Dr. Blake Pearson responds to a recent letter, clarifying that his father sought psilocybin for end-of-life distress, not life extension.
I read Allan McKeown’s letter responding to the Journal’s article about my father with care. I appreciate the respectful tone and his empathy for people facing terminal illness.
However, I must strongly disagree with his conclusion that denying my father access to psilocybin-assisted therapy does not represent a systemic failure.
My father, Pete Pearson, read both the original article and Mr. McKeown’s letter. To be candid, it upset him. Not out of anger — but out of sadness. Seeing his name used to argue that the denial of care he experienced was appropriate felt dismissive of the very real suffering he is living with.
To clarify an important point: we were never seeking psilocybin to prolong my father’s life. That claim misrepresents the situation and was not suggested in the original article.
My father is dying. He knows this. What he was asking for was help with end-of-life distress — the fear, anxiety, and existential suffering that often accompany terminal illness.
Psilocybin-assisted therapy is being studied precisely for this purpose. It is not experimental speculation. It has been granted Special Access Program and Section 56 exemptions in other end-of-life cases in Canada, and it is being evaluated in rigorous clinical trials internationally.
The risks are real, but they are well understood and manageable when therapy is provided with proper screening, preparation, and trained clinical support.
In my father’s case, we submitted a physician-led application under Health Canada’s own Special Access Program — the very mechanism intended to allow access when conventional options have failed. That application sat unanswered for months and was ultimately denied nearly a year later.
During that same period, his MAID application was reviewed and approved in a matter of weeks. That contrast matters.
This is not an argument against MAID. I support compassionate access to it. But a system that can efficiently facilitate death while failing to meaningfully address psychological suffering at the end of life is not balanced — it is incomplete.
My father was not asking for something reckless. He was asking for support to live his remaining time with less fear and more peace. Denying that request after nearly a year, without meaningful engagement, is not simply a matter of safety or evidence. It reflects a system that has not yet learned how to care for the whole person at the end of life.
If telling this story helps move us closer to a more humane, evidence-informed approach for others, then my father’s willingness to speak publicly will have mattered.
Blake Pearson MD
