They'd come from all over North America, from different backgrounds and different sports, but they had a few things in common: They were vulnerable, and they felt that prescription medications had failed them. The participants were nervous, but also hopeful.Īlong with Lee, there was a professional football player considering retirement and a former hockey star who had multiple concussions. Two psychedelic mushroom ceremonies and two therapy sessions awaited them at the retreat run by a Canadian company called Wake Network. They each had come to the Good Hope Estate, a sugar plantation turned exclusive resort, hoping to rid themselves of depression, anxiety, and chronic pain they had experienced for years.
Lee was part of a small group - many of them retired athletes - who'd traveled to Jamaica in March 2022 for a retreat costing as much as $5,500. Psychedelic mushrooms, he hoped, could change his life. Now, he had come to a verdant jungle at the end of a dirt road halfway up a mountain. "When you're in pain and you're stuck in a corner, you'll do anything to get out of it," Lee said. The impulse faded, but the pain remained. He was willing to do anything to escape the hell he felt trapped in. In his lowest moment, on a night when he was in the depths of an addiction to painkillers, he said, he contemplated driving his car into the median of a Chicago freeway at 140 mph.
At one point, Lee was taking eight prescription medications, all of them trying to help him cope.
Some days, it was debilitating headaches.
WAKEFIELD, Jamaica - The boxer felt broken.
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