It’s an exciting time for psychedelics. Clinical trials using psychedelics to treat PTSD, addiction, depression and anxiety are proceeding apace. Oregon and Colorado are preparing to regulate psilocybin-assisted therapy. Cities are decriminalizing so-called natural medicines, and the state of Kentucky, of all places, recently decided to spend $42m to research the healing potential of ibogaine, a naturally occurring hallucinogen found in a West African shrub. Yes, Kentucky. And Texas.

This month, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) expects to welcome as many as 10,000 people to Denver, aka the Mile High City, for Psychedelic Science 23, the biggest gathering ever of the psychedelics industry.

All that’s missing is the industry. 

Startup companies seeking to develop psychedelic medicines are struggling to raise money, and a few high-profile companies have filed for bankruptcy or been forced into mergers. 

Last week, Lucid News published my story about Field Trip Health, a publicly-traded company that burned through $100m of investor money and is now being sold off in pieces. Here’s how the story begins:

Welcome to the era of psychedelic stocks,” declared Forbes. 

It was October 2020. A startup called Field Trip Health had just gone public on the Canadian Securities Exchange. The birth of a psychedelics industry was upon us, some said.

These molecules “stand poised to fundamentally revolutionize how we consider mental, emotional and behavioral health,” said Ronan Levy, the co-founder and president of Field Trip.

He may well be right. 

But Field Trip Health, a high-profile upscale chain of ketamine clinics that burned through nearly CA$100 million in investor money before collapsing in March, won’t be leading the way. 

Instead, Field Trip’s story is a cautionary tale. Developing the potential of FDA-approved psychedelic medicines will require time, vast sums of patient capital and the support of regulators, government payors and private insurers so that psychedelic-assisted therapies can be fit into the existing health-care system in the U.S.

By most accounts, Field Trip’s ketamine-assisted therapy brought relief to patients, some of whom had exhausted all other options. That’s encouraging news.

But psychedelic-assisted therapy, for now, lacks a business model. How to bring its benefits to people who are suffering will be a major topic at Psychedelic Science 23. I’m looking forward to learning more in Denver.

You can read the rest of my story about Field Trip Health here at Lucid News.

Several weeks ago, I attended the Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics conference in New York City. The gathering attracts scientists, entrepreneurs, investors, activists, lawyers, therapists, and not a few party-goers, about 1,000 people in all; it’s a great place to take the pulse of the sector. I came away more impressed than ever by the work of the scientists who are researching the benefits of MDMA, psilocybin, and LSD, but wondering where the money will come from to get these drugs into the hands of people who need them. Click here to read my take, published on Medium.

There is one place more people are finding psychedelics: In church. No one is keeping an exact count but the number of churches that offer ceremonies using plant medicines continues to grow apace. Some churches operate openly, with websites and Facebook pages. Others remain underground. They operate in cities and rural areas, often ignored by law enforcement.

My story for Lucid News takes a look at the legal issues raised by plant-medicine churches. The landscape is murky.

The more I learn about psychedelic drugs, the more I realize how much work lies ahead for researchers who are studying these medicines.

Last week, I watched How to Change Your Mind, the four-hour Netflix adaptation of Michael Pollan’s book, which explores the history and healing potential of four drugs: LSD, psilocybin (the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”), MDMA, and mescaline. It’s excellent!

But, through no fault of Netflix or Pollan, the series is out of date. It has little to say about the startups and public companies that are trying to turn psychedelic drugs into FDA-approved medicines.

One of the more interesting startups is Eleusis, which was founded in 2013 by a former Goldman Sachs banker named Shlomi Raz. Guiding much of its research is Charles Nichols, a professor of pharmacology at the LSU medical school. (His father David Nichols is a legend in the psychedelic world.) What sets the company apart is its extensive research into the anti-inflammatory properties of psychedelics. While indigenous people historically have used psychedelic drugs to treat physical ailments, there has been very little contemporary research exploring whether and how psychedelics can reduce inflammation, which is associated with such diseases as arthritis, asthma, Alzheimers disease, retinal disease and heart disease. This is virgin territory for research.

You can learn more in my latest story for Lucid News, which ran under the headline: Can Psychedelics Treat Inflammation and Eye Disease. Eleusis Thinks So.

In 1976, Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, a brilliant and eccentric chemist who concocted hundreds of psychoactive drugs in a home-based laboratory in the hills of Berkeley, California, cooked up a batch of MDMA, the drug that later became known as Ecstasy or Molly. He then tried some, as was his habit.

He loved it. “I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria,” he wrote in his lab notes afterwards. “I have never felt so great, or believed this to be possible. The cleanliness, clarity, and marvelous feeling of solid inner strength continued throughout the rest of the day and evening. I am overcome by the profundity of the experience.”

This is quite the endorsement, if only because Shulgin took a lot of drugs during his long life.

Thirty five years later, MDMA is having a moment. A clinical trial of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, run by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPs, produced impressive results, moving the combination of MDMA and therapy closer to FDA approval. The first study of MDMA-assisted therapy for alcohol-use disorder, conducted by researchers at Imperial College in London and the University of Bristol, delivered encouraging, albeit very preliminary, findings. Researchers studying MDMA, as well as experienced users, say that the drug could be an effective way to treat other psychological ailments, while improving the health and happiness of so-called “healthy normals.”

You can read the rest of this story at Medium.

Little-known outside the world of psychedelics and drug policy, Rick Doblin is one of the most effective nonprofit leaders in America. Doblin is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, better known as MAPS, which for 35 years has been trying to develop psychedelic medicines and advocating for the responsible use of psychedelic drugs.

Doblin, in my view, is a brilliant strategist who has done more to change the narrative around psychedelics than anyone, with the possible exception of the writer Michael Pollan. He has built political alliances on the right and left, worked closely with medical researchers and, as best as I can tell, made few enemies along the way. MAPS is on the verge of a major breakthrough by securing FDA approval for the use of MDMA, along with talk therapy, as a prescription medicine to treat PTSD.

I tell the remarkable story of Doblin and MAPS at some length in the new issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The story is ordinarily paywalled but it is available for free until April 1. Here's a link.

The act of coming out of the closet has been so important to the movement for gay rights that it is celebrated every year on National Coming Out Day. When people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender share their stories, they change hearts and minds, create new allies and help to dispel prejudices and misconceptions.

Can a similar dynamic help end the war on drugs?

Dr. Carl L. Hart, a professor of psychology at Columbia, and Charles Wininger, a Brooklyn-based psychoanalyst, are getting things rolling with new books. They chronicle their drug histories, describe the pleasures that drugs deliver and argue, persuasively, that the press and popular culture have left most Americans misinformed about the risks and benefits of illegal drugs.

You can read the rest of this story on Medium.

As medical director of the Aquilino Cancer Center, Dr. Manish Agrawal has seen the progress made possible by cancer research. Death rates from cancer have declined steadily among men and women.

But Dr. Agrawal has also seen patients struggle with depression and anxiety. Some cannot get the help they need.

“There’s so much emotional and psychological suffering that cancer patients and their families go through,” he says, “We never fully address that.”

Now, a small group of patients at Aquilino, an outpatient treatment center at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Rockville, MD, will have the chance to try something new — treatment that combines group therapy with a single dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic drug that is the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms. Psilocybin is illegal, but the government gives select researchers permission to use it in controlled clinical settings.

You can read the rest of this story on Medium

Pastor James Lindberg was unmoored by his first trip on psilocybin. “I’m a pretty normal middle aged white guy who found myself involved in things that were a bit larger than I intended them to be,” says Lindberg, who leads a Lutheran church in an Omaha suburb.

Rabbi Zac Kamenetz’s first journey on psilocybin led him to “light, connection, warmth, gratitude and the sense that all is well,” he says. “I left that experience inspired, energized and grounded, in the sense that the path that I was on was a noble one.” His next trip brought “darkness, emptiness and a void.”

Pastor Lindberg and Rabbi Kamenetz are participants in an FDA-approved study to examine the effects of psilocybin-facilitated experience on the psychology and effectiveness of religious professionals. The research aims to deepen understanding of what are called mystical, transcendental or awe-inspiring experiences.

The man helping to guide this mashup of science and the sacred — William A. “Bill” Richards, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research — is uniquely qualified to do so. A clinical psychologist who has investigated psychedelics since the 1960s, Richards is an ordained minister (though he never pastored a church) with advanced degrees from Yale Divinity School and Andover-Newton Theological School. He has been guiding volunteers on drug trips on weekdays at Johns Hopkins and singing bass in the choir on Sundays at the Episcopal church where he worships in Baltimore.

You can read the rest of this story at Medium.

Civil rights. Feminism. Gay rights. Environmentalism. Meditation. Yoga. Natural childbirth.

Much of the politics and culture of the 1960s has been absorbed into mainstream America.

Not psychedelic drugs — not yet, anyway.

That will soon change if David Bronner, the CEO of family-owned soap-maker Dr. Bronner’s, has his way.

“Psychedelic medicine is the last and arguably the most powerful gift of the counter-culture that hasn’t been integrated,” says Bronner, who has put millions of dollars of his company’s money behind drug policy reform.

Bronner, 47, a pony-tailed vegan and an enthusiastic user of psychedelic drugs, says his life was transformed by a three-month sojourn in Amsterdam after college. He recently put $1 million of his family-owned company’s money behind a ground-breaking ballot initiative in Oregon.

You can read the rest of the story here on Medium.

Philanthropic dollars helped to create today's psychedelic renaissance by funding medical research into the therapeutic benefits of psilocybin and LSD. The research has generated a great deal of excitement.

Now, startup companies want to bring psychedelic medicines to market. That's the topic of a story that I posted today at Medium.

Here's how it begins:

Despite Covid-19, a crashing economy and formidable legal obstacles, a growing number of entrepreneurs and investors are betting that medicines derived from psychedelic drugs can become a real business and heal millions of people. They are joining the researchers, activists, philanthropists and journalists who until now have been driving what’s been called the psychedelic renaissance.

A dozen or more startup companies are developing medicines from psilocybin, MDMA, ibogaine and LSD, all of which are illegal in the US, as well as from ketamine, a legal anesthetic with hallucinogenic properties. They hope to treat a surprisingly wide range of mental conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, addiction, even Alzheimer’s disease.

This is excellent news. Developing new drugs is an expensive proposition. Especially in today's tough environment for fundraising, nonprofits are likely to have a hard time bringing in enough donations to stage clinical trials, secure regulatory approval, manufacture and distribute the medicines, persuade doctors to use them and convince insurance companies to pay for them.

Investors, by contrast, may be willing to risk their money with the hope of eventually making a financial return.

You can read the full story here on Medium.

This is a remarkable moment for psychedelics. Elite universities, including Johns Hopkins and Imperial College in London, have opened centers to research the medical benefits of such drugs as psilocybin, a hallucinogen found in mushrooms. The nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research (MAPS) is recruiting people suffering from PTSD to participate in FDA-approved clinical trials using MDMA, better known as molly or ecstasy. CBS News’ 60 Minutes last fall reported on life-changing psychedelic journeys.

So far, the psychedelic renaissance has focused on the potential of these dugs to heal mental illness, and rightly so. A growing body of research suggests that they can alleviate suffering caused by a broad array of ailments: depression, addiction and anxiety, among others.

This story, though, is not about how psychedelics can heal the mind. It’s about how they can heal the world. There is sickness all around us. The threat of climate change. Unconscionable poverty amidst great wealth. Extreme political polarization. These are manifestations of deeper ills: People feel disconnected from one another and from nature.

Serious people — not just hippies, but neuroscientists with PhDs, and their philanthropic supporters — say psychedelics can help address these deeper problems. Drug trips, under controlled conditions, break down the barriers between people and bring users closer to nature.

“These medicines can help us wake up to new levels of caring and concern,” says David Bronner, a philanthropist and the CEO of Dr. Bronner’s, the family-owned maker of natural soaps. “It’s crucial to wake up to the miraculous world we’re part of and understand how we can serve and make it better for all of us.”

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You can read the rest of the story on Medium.