By Lexi Pandell, Illustration: Marcos Chin, UCSF Magazine, Winter 2023
When Tom Solis, a renowned chef and baker, fell ill with AIDS in the 1990s, he believed he would soon die. But breakthrough drugs called protease inhibitors quickly put him back on a path to a fairly normal life. Still, he struggled for years with the challenges of managing his disease and the deaths of loved ones in his community. “I felt I always had this tight armor that I could not get out of,” he says.
Then, in 2016, a doctor suggested he look into a clinical trial at UC San Francisco that had just begun recruiting patients for a study of psychedelic therapy in long-term AIDS survivors experiencing demoralization, a kind of existential distress. Solis jumped at the chance. “I’ll be totally honest,” he says. “I wanted to get super-high.”
And that he did. The experience was also one of the most profound of his life. It was momentous for UCSF, too, because the trial marked the beginning of the University’s foray into the fast-growing field of psychedelic medicine.
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