LOS ANGELES.–Former Alaska Airline pilot Joseph Emerson, 44, told his story about Flight 2059 Oct. 22, 2023, flying from Everett, Washington to San Francisco, where in mid-flight in the cockpit he pulled an emergency lever to shutdown the engines, claiming he was still hallucinating from psychedelic mushrooms he took 48 hours earlier. Emerson was in a psychotic hallucination while flying his Alaska Airlines flight endangering the lives of a all 80 passengers and crew. “I did something unfathomable to me, something I have to responsibility for and I regret,” Emerson told ABC News “Good Morning America.” Emerson was released from custody in Dec. 2023 and awaits trial that could see him spend years in jail, but, at the same time, offers a mitigating circumstance of continued effects of psychedelic mushrooms, a growing practice for treating depression and post-traumatic stress.
Emerson told investigators he had taken hallucinogenic mushrooms under doctors care to help him recover from six years of grief after the death of a close friend. Whether that was true or not, a cult of medical practitioners give hallucinogenic drugs to treat intractable depressions and post-traumatic stress. Some questionable research supports the practice of using psychedelic drugs for treating schizophrenia and other mental health conditions that resist treatment from conventional psychoactive drugs or talking therapy, both individual and group treatment. Practitioners using psychedelic drugs justify their treatments based on clinical outcomes published in questionable journals citing remarkable benefits of hallucinogenic drugs in treating post-traumatic stress from combat duty and other traumatic events, where other treatments can’t allegedly touch the conditions.
Emerson has plead not guilty to charges of reckless endangerment because he was not in his right mind at the time of the Oct. 22, 2023 flight when he reached to pull the red levers on his Boeing 737 jetliner which could have caused a catastrophic crash. “There was a feeling of being trapped, like am I trapped in this airline?” Emerson told GMA, giving the interview in hopes of establishing plausible deniability for committing an egregious criminal act. “This is not real. I need to wake up,” Emerson told GMA’s Gio Benitez. Emerson didn’t recall Egyptian Air Flight 1999 Oct. 31, 1999 when a pilot mysteriously downed the flight in the Indian Ocean en route from Los Angeles to Cairo with all 213 passengers and crew lost. What happened there is anyone’s guess but thankfully sharp crew monitoring Emerson’s erratic behavior was controlled enough to make an emergency landing in Portland, Oregon.
Emerson’s attorney Noah Horst, who authorized him to talk to the media, said his client, “he would never intentionally hurt another person and that “Joe was not under the influence of any intoxicants when he boarded the flight,” giving the exculpatory explanation. But whatever lingering effects of the hallucinogenic mushrooms, it gives a chilling tale for licensed or unlicensed practitioners providing psychedelic drugs for a fee in treating a wide variety of mental health conditions. “It’s 30 seconds of my life that I which I could change, and I can’t,” Emerson told GMA, hoping to establish a public record regarding how he endangered 80 passengers and crew. Emerson admitted to grabbing two red levers designed to shut down engines in case of fire, saying he thought it would wake him up from his hallucination. His attempts to shutdown the engines didn’t work.
Emerson was the victim of psychiatric con artists selling gullible patients an instant way out of their obsessions, compulsions, depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress for dropping the equivalent of LSD or the equivalent of off-label anesthetics like Ketamine, creating temporary euphoria but doing little, like meditation or hypnosis, to solve real human problems, like social disasters, job losses, despair and suicidal thoughts. Emerson hoped he could get over the death of a good friend who’s plagued him over the last six year, at least according to his self-reports. More careful examination would find Emerson a poorly adjusted person, with frayed coping skills, leaving him vulnerable to con artists promising miracle cures for the hard work needed in individual and group psychotherapy. Emerson said he regrets the “30 seconds” trying to shut down his jetliners turbine engines.
Emerson’s case speaks volumes about our criminal justice system, telling his story to ABC News for the purpose of exculpatory explanations when his reckless endangerment case finally goes to a jury. Emerson’s attorney said he wasn’t under the influence but clearly he had some kind of flashback or psychotic episode from his hallucinogenic mushrooms. Government regulators at state boards all around the country need to crack down on unscrupulous practitioners making false promises to gullible patients but, more importantly, feeding them dangerous psychedelic drugs without any real therapeutic benefits. No one in the media questions the benefits or liabilities of using hallucinogenic drugs to treat various forms of mental illness. Emerson’s case should sound a loud alarm about the dangers of psychedelic drug use for treating human problems with human solutions.
About the Author
John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.
