About halfway through 5280 magazine's June 2025 feature story on psilocybin therapy — and how doctors and entrepreneurs in Colorado are experimenting with magic mushrooms for cancer patients and people suffering from trauma — journalist Robert Sanchez makes his own personal revelation:
As I reported this story, I also had a big question for myself. Namely, how could I stop being an asshole?
The past year had easily been the worst of my life. In the spring, my wife was laid off. In the summer, my closest childhood friend died by suicide, and I was sucked into his family’s blast zone for months. In the fall, my editor — and a friend of 17 years — was laid off. In the winter, 5280, the magazine to which I’d tethered my professional identity, was sold. In almost every way, my life’s scaffolding had collapsed. I found myself seething — resentful not just about the chaos, but also about how each unrelenting challenge left me feeling more vulnerable and powerless.
Sanchez, a senior staff writer who's been with the Denver-based magazine for 18 years, decided to try microdosing psilocybin himself while reporting his story, which focuses heavily on Teresa Anne Volgenau, a participant in a clinical study on the use of psilocybin to treat pain and anxiety in cancer patients. As Sanchez told me:
I’m known around my magazine for abstaining from alcohol and drugs. Early in my reporting, my editor, Spencer Campbell, made a joke about me doing a macro psilocybin dose. He made it clear that he was joking, and I had no interest in using psilocybin as part of the story. But as I spent a month or so reporting, I was meeting all these doctors and researchers and in-home healers who talked so highly about the drug that I figured I could baby-step my way into this with microdosing.
The decision to include yourself in a story is one that many journalists don't take lightly. But in sharing his own personal experience, Sanchez said he was able to build a deeper connection with both his subjects and with readers. "At the very least, I could report and write about my experience, which I knew would be interesting to readers, regardless of how psilocybin worked (or didn’t work) in my life," he said. "As a journalist, I want to inform readers and demystify subjects for them. Using psilocybin as part of the story seemed like a good spot to do that."
Sanchez talked with Storyboard about how the piece came together, and how he thinks about first-person storytelling combined with reporting. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Have you written about yourself in your stories before, and does it come naturally for you?
I mean, I'm pretty comfortable. This is how I feel: I'm delving into intimate details of people's lives every single day. I'm asking what most people would consider inappropriate [questions] if I weren't a journalist. And I always feel like journalism should be more of a two-way street. I feel that especially today, the way there's just so much distrust about media. The more open we can be as journalists with our readers, [the better].
It can be something as easy as “I'm writing a story about X, Y, Z, but as part of this project, I interviewed 25 people,” just to kind of give the reader a little bit of a glance into the kind of work that went into it.
I want this two-way street between myself and my readers — but then also myself and the characters in my stories. So when I sit down with somebody and they're like, “Psilocybin helped me in this way,” I can honestly tell somebody, “I'm microdosing and I'm feeling this way. How are you feeling?” I want my sources to understand how deeply I care about the stories and how seriously I'm taking them. And I think this was one way for me to do that in this story.
You and I are close in age. Over the years, I've come to question things that I learned in journalism school about not putting yourself into the story — why we do that, or why we don't.
A hundred percent. I think readers want to know who's delivering their information. “Who is that person?” … I'm not saying to do this all the time, obviously, but if we can humanize ourselves in some ways, I think that just completely destroys a barrier between the reader and the journalist, and I think that creates more trust.
Why did you decide to microdose versus macrodose?
That's a good question. For me, I talked to enough people — when I say enough, I mean dozens of people — who had had positive experiences, but said that the macrodosing changed them in sometimes significant ways. In great ways, but in sometimes very significant ways.
For me, I wasn't looking for a mental overhaul. I was looking for, like, a tweak. I really like who I am. I like how I view the world. I didn't want to change. I love my family, and I love journalism.
In the story you write that some experts were skeptical about the efficacy of microdosing.
Yeah, they were. And that's fine. I had a conversation with one scientist who studies placebos, and he's big into psilocybin now — at least studying it and understanding it.
I had told him what I'm experiencing, and he's just looking at me like I'm a fool. I said, “OK, I don't need you to tell me if this is a placebo effect, because if it is, I don't care.” And what he told me was “Keep doing it. Placebo effects are amazing.”
But then I talked to a psychiatrist who felt microdosing was kind of another tool in the toolbox who said, “You are speaking to me the way that somebody who macrodosed would speak to me about certain changes in the way that you're perceiving things,” and was very encouraged.
We get several thousand words into the piece before you tell your own story. How did you decide to structure it the way you did?
I fully reported this story as I was doing the microdosing. But the way I put together the story, I just felt like Teresa, that primary character who is living with Stage 3 cancer and had these existential issues, was so compelling and real — I wanted the focus to be on the science and a [person] who's doing this.
When you look at the way I put together the story, you'll see I use "I" somewhere fairly early in the story — and the reason I put that in was because I knew I was going to introduce myself later, and so I wanted to put in little markers … to ease the reader into the idea without them knowing it that I was going to appear as a character within my own story.
You also teach journalism at the University of Denver. What do you tell your students about telling personal stories or using first person in their own work?
I see so many young journalists who want to write just first person. [They're] very capable writers who are so deathly afraid to do real reporting that they focus entirely on first person. … They're nervous. For my students, I'm like, “First person is off limits.” Because you need to know how to report. You need to know how to write about someone else's life, you need to know how to ask questions. …
I'm Catholic. Every time I interview a new person, I say a prayer. I try to get across to them that I'm scared out of my mind before I interview strangers. It takes all the courage in the world for me to go up to a stranger's door and knock on the door, right?
It's always easier to email. So I try to have them do those kind of one-on-one, actual face-to-face interactions. Once I tell them, “I'm kind of scared out of my mind,” that breaks down so many barriers with my students. They're like, “Oh, Robert's scared. So it's OK if I'm scared.”
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Mark Armstrong is editor of Nieman Storyboard.
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