My new story for Lucid News looks at Carey Turnbull, who exercises a lot of influence over the psychedelic sector as a philanthropist, the founder of two startups, and the leader (and funder) of a nonprofit that challenges overly-broad patents. He has supported research at NYU and Yale that could pay off big, but some worry that he is accumulating too much power. A former Wall Street trader, Turnbull is also an enthusiastic user of psychedelics.

There’s enormous excitement over the potential of psychedelic medicines to treat a variety of mental health conditions, for good reason. But startups in the sector are struggling to raise money. Consolidation has begun. Eleusis Therapeutics, a promising startup, was recently acquired by a private company called Beckley PsyTech. Here’s my story about the deal, published by 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.

As a young philanthropist who supports research into psychedelic medicines, Cody Swift is nothing if not hands-on.

He has experimented with psychedelics. He has guided clients through trips as part of clinical trials at Johns Hopkins University. He has published in an academic journal. Most important, he has donated millions of dollars. His donations are poised to have a big impact.

He’s also a leader, with David Bronner and others, of efforts to support indigenous peoples who have used these medicines for thousands of years.

I profiled Cody Swift for Lucid News, in a story you can read here.

Last week, Filter, a nonprofit journalism website that covers drug policy, published my long (3,000-word) story about the Truth Initiative. Truth Initiative, which was formerly known as the American Legacy Foundation, began in 2000 as an anti-smoking group — by most accounts, a very effective one — and later evolved into a nonprofit that seeks to “inspire lives free from smoking, vaping & nicotine.” My story explains, to the best of my ability, how and why Truth Initiative broadened its mission and, arguably, took a disastrous turn in the wrong direction.

The story is unavoidably detailed and complicated, so I won’t try to summarize it here. Suffice it to say that well-respected senior scientists who left Truth Initiative told me that they are dismayed by the organization’s hard-line stance against vaping and all things nicotine.

“They have spun and ignored the science to cherry pick only information and data that supports the ideology of prohibition,” said David Abrams, a professor of public health at New York University, who previously directed the research arm of Truth Initiative.

Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who writes about medicine and culture, told me: “We’re not talking misinformation. We’re talking disinformation. This is willful misrepresentation of facts. It’s mind-blowing.”

I dearly hope that members of the Truth board will read my story and reconsider the organization’s position. Vaping is literally a life-and-death issue.

You can read the story by clicking here.

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.

Last week, I gave a talk titled "The unchecked power of philanthropy" at an event called The Global Nicotine Forum in Warsaw. I explained how and why I'd decided to write about Bloomberg Philanthropies' campaign against electronic cigarettes, beginning with a long article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy in March of last year and continuing to this day.

The talk, delivered via Zoom, turned out to be timely. The campaign by Bloomberg and its allies surely contributed to the FDA's decision this week to ban products made by JUUL, a popular brand of e-cigarettes. That decision is misguided, in my view.

For reasons that I don't fully understand, the edited version of my talk, which I posted to Medium, has generated a lot of praise and become by far my best-read story ever on Medium. Here's a link.

Scientists at universities including Johns Hopkins and NYU have made psilocybin their drug of choice as they seek remedies for a variety of mental ailments. The nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies is moving closer to gaining FDA approval for MDMA and talk therapy as a treatment for PTSD.

Yet mescaline has not been forgotten. A startup company called Journey Colab is preparing to start clinical trials to investigate the potential of mescaline to treat alcohol use disorder. Journey Colab and its founder, Jeeshan Chowdhury, have set aside equity in the company to recognize the contributions of indigenous people to psychedelic science.

Lucid News, a website about psychedelics, published my story about Journey Colab last week. Here’s the link.

It’s crazy hard to quit smoking. More than half of adult smokers try to quit in any given year, and fewer than one in ten succeed.

Nicotine patches, nicotine gums, nicotine lozenges, medicines like varenicline, cognitive behavioral therapy–nothing works especially well.

This is why some scientists are intrigued by the unorthodox idea of helping people to quit smoking by giving them a psychedelic drug — psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms — along with therapy.

Scientists at the Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University have been investigating psilocybin-assisted therapy as a treatment for tobacco use disorder for more than a decade. They’ve reported quit rates among smokers that are, as best as I can tell, unprecedented in the contemporary literature about smoking cessation.

So promising are the early results that the National Institutes of Health last fall awarded a grant of nearly $4m to scholars at Johns Hopkins, the University of Alabama at Birmingham and New York University to further explore the impact of psilocybin on tobacco addiction. It’s the first NIH grant in more than 50 years to directly investigate the therapeutic effects of a classic psychedelic.

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

Sometimes, for advocacy groups, bad news is good news, and good news is bad news. Trump’s election set off a fundraising bonanza for the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. The LGBTQ movement was confounded when the US Supreme Court legalized gay marriage.

That’s the context for my new story at Medium, posted under the headline, When the good news about smoking is bad news for anti-smoking groups. And it's really good news! Teen smoking is down by more than 90 percent from a decade ago. Since most smokers start young, this augurs well for future declines in adult smoking, which is also falling.

You’d expect, as a result, to hear enthusiastic cheering from organizations like the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. Nope. Instead of declaring victory and shutting down, they have shifted their focus from teen cigarette smoking to teen vaping.

Tobacco-Free Kids would not exist without harm, so they look for harm wherever they can find it. So anti-smoking groups now want to ban vaping, the very thing that has helped teens avoid smoking and helped adults to quit smoking. It's nuts.

Recently, it came to my attention that a 40-year-old Pittsburgh man named Daniel Muessig — a former criminal defense lawyer and freestyle rapper — was, in all likelihood, headed to federal prison for five years for selling large quantities of weed. This is, of course, exactly what publicly-traded companies do in states where marijuana is legal. Legal cannabis is a $30.6bn business in the US. But for some reason–namely, the stubbornly prohibitionist mentality of Washington politicians, up to and including President Biden–people’s lives are being ruined for selling pot. Still.

I told Daniel’s story in Reason, a libertarian magazine that I’ve read and admired for years. Here’s a link. Reason has long crusaded for an end to the drug war, and for other causes that matter to me — free speech, gay rights, open borders (or at least massively more immigration), abortion rights, religious freedom and, broadly speaking, far less government intervention in the economy. I’m probably one of the few writers who has contributed to the socialist newspaper In These Times, Fortune, The Guardian and Reason, but there you have it.

Sometimes I chase stories. Other times, stories chase me.

In the case of a Bethesda, MD-based animal welfare charity called Alley Cat Allies, it's definitely the latter.

I came across Alley Cat Allies in 2018 when I reported on its problems for The Chronicle of Philanthropy. I followed up with a long blogpost, then a Medium story and today, yet another. Every time I think I am done with these folks, a staff member or former staff member reaches out to me with new information.

Why bother to keep after Alley Cat Allies? Mostly because, from the start, this has been about a bigger issue--the failure of Charity Navigator and Candid to warn donors away from this deeply dysfunctional organization. To the contrary, despite public information pointing to problems with Alley Cat Allies that dates back 2004, Charity Navigator and Candid have rewarded the nonprofit with their highest ratings.

Here's a link to the latest catalog of misdeeds at Alley Cat Allies.

At the very least, this should be a message to anyone who relies on Charity Navigator or Candid to vet charities: Don't.

Some $2-billion was invested in the above-ground psychedelics “industry” last year. That’s stunning when you stop and think about it.

Business models for psychedelics companies are highly speculative–no one knows whether insurance companies will pay for treatments, and efforts to patent drugs like psilocybin have met stiff resistance.

Still, the dollars are flowing. That’s because investors and entrepreneurs alike believe that these drugs have enormous potential to alleviate suffering from PTSD, depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders. They’re embracing the risks, in part because FDA-sanctioned clinical trials of these medicines have produced exciting results.

In my latest story for Medium, I talk with the founders of a venture capital firm called Palo Santo that has raised about $42 million and invested in 28 companies. Like many in the sector, they grew excited about working with psychedelics after experiencing the power of the drugs themselves. You can read my story here.

Here’s my latest on The Great Vape Debate.

My story in Medium, headlined The CDC’s EVALI Screwup, looks at the misnaming of a lung disease that was caused, not by legal e-cigarettes, but by illicit THC products. The CDC erred in calling the disease EVALI, which stands for “E-cigarette or Vaping use-Associated Lung Injury.” Worse, it has refused to correct the error. This is simply awful because it will discourage smokers from quitting and turning to e-cigs for the nicotine hits they want or need.

Meantime, Bloomberg Philanthropies continues to financing anti-vaping campaigns—and refuses to even talk with its critics. My story for Medium, headlined Michael Bloomberg Loves Data. Except When He Doesn’t, reports for the first time that some of the nation’s leading anti-smoking experts have been trying to meet with Bloomberg since last spring. They’ve run into a wall. One more bit of evidence (not that we need it) that foundations are accountable to no one.

Politicians on the left and right valorize small business. Yet businesses that sell e-cigarettes, most of which are family-owned and employ just a few people, are the targets of unrelenting assaults from governments at all levels.

My new story for Medium, The unrelenting assault on vaping is taking a toll, looks at the impact that bans, taxes, prohibitions on shipping, misinformation, and FDA rules have had on vaping. An estimated 3,500 vape shops have closed since 2018. Jobs and tax revenues have been lost.

Worse, anti-vaping campaigns are making it harder for smokers to switch to e-cigarettes, which are a safer way to obtain nicotine.

Most vape shop owners are former smokers who quit by using e-cigarettes. They’re motivated by passion as well as money. Kim “Skip” Murray, who is about to close her vape show in Brainerd, MN, tells me: “Being involved with this technology has been a privilege.”

There is so much misunderstanding about vaping and smoking. And it is literally a life-and-death issue. Please take a look at my story.

Why I'm thankful to be an American.

It's easy to lose sight of what makes this country great.

Written from a place of gratitude.

Read it on Medium.

Big-time philanthropy is a peculiar enterprise – undemocratic, accountable to no one and slow to change.

If you doubt it, consider the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust, Arizona’s largest private foundation. The trustees are paid $44,000 a year, more than the directors at the Ford or Rockefeller foundations, which are far bigger. They took control of the biggest day of giving in the trust's history, excluding the paid staff. And what do you know? Some of the most generous grants went to charities on whose boards they sit.

It's all perfectly legal, and it may be just what Virginia G. Piper, the trust's eponymous benefactor, would have wanted.

You can read my story about the Piper Trust on Medium.

The government last week released encouraging news about youth vaping. It is down by 60 percent over the last two years.

It's too early to be certain -- the results of this latest government survey are not strictly comparable with data from past years -- but it appears as if the youth vaping epidemic is over.

You would think this would be reason to cheer. But anti-vaping groups like the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and the Truth Initiative instead downplayed the decline, focusing only on those teenagers who continue to vape. As always, they ignored the interests of the millions of adult smokers who have used e-cigarettes, which are less dangerous than combustible tobacco, to kick their habit.

In my latest story for Medium, I look at how the data released by the CDC and FDA was distorted or taken out of context by the groups that want to ban flavored e-cigarettes.

Increasingly, I see the story of the anti-vaping movement as a classic example of a point made the other day on Substack by Freddie deBoer: That "nonprofits are self-serving entities that exist to perpetuate their funding and the jobs of their workers."

"This is not an allegation of cynicism on the part of any individuals," he goes on to say, "but a function of the nature of systems." You can read my story here.

MDMA is an illegal drug that, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, has no medical value and a high potential for abuse.

Yet MDMA -- better known as ecstasy or molly -- is being welcomed into a veterans administration hospital where it will be used to help combat veterans with PTSD.

How can that be?

The research at a Bronx, NY, VA hospital has been permitted by the FDA, which, to its credit, continues to approve clinical trials to assess the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic medicines. Guided by science and not by the politics of the war on drugs, FDA regulators are increasingly aware of the potential of psychedelics; when accompanied by therapy, they appear to be able to help alleviate suffering from a range of mental disorders.

Specifically, this clinical trial took root at a meeting at Burning Man and was made possible by the philanthropy of two colorful billionaires. You can read more in my latest story at Medium.