“I did five ceremonies, and I connected with many things in my past and within myself. Nobody would take ayahuasca as a party drug. It is not a party drug. It opened up old wounds for me. I delved deep into my traumas and re-lived things that I didn’t necessarily want to relive. But that was in order to heal from them, in order to open up [the wounds] and air them all out to heal.”
It has been six months since that trip and Miller says he’s experienced a miraculous recovery.
“It just feels like magic, you know, like I’ve changed. I came out feeling reprogrammed and I couldn’t find the rage and anger that had plagued my family. I no longer experience getting blown up in my sleep three times a week. It’s been transformative, and it was safe.”
For the vast majority of people, most psychedelic drugs are safe to use, says Norman Fabrown, associate professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga and principal investigator in the university’s Psychedelic Studies Research Program.
“They’re as safe as taking aspirin in terms of the chances that you’re going to have an allergic reaction or [have it] cause some kind of organ problem,” said Fabrown.
Psychedelics are illegal in Canada, classified under the same category as heroin. But Fabrown says they’re not detrimental to one’s health in the way the other highly-addictive drugs in this category can be.
One of the main health concerns with psychedelics is it can destabilize a person’s mental health, because during the high, the person becomes more open to developing new mentalities and connections.
But cases where people have had to be hospitalized are few compared to the many who go back to their normal mental state after taking mushrooms or other psychedelic drugs, says Fabrown, who published a study surveying hundreds of anonymous self-reported benefits and drawbacks to psychedelic use in 2018.
Many who do take psychedelic drugs as treatment do it to help improve their mental health once every other treatment has failed, says Fabrown. “They’re contemplating suicide, especially in PTSD and chronic treatment-resistant depression [or] anxiety disorders.”
At the height of his pharmaceutical dependance, Miller was taking 400 milligrams of the antidepressant Pristiq daily, which is more than four times the maximum recommended dose.
Now, the only pharmaceutical drug he still takes is to regulate his blood pressure. But he’s added something else to his regimen: a daily microdose of psilocybin, the psychoactive compound found in magic mushrooms. He takes 150 milligrams a day, a dosage he says is entirely “sub-perceptual.”
“One of the things that psilocybin does is it gives you a second between an instinct, and an emotion or reaction. My wife and I used to say that I would go from zero to apocalyptic. I don’t do that anymore. I go from zero to, “Oh no, that’s not worth getting pissed about. Or is that really a problem that is worth traumatizing those around me?”
Psychedelics are not a “fire and forget missile,” Miller says. They help you unwind the trauma, but there’s still lots of work to be done afterwards. He takes the psilocybin in conjunction with daily journaling, exercise and mediation.
“These four things changed me immeasurably, in ways that no modern modality of any pharmaceutical could.”
The Ayahuasca experience was expensive, costing Miller and his wife $6,000 each, including airfare to Peru. But it’s still cheaper than a lifetime of pharmaceuticals, he says.
“By the way, I saved the government $1,500 dollars a month in medication costs. These are not cheap drugs. Now I only pay for my microdosing out of pocket, which is a really inexpensive answer.”
Psychedelic therapy
The Canadian Senate’s Subcommittee on Veteran Affairs recently released a statement urging governments at all levels to “launch and fund a large-scale research program on psychedelic-assisted therapy.”
“The subcommittee heard that military- or combat-related PTSD does not often respond well to psychotherapy and slow-acting antidepressants, but that psychedelics such as psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and MDMA can be transformative,” the statement reads.
One of the things that worked about psychedelics, but that never clicked with pharmaceutical drugs for Miller is the spiritual component associated with them. “There’s a spiritual intention to this that is so important for it to actually work for you,” he said.
“One of the things that I would be suggesting to the Senate is that when doing those clinical research trials, we need to listen to the people who’ve been practicing with this medicine for decades, outside of a clinical setting. You must be spirituality involved in this.”
The spiritual context of taking psychedelics depends on whether the person helping to lead the experience or the one who takes the hallucinatory drugs are spiritual themselves, says Fabrown.
“What psychedelics do is they weaken all of these inhibitory connections to how your brain is making connections… [and] your mind is making connections that it wouldn’t normally have been permitted to make,” says Fabrown.
What’s powerful is when people who had closed off the possibility of them being a certain way, suddenly are open to a new identity. Fabrown used the example of someone who feels like they can’t be connected to others or believe in a higher power — suddenly all these things become a possibility.
“The evidence increasingly shows that psychedelic drugs — when paired with psychotherapy — can offer hope,” said Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu, deputy chair of the subcommittee, in the government statement. “Our veterans can’t afford to wait any longer for this treatment.”
Fabrown says experts are expecting psychedelic drugs to be legal in the coming years in Canada.
For the first time in a decade, Remembrance Day doesn’t fill Miller with dread and rumination.
“This year, I just don’t have that sadness and desperation. I will mourn my lost brothers and sisters on the 11th, but I don’t have the visceral pain that November has always caused me, or has for a decade now.”
Rather, on Remembrance Day, he’s going to raise a glass of Miller beer to his best friend Matt, who was killed in 2007.
“It was his beer, I’ll toast to him and have some sadness. But I also don’t think it’ll last. I think that I will move on with my day after that, because I now look at it as that’s what they would want me to do. They wouldn’t want me to suffer right?”
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