It’s mid-August, and an eerie electronic whine fills the auditorium at Charlotte’s Visual and Performing Arts Center. A dancer dressed in white walks across the stage, stretches and lies down. She’s about to perform a dreamlike dance, organized by local artist Sweat Transfer.
It's Cohobafest, an event that’s part educational summit, part festival, and all about psychedelics.
Laura Camilo Apgar co-founded the Charlotte-based nonprofit Cohoba. In September, the organization will start offering ketamine-assisted therapy.
“The thought was, ‘Let's just see who's out there, who's supportive, or what kind of pushback we get if we try to have a more public-facing psychedelic event,’” Camilo Apgar said.
Cohobafest gathered social workers, artists, policy wonks and veterans to discuss the use of psychedelics in medicine.
“It's not underground, right? Like it's not at a rave, it's not at a festival. It's a county building,” she said.
This group of drugs alters how you perceive the world around you. In some cases, that can help patients overcome persistent mental health problems. Clinical trials have focused on treating PTSD, depression and anxiety, with promising results.
Reversing decades of stigma
Gina Giorgio, founder of Carolinas for Care, lobbies to expand psychedelic treatment access and funding in North Carolina.
“Psychedelic-assisted therapy is the practice of using a psychedelic medicine like psilocybin, MDMA, or Ibogaine in a controlled setting along with a licensed facilitator or therapist,” Giorgio said.
These compounds have also gained political momentum. President Trump issued an executive order in April to accelerate research and expedite drug approvals. While Ketamine is already approved for therapeutic use, MDMA, psilocybin and others are still in the same legal bucket as heroin — drugs with no medical use. But Trump said these drugs could, quote, “save lives and reverse the crisis of serious mental illness in America.”
Giorgio worked with North Carolina lawmakers to introduce the HEAL Act earlier this year, which would have created a psychedelic medicine task force and research grant fund. Although the bill stalled in committee, places like the Pearl Institute in Waynesville are still fundraising to continue their own research.
‘The nightmare went away’
“In 2023 and 2024, we were given permission by the FDA to treat four patients who had severe treatment-resistant PTSD,” said Raymond Turpin, the Institute’s clinical director.
The treatment lasted five months. The patients received three doses of MDMA along with talk therapy sessions to help process their experiences with the drug.
“We had one veteran who had had the same nightmare for 35 years, where his incident was where a wall collapsed on him,” Turpin said. “He couldn't get to his buddy, and his buddy died.”
Turpin said before treatment the patient would wake up screaming in the middle of the night, hands pressed against the bedroom wall.
“After his first MDMA session, the dream never happened again. The nightmare went away, and he hasn't had it to this day,” he said.
The other three patients improved drastically as well. The Pearl Institute is currently fundraising to start a larger study, this time hoping to include first responders who lived through trauma during Hurricane Helene — at a price tag of $25,000 per participant.
Even as the door remains officially shut, people still take psychedelics for medical use or otherwise. Cohoba co-founder Daniel De La Cruz recognizes that not everyone who consumes psychedelics is trying to treat mental illness. High-profile cases like the death of actor Matthew Perry from illicit ketamine made the potential harm of unsupervised use clear.
“I 100% would prefer that people access these medicines with a licensed therapist through a psychiatrist in the absolute safest manner possible,” De La Cruz said.
So, he’s showing people how to test these compounds to avoid poisoning themselves. At a booth during Cohobafest, De La Cruz tears open a Fentanyl test kit and demonstrates its usage.
De La Cruz and other therapists will continue pushing for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency to approve psychedelics for medical use. For these drugs, it’s already been a long and arduous trip.
“People are self-medicating, and we just want to promote harm reduction, promote education, and let people know there is a psychedelic community here in Charlotte,” he said.
