Straight-edge icon who testified before Senate against drugs turns to psilocybin therapy for heart condition and chronic pain, reveals transformative experience in emotional podcast with son
Just two days before Twisted Sister announced the cancellation of their highly anticipated 50th anniversary reunion tour, frontman Dee Snider’s son Cody released a revealing podcast on February 3, 2026, documenting something few could have imagined: the famously straight-edge rock icon undergoing a six-gram psilocybin mushroom ceremony in a last-ditch effort to heal the severe health issues that would ultimately end his ability to perform.
The timing is striking and tragic. On February 5, guitarists Jay Jay French and Eddie Ojeda announced that Snider had “suddenly and unexpectedly resigned” from Twisted Sister due to health challenges, forcing the cancellation of all scheduled shows beginning April 25 in São Paulo, Brazil, and continuing through the summer. What the public didn’t know until now was that Snider, 70, had been fighting desperately behind the scenes to find a way to continue performing, even turning to a practice that completely contradicted everything he had publicly stood for throughout his entire career.
For those who followed Snider’s legendary 1985 testimony before the Senate during the PMRC hearings, where he famously declared “Believe it or not, I do not drink. I do not smoke. And I do not do drugs. I’m married. I have a three-year-old son. I was born and raised a Christian, and I still adhere to those principles,” the revelation that he underwent a psychedelic mushroom ceremony is nothing short of shocking. Yet the podcast, featuring extensive footage and testimony from Snider himself, reveals a man facing his own mortality and willing to do anything to save not just his career, but his life.
In his own statement released February 5, Snider revealed the extent of his physical deterioration:
“A lifetime of legendarily aggressive performing has taken its toll on Dee Snider’s body and soul. Unbeknownst to the public (until now) Snider (70) suffers from degenerative arthritis and has had several surgeries over the years just to keep going, able to only perform a few songs at a time in pain. Adding insult to injury, Dee has recently found out the level of intensity he has dedicated to his life’s work has taken its toll on his heart as well. He can no longer push the boundaries of rock ‘n’ roll fury like he has done for decades.”
But the podcast reveals far more detail about Snider’s medical situation and his reasoning for attempting the mushroom ceremony. “I’ve had some different health issues that have happened. I’ve got arthritis in my shoulders, degenerative arthritis. I had a hip replacement due to just overuse of my joints in my profession, i.e. rocking too hard. And I also have hypertension and high blood pressure,” Snider explained in his pre-ceremony interview.
What pushed him over the edge into considering psychedelic therapy was the prospect of being dependent on pharmaceutical drugs for the rest of his life.
“While I’m working with doctors and I’m taking some medicines to lower my blood pressure, whatever, when I analyze the situation, I think that there’s got to be something that could be done that if I could bring my stress down, if I could take it down a notch, so to speak, maybe I could get my heart back to where it needs to be. Because the idea of taking actual drugs, no matter how proven they are, no matter how safe they are, again, I’ve lived a drug-free life, a healthy life. So, the idea of being chained to a bottle of pills for the rest of my life, that’s something that really disturbs me.”
The irony is palpable. A man who built part of his public persona on being drug-free, who threw his own son’s suggestion to try mushrooms back in his face years earlier, was now willing to do the very thing he had railed against, not for recreation, but for survival.
The ceremony itself, conducted in January 2026 at a family compound in North Carolina, was facilitated by an experienced shaman named Riz Mirza and documented by director Ola Englund. Snider’s wife Suzanne and their children Cody and Tanya were present throughout the five-hour session. The catalyst for bringing in an outside facilitator rather than having family members guide the ceremony came from an unexpected source: Jack Osbourne, son of the late Ozzy Osbourne.
According to Cody Snider in the podcast, he and his wife Tanya encountered Jack at a paranormal investigation shoot in Joshua Tree shortly after Ozzy’s death in July 2025. When they mentioned their father’s health struggles and their plan to give him mushrooms, Jack’s response was emphatic.
“Mushrooms have saved my life. They healed me of addiction. Healed me in so many ways. And it was my dream to get my father Ozzy to do mushrooms to see if it would help with his Parkinson’s. And we never got to do it,” Jack told them. “In days after my father died, a study came out that said mushrooms can help with Parkinson’s disease. This is a big regret for me. Don’t miss this opportunity. You have to do this for your father.”
What followed was a profound and emotional journey that Snider describes in extraordinary detail in the podcast. After drinking mushroom tea, equivalent to six grams of psilocybin, well beyond what’s considered a “hero’s dose,” Snider experienced what he describes as being placed on a “biomechanical” operating table in a dark room, surrounded by tribal tattoo-like machinery that slowly closed in on him. “It was very claustrophobic. It got closer and closer to me. Never penetrated. I didn’t feel pain. It didn’t tear at my body or anything,” he recalled. “The machinery, my whole body, head to toe was under it and it got super close. The drone sounds and just super loud and right when I was really sort of at my wit’s end with this experience, it stopped thankfully.”
But the most transformative aspect of the ceremony wasn’t the visionary experience itself, it was what came after. The medicine took Snider through pivotal moments in his life, confirming decisions he’d made about building a family compound, validating his 50-year marriage to Suzanne, and revealing the spiritual connection between his wife and daughter Cheyenne as what he called “the sacred feminine.”
Then came the most emotionally devastating revelation: his relationship with his father. Snider has long been open about the difficult, abusive relationship with his father, a World War II veteran and police officer who was physically and emotionally abusive. What the mushroom ceremony revealed to him was that his father’s abuse stemmed from an overwhelming, intense love that he didn’t know how to express properly.
“I realized that the love he had for me, love and hate, love and anger are two sides of the same coin. When my father’s love I felt was either taken from me or abused or whatever was going on when I was a child, it was because of that incredible love that I felt love, but also felt such pain and such hurt. And all of my music, all of my, he was my muse, my hatred for him,” Snider revealed, his voice breaking with emotion.
The ceremony also revealed something else: that Snider has been stuck in what the shaman calls the “warrior” phase of masculine development, unable to transition to the “wizard” phase appropriate for a 70-year-old man.
“I have been a warrior for a very long time and I’ve been a father for a very long time. I’ve been stuck in warrior mode. My problem is I have not, I’m 70 years old. It’s time for me to relinquish the warrior position. There’s nothing to fight anymore. I’ve won. I’m successful. I have everything I’ve dreamed about, everything I could possibly want. And yet I’m stuck constantly doing, feel like I’m doing battle every day in my life,”
The shaman’s words to him during the ceremony cut deep: “You’re out on the battlefield alone. Come inside. The war’s over.” Snider broke down crying at this revelation.
Perhaps most symbolically, the ceremony involved Snider learning what he calls “the magic words,” the punchline to an off-color joke his 94-year-old father has been telling him repeatedly. Snider came to understand that his father’s repetition of this joke was actually him trying to pass on something sacred, a symbolic passing of the wizard role from father to son. The next day, Snider called his father and told him, “I know the magic words.” His father’s response: “Now you must tell them to your children.”
The podcast shows extensive footage of Snider crying throughout the ceremony, something his son Cody says he had never witnessed in his entire life. “As a kid, I’ve never saw my father cry once. I sat there and watched my father move energy through tears for hours and hours and hours. And let me tell you, I have never been more proud of this man in my entire life,” Cody said emotionally.
But did it work? The answer is complicated and ultimately tragic. According to the podcast, Snider’s heart tests after the ceremony showed his levels were “down a little bit, but it was not completely healed.” However, when he meditates, his heart levels normalize. The ceremony gave him a tool, meditation, and a path forward, but it required ongoing work. The podcast emphasizes that psychedelic medicines are not a panacea but rather a stepping stone, that they show you the way but you must heal yourself.
Clearly, it wasn’t enough to save his ability to perform. In his February 5 statement, Snider was blunt about his limitations: “I don’t know of any other way to rock. The idea of slowing down is unacceptable to me. I’d rather walk away than be a shadow of my former self. In the immortal words of Dirty Harry, ‘A man’s got to know his limitations.’ Sadly, Dee Snider now knows his.”
The podcast ends with Snider advocating for the legalization of psilocybin therapy, calling it a tragedy that these medicines are illegal in most parts of the world. “Having seen the restorative and the emotional help that it gives, it seems a shame that it isn’t available. Especially if it was available, you definitely would see more controlled situations going on where people are doing it less haphazardly, a little more ceremoniously, which is how it needs to be treated because it is a ceremony and needs to be respected in that way. Not a joke,” he stated.
His family has started a petition to legalize enthogenic plant medicines in North Carolina and plans to build a medicine center to help others. In a somewhat humorous coda to the story, Snider’s first post-ceremony purchase was a $3,000 giant Bigfoot statue for the front of the family compound, which his son jokingly attributes to his father’s transformation from skeptic to believer.
The future of Twisted Sister remains uncertain. French and Ojeda’s statement indicates that “The future of Twisted Sister will be determined in the next several weeks.” Whether the band will continue without Snider, find a replacement, or simply cease to exist remains to be seen.
What is certain is that Dee Snider’s journey from anti-drug crusader to psychedelic therapy advocate represents one of the most dramatic personal transformations in rock history. A man who once proudly testified before the United States Senate about his drug-free lifestyle ended his performing career having undergone one of the most intense psychedelic experiences possible, crying for hours as he confronted his demons, made peace with his father, and accepted that the warrior must finally lay down his sword.
“Older. Wiser. Still loud,” is the slogan for this new era of Snider’s life. He may no longer be able to rock with the fury that defined his career, but his willingness to share this incredibly vulnerable journey may end up being his most important contribution yet, especially as discussions about psychedelic therapy for veterans, trauma survivors, and those suffering from chronic pain continue to gain mainstream acceptance.
For a man who spent his entire life fighting, the mushroom ceremony taught him the hardest lesson of all: sometimes the bravest thing a warrior can do is walk off the battlefield.
