Oregon’s psychedelic mushroom regulators accused of conflict of interest

Chair of board advising on legalisation of psychedelic mushrooms resigns after being accused to standing to profit from own rules

A vendor bags psilocybin at a pop-up cannabis market in Los Angeles. In 2020, after a landmark US-first vote, Oregon legalized the therapeutic use of psilocybin. \Photograph: Richard Vogel/AP

Mattha Busby

Sun 13 Mar 2022 

The chair of a board advising on the legalisation of psychedelic mushrooms in Oregon has resigned after being accused of standing to profit financially from the potentially $1bn industry he is helping to shape.

In 2020, after a landmark US-first vote, Oregon legalized the therapeutic use of psilocybin. But the ructions at the board could throw the whole industry into disarray.



Will the magic of psychedelics transform psychiatry?

The state governor appointed an advisory board to help implement the trailblazing reforms, for rollout in January next year.

According to local media reports, however, some members of the board have allegedly announced or indicated their plans to invest in the industry.

Former chair Tom Eckert, who led the campaign to pass the psilocybin ballot, has created a company to train magic mushroom therapy facilitators.

Other members also admitted recently that they were intending to pursue business ventures, after it was agreed personal and financial conflicts of interest would be formally disclosed. The board makes non-binding recommendations to health authorities.

Responding to questions from the Guardian ahead of his resignation, Eckert – whose wife, Sheri, with whom he had campaigned for years, died in late 2020 of cardiac arrest, defended his actions.

“In many cases, our perspectives and experiences relate to industry involvement, which was known when we were appointed and is known, through our disclosures, by the board, the public, and the [Oregon health authority]. I have disclosed my projects, as have others on the board. I supported the updated policy and will continue to comply with that policy.”

He argued that individual board members use their contacts to help connect “useful people and resources’” to the board. “It is in the board’s interest to seek out and integrate the best information out there, from multiple perspectives, so that we can optimally support the Oregon health authority in building the best statewide program possible.”

But as the risk of bringing the reputation of the board into disrepute grew, he resigned. “As my life continues to change, with more relationships taking shape, I am mindful of appearances. I do not want anything to distract from the earnest work of this advisory board,” he said in a statement first reported by Marijuana Moment.

“It feels like the right time to orient my energies to the next stage of the journey. I look forward to supporting the development of Oregon’s psilocybin infrastructure in new and different rules.”

Oregon’s cautious experimentation comes as evidence grows of the beneficial effect of magic mushrooms on mental health. A handful of other US states have since moved towards rolling back psychedelic drug prohibitions and providing a legal framework for psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy.

Campaigners, experts and business people in Oregon – many of whom are passionate about the potential of psilocybin to address the country’s mental health crisis – have been tasked with helping to create the rules.

Potential conflicts of interest are, in that sense, unsurprising, say some industry sources. “This volunteer advisory board was specifically chosen because folks are involved in populating the eventual [psilocybin therapy] ecosystem with organizations,” said one company insider. “It’s a trade board in that sense.”

But David Nickles, an expert on the nascent psychedelic industry, said the “personal and professional conflicts of interest” of the chair raise significant questions.

As well as founding the firm Innertrek to train psilocybin therapists, it emerged that Eckert has also been in a personal relationship with the CEO of a company investing in the Oregon psychedelic industry. The firm, Synthesis Institute, recently bought a 124-acre property in Oregon, to host future retreats that are likely to cost thousands of dollars, as well as facilitator training.

The board has commended Synthesis for the expertise provided to them by its staff. It said Synthesis “has supported nearly 20% of our inaugural psychedelic practitioner training cohort participants” with financial scholarships.

“The chairman’s personal and professional conflicts of interest raise significant questions,” said David Nickles, an expert on the nascent psychedelic industry.

“In what situation is it appropriate for people who are crafting regulations to also profit off of the industry they are regulating? What does it mean to forge undisclosed romantic relationships across lines of industry and regulation? And, even if it’s happened before, do such practices generate or maintain a world in which we want to live?.”

Eckert told a recent board meeting that where there are potential conflicts of interest, “it makes sense for thinking of not voting on those issues”.

Oregon department of justice rules state that appointed public officials serving on a board should publicly announce any conflicts of interest, not participate in any debate on the issue and refrain from voting on it.

Eckert went on to tell the board: “There’s so many grey areas. The expertise is coming in on a lot of those subcommittees because we’re working on stuff, and I’ve been transparent about working on a training programme for example.

“Therefore, I’m interested in understanding how that can happen in all kinds of ways. So [deciding] where that line is is going to be tricky, and I’m very open to defining that a little bit more. We kind of did this on the fly early on.”

Some cannabis regulators have been accused of helping enrich friends who are already established in the industry, by raising barriers to market entry amid the so-called “green rush”. Last year in Florida, John Burnette, a developer who is married to a cannabis company CEO, was jailed for conspiring for former state representative Halsey Beshears “to keep out competitors”. Critics have argued that there is a revolving door between decision-makers and the cannabis industry.

Oregon is under particular pressure to ensure that low-income and ethnic minority communities are not shut out of the potential psilocybin economy.

A state senate committee voted last week to establish a taskforce including representatives of the indigenous community to examine barriers faced by people of colour in starting psilocybin-related businesses.

“We cannot continue the cycle of shutting out the future of medicine to certain communities and we have a rare opportunity here to prevent these inequities from being built into this system in the first place,” said state senator Wlnsvey Campos.

How psychedelics are returning to the world of medicine

Millions of people in Germany have been diagnosed with depression. Researchers believe that drugs such as LSD and psilocybin can offer an effective treatment. They could also bring big profits.


Psychedelic drugs could be used to treat depression

On July 13, there was a rainy sky above the southern German city of Mannheim. But, despite the uninspiring weather, it was a day of hope for millions of people with depression — because the first patients of a research project run by the Central Institute of Mental Health were scheduled to have a psychedelic experience.

They wore a blindfolds and headphones that played music and were accompanied by two therapists. The hallucinogen used for the inner journey is called psilocybin.

This active ingredient was isolated about 60 years ago. It gives the magic mushrooms their "magic" — i.e., their mind-altering effect. And it has been banned almost worldwide, including in Germany, for over half a century.

Even for the Mannheim researchers, "obtaining the substance has proven to be the highest hurdle." That's according to researcher and psychiatry professor Gerhard Gründer.


Can 'magic mushrooms' help treat depression?

"There are not that many manufacturers in the world from whom you can obtain such a substance in the required quality. It was a long and laborious process," he said.

But that laborious process is becoming more common. Hallucinogenic trips have long ceased to be solely the recreational pastime of hippies. A growing number of scientific studies point to the potential of psilocybin-assisted therapy for treating depressed patients — even those for whom other therapies have been exhausted. The Mannheim study, with a total of 144 patients, is now large enough that Gründer "expects statistically robust conclusions."
Depression is a widespread condition

According to estimates by the World Health Organization, about 300 million people worldwide live with depression. In Germany, that number is an estimated 5 million, and the Health Ministry has referred to it as a "widespread disease."

A conservative estimate is that around one in five patients cannot be helped with conventional treatment methods. "There is a huge need," Gründer said, adding that his institute is almost overrun with inquiries from patients.

In conventional therapies, patients are treated with daily doses of antidepressants. The new approach is fundamentally different.

"Here, it's a matter of taking this substance once or twice," Gründer said. "This is a very disruptive therapy that becomes embedded in a psychotherapeutic program."

Gründer believes that there is a huge need for unconventional therapy

Subjects in earlier studies reported life-changing experiences and significantly improved mental states, and were even able to stop taking their antidepressants, often a state that lasted for many months after the healing trip. The prospect of being able to significantly improve the condition of severely depressed people with just a few psychedelic sessions is worth over €2 million ($2.3 million) in funding to the ministry of education and research.

The fact that public money is now also flowing into research with psilocybin in Germany shows that psychedelic research is slowly edging from the fringes into the medical mainstream.

Psychedelic substances have returned to where they once stood in the 1950s and '60s — to the center of psychiatric, medical and psychological research.

An international meeting on psychedelic therapy took place in Berlin in mid-September
International meeting of experts in Berlin

This could be seen in mid-September in Berlin, when the Insight 2021 conference took place, organized by the Mind Foundation. According to its website, the foundation advocates the "evidence-based, safe and legal use of psychedelic experience in medicine and society." The venue for the meeting of the center of international psychedelics research is the Berlin Charite, one of Germany's most prestigious medical institutions.

For four days, attendees discussed neurological processes, compared the effects of LSD, psilocybin and other drugs with diagrams, and presented the state of research in a wide variety of fields. Even an employee of the German drug approval authority, the federal authority for drugs and medical devices, was there.

"We managed to destigmatize the topic; a discourse has emerged," Mind Foundation co-founder Andrea Jungaberle said in summary. "How this discourse will affect day-to-day medical business remains to be seen."

Experts are already enthusiastic. "How ecstasy and psilocybin are shaking up psychiatry" a headline of the science magazine Nature gushed at the beginning of the year.

Watch video02:08 Drug use: Why do we get high?

Psilocybin on the stock market

A growing number of companies are also keen. If they had their way, psilocybin, the ecstasy active ingredient MDMA and other substances would soon be used across the board to treat depression, addiction, and an array of other diseases. At least, that is the goal of the biotech holding company ATAI Life Sciences, owned by German investor Christian Angermayer.

Angermayer has discussed his own psilocybin experiences in German media, including newspapers Handelsblatt and Wirtschaftswoche — and this summer he took his company public in New York. Just three years after its founding, the psychedelic holding is already worth over $2 billion.

ATAI's holdings include Compass Pathways, a British company that has developed its own synthetic psilocybin. Compass Pathways is currently conducting a phase 2 trial with the drug involving more than 200 patients at 22 locations in 10 countries, currently the largest psilocybin clinical trial in the world. The company, which is also listed on the Nasdaq in New York, has been valued at over $1 billion after only five years in existence.

Watch video 42:36 LSD is back

The Berlin Registry of the Mind Foundation shows that the "trip therapy boom" has allowed an entire industry to flourish. It lists about 130 companies in the psychedelic industry, from A Whole New High, which offers psilocybin retreats in the Netherlands, to Wavepaths, a specialist for the right sound via headphones for an inward journey.

Even Andrea Jungaberle is not entirely comfortable with the rapid development. "Our best friend and our biggest enemy is the hype," she states soberly, promoting an "appropriate approach between demonization and transfiguration."

Swiss psychotherapist Peter Gasser, who has been working with LSD and MDMA for 30 years, shares this assessment.

"This pace almost scares me," he said. "This scaling up of small niche treatments: Just a few patients per the study, now you're already thinking in terms of millions." Gasser fears that the quality of treatment could suffer "because it's seen as too technological or too schematic."

The ketamine blew my mind’: can psychedelics cure addiction and depression?

‘We prepare a client for their drug experience; allow them to feel safe and warm.’ Illustration: Frieda Ruh/The Guardian

This week sees the opening of the first UK high-street clinic offering psychedelic-assisted therapy. Could popping psilocybin be the future of mental healthcare?


Words: Alexandra Jones Illustration: Frieda Ruh
Sat 13 Mar 2021 11.00 GMT

In the summer of 1981, when he was 13, Grant crashed a trail motorbike into a wall at his parents’ house in Cambridgeshire. He’d been hiding it in the shed, but “it was far too powerful for me, and on my very first time starting it in the garden, I smashed it into a wall”. His mother came outside to find the skinny teenager in a heap next to the crumpled motorbike. “I was in a lot of trouble.”

Grant hadn’t given this childhood memory much thought in the intervening years, but one hot August day in 2019, it came back to him with such clarity that, at 53, now a stocky father of two, he suddenly understood it as a clue to his dangerously unhealthy relationship with alcohol.

The day before, a team of specialists at the Royal Devon and Exeter hospital had given him an intravenous infusion of ketamine, a dissociative hallucinogen, in common use as an anaesthetic since the 1970s, and more recently one of a group of psychedelic drugs being hailed as a silver bullet in the fight to save our ailing mental health. To date, more than 100 patients with conditions as diverse as depression, PTSD and addiction have been treated in research settings across the UK, using a radical new intervention that combines psychedelic drugs with talking therapy. What was once a fringe research interest has become the foundation of a new kind of healthcare, one that, for the first time in modern psychiatric history, purports to not only treat but actually cure mental ill health. And if advocates are to be believed, that cure will be available on the NHS within the next five years

Thanks to its world-leading academic institutions, the UK has become a home to many of the biotech companies developing these treatments. But while investment money pours in and new experimental trials launch almost weekly, ketamine remains the only psychedelic drug that’s actually licensed for use as a medicine.

Under its influence, Grant had an out-of-body experience he struggles to put into words. “It was like I was sinking deeper and deeper into myself,” he says. “Then I became white… and I left my body. I was up on the ceiling, looking at myself, but I was just this white entity. I felt very serene and humbled; I finally understood my place in the universe, just a white speck of light, I wasn’t the centre of everything and that was fine.”

The next day, in a therapy session at the hospital, the motorbike story and other memories swirled up from his subconscious: being caught smoking at school and caned, and other instances of “playing up” as a child. Most vividly, he remembers the consequences: “I got my parents’ attention.”

I realised feeling overlooked as a child drove my drinking. It hadn’t been on my radar – but with ketamine I got there

His parents were evangelists; Grant’s father was a teacher and lay preacher, and his mother ran a nursery from home. They were also fosterers who, over the span of their marriage, gave a home to more than 200 children. “Growing up, love was never in short supply,” Grant says. What was in short supply was his parents’ attention. “They had a lot of commitments, they were very busy people,” he says. “I suppose what I realised in that therapy session was that I’d felt overlooked as a child and that had caused me pain.” Over the years, that pain crystallised, and alcohol became a crutch. “I could see it was the root of the negative emotions that drove my drinking, and a lot of other bad habits and behaviours.” He says it’s a realisation he might have taken years to come to with standard talking therapy. “It wasn’t even on my radar, so it blew my mind. To understand myself and my drinking, and why I behaved the way I did… With the ketamine therapy I got there in a few weeks. I feel free.”

In recent years, research into psychedelic-assisted mental healthcare has shed its outsider status. As far back as 2016, Robin Carhart-Harris and his team at Imperial College London published promising findings from the world’s first modern research trial investigating the impact of psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) alongside psychological support, on 19 patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD). This is when a person doesn’t respond to two or more available therapies; it is particularly debilitating and, recent data shows, affects about a third of all people with depression. In the study, two doses of psilocybin (10mg and 25mg, seven days apart), plus therapy, resulted in “marked reductions in depressive symptoms” in the first five weeks, which “remained significant six months post-treatment”. This new treatment proved so promising that, in 2018, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) awarded breakthrough therapy status to psilocybin (given only to drugs that “demonstrate substantial improvement over available therapy”) as a treatment for TRD. In December 2019, a ketamine-like drug – esketamine – was licensed for use in the UK as a rapid-onset treatment for major depression: it starts working in hours, compared with weeks or months with traditional antidepressants. In April 2020, after running their own psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy study, with 24 participants who had depression, experts from Johns Hopkins University in the US issued a press release stating: “The magnitude of the effect we saw was about four times larger than what clinical trials have shown for traditional antidepressants on the market.”

All this, and other early-stage evidence, is fuelling larger, more ambitious investigations. The London life sciences company Compass Pathways, whose research led to the FDA award, is coordinating one of the biggest psilocybin for TRD studies in the world, involving 216 patients across Europe and North America. The aim is to develop a new style of therapy that harnesses the psychedelic experience, as well as to change these substances’ classification, so they can be licensed as medicines. This wouldn’t change the legal status of MDMA or psilocybin (banned for recreational use in the UK), but it would mean treatments using these compounds could be prescribed.

Laurie Higbed, Ben Sessa and Steve O’Brien at Awakn in Bristol, the UK’s first high-street provider of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. Photograph: Joel Redman/The Guardian


In the meantime, practitioners of this new kind of mental healthcare can use ketamine as their psychedelic agent; and some studies, such as the one Grant participated in, are even government funded. The Ketamine for Reduction of Alcoholic Relapse (Kare) study is a novel attempt to ease the huge burden on the NHS caused by alcohol-related illnesses. (Two years ago, a major review of inpatient records found that 10% of people in hospital beds in the UK were alcohol dependent, and one in five were doing themselves harm by drinking.) As the Kare study lead, Professor Celia Morgan, tells me, “Three-quarters of people who stop drinking and go through detox will be back drinking within 12 months: that’s not a good recovery rate.”

Patients aren’t merely given a dose and left to their own devices; a new style of therapy was developed for the study which, Morgan says, uses principles from cognitive behavioural therapy, mindfulness and relapse prevention. “We designed it to go with the ketamine effects. We wanted something evidence based, a therapy that has been shown to help people avoid alcoholic relapse. But also something that would work with what we know about the brain in the ketamine state.” The patient is primed for new learning, she says, and more able to view the self from an outsider’s perspective.

Until now, in the UK, therapy using psychedelics has remained the preserve of academic institutions – available only in research trials with highly specific criteria for inclusion. This week, though, with the opening of its clinic in Bristol, Awakn Life Sciences has become the UK’s first on-the-high-street provider of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. The clinical-biotech company is “researching, developing and delivering evidence-based psychedelic medicine to treat addiction and other mental health conditions”. This means it will be developing its own type of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (with a focus on MDMA to treat addiction) via experimental trials. And alongside it, delivering ketamine-assisted psychotherapy.

“Our USP is the clinics,” says Dr Ben Sessa, consultant psychiatrist, psychedelic therapist and chief medical officer at Awakn. “We’re aiming to open 15 to 20 across the UK and EU in the next 24 months. Patients will be able to self-refer or be referred by their GP (including NHS).” They will need a formal diagnosis and will most likely have to prove they have already tried a number of other therapies.

See a psychiatrist at 20 and chances are you still will be at 60. We’ve come to accept we can’t cure patients. Why not?

Sessa is scathing about the psychiatric profession as it currently operates: “We need innovation in this industry, desperately and now.” The problem, he argues, is that outcomes within psychiatric treatment fall far short of the gold standard set for the rest of the medical profession. “If you broke your leg and went to an orthopaedic specialist, you’d expect it to be fixed,” he says. “You wouldn’t expect to be prescribed painkillers for the rest of your life. But if you present to your psychiatrist in your early 20s with a severe mental illness, there’s a good chance you will still be seeing them when you’re 60. You’ll still be on the same daily drugs.” According to the most recent NHS figures, only half of talking therapy patients recovered from their condition. “What about the other 50%?” Sessa asks. “As an industry, we’ve come to accept that we can never cure our patients. But why not?”

Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, he says, may be “the holy grail – curative psychiatry”, arguing that these interventions offer relatively fast-acting alleviation of symptoms and don’t require the same level of maintenance (with drugs or talking therapy) as the treatments currently available.

Though alcoholism is a focus, Awakn will also offer psychedelic-assisted therapy to treat depression, anxiety, eating disorders and most addictions.

On a Monday in late February, the Bristol clinic is abuzz with builders and workmen. Formerly the site of an Indian restaurant, it sits in a 19th-century building on the corner of Regent Street and Hensmans Hill in Bristol’s chi-chi Clifton area. Its position, next to a barber shop and cocktail bar, and overlooking a small park, was picked for its ordinariness. As Awakn’s CEO Anthony Tennyson explains, “Our strategy is to normalise the industry; we want to integrate into the mainstream, so that popping in for mental health treatment is as normal as… ” he trails off. Getting your teeth whitened? “Something like that,” he laughs.

Inside, the clinic is painted a tasteful dove grey, with exposed brickwork and wooden floors. “It’s going to be sort of Scandinavian chic in design,” says Steve O’Brien, the operations manager. “That will be one of the treatment rooms.” He points up a flight of stairs to a room separated from reception by a reinforced glass partition. “We’re waiting for the beds to be delivered.” “Set and setting” (ie the mental state and physical environment) have been shown to be vital to the psychedelic experience – and a bad setting can equal a bad trip.

This is something O’Brien has experience of. “Years ago I took [the powerful hallucinogen] ayahuasca in Iquitos, Peru. It was all a bit dodgy. I ended up in this dark little hut with breeze-block walls covered in sheets and 12 Peruvian ladies in deck chairs watching Friends really loudly next door. I thought I was going to be ritually sacrificed,” he says. The clinic’s attention to the furnishings and feel of the space isn’t just elegant window dressing: “It’s about preparing a client for their drug experience, allowing them to feel safe and warm. It’s about as far from that Peruvian hut as you can get.”

Patients will be assessed by Awakn’s team, including Sessa and Dr Laurie Higbed, a clinical psychologist who specialises in complex trauma and addictions, who has been part of research trials using both psilocybin and MDMA as adjuncts to psychotherapy. “I was the clinical psychologist, alongside Ben [Sessa as consultant psychiatrist], in an addiction service,” Higbed says. “We used to chat over coffee about how our caseload was full of clients who had experienced trauma in their lives, particularly in childhood. We were treating their heroin or alcohol use, but really that was just a symptom, rather than the cause.”

Her job was to help addicts uncover and work through those underlying traumas via talking therapy. But being forced to remember a trauma we may have spent a lifetime trying to suppress can be very daunting. “Often you get a little bit worse before you get better,” Higbed says, and this requires “a lot of faith that it’s worth the effort”.

‘Psychedelic compounds free thoughts to move in new ways.’ Illustration: Frieda Ruh/The Guardian

Metaphors abound for exactly how psychedelics work on a neurological level but one of the most popular involves considering the brain as a snow globe, showing a pristine scene at birth. As we age, our experiences, habits and the traumas we live through create tracks in the snow for our thoughts to run along. The older we get, the more worn the tracks become, making it harder for us to escape established thought patterns. “So with things like depression,” Higbed says, “you might have this negative worldview which can be very difficult to break free from.” Psychedelic compounds shake up the snow globe. Old ruts are destabilised and thoughts are free to move in new ways.

“This is why therapy is an important part of the treatment,” says Morgan who, as well as running the research trial Grant was a part of, will be consulting on treatments for alcoholism at Awakn. “The drugs alone might prompt big epiphanies, but the therapy helps you to learn from them and create lasting change.” She has seen this process in action. “One patient had been drinking seven bottles of wine a day, and had seen his life crumble,” she says. “His wife left, his daughter stopped speaking to him.” The patient had been abused as a child, and over his lifetime had spent increasing amounts of energy trying to avoid the emotions thrown up by that early trauma. “He had a very strong reaction to the ketamine infusion,” Morgan says. “He said he felt a kind of love and safety that he hadn’t felt for a long time. At one point he felt like he was back in his mum’s tummy.”

As part of the psychedelic experience, he also encountered his abuser, his father. “He said he felt pity for him. This was a massive step because he was able to understand his experiences from the perspective of an observer; the pity also extended to himself, which alleviated a lot of the shame and guilt he’d been feeling because of his alcoholism.” Eighteen months later, the man was still sober – having previously only ever managed a month.

A treatment course at Awakn lasts six weeks, with four drug-assisted sessions in that time. “And a follow-up session at week nine, so it’s 11 in total,” Higbed says. “It’s intensive.” Though, ultimately, they hope to work primarily with MDMA, they’re hamstrung by the current global legislation, which says the drug can be used only in an experimental setting. In the meantime, they’ll offer ketamine injections, more fast-acting than the infusion Grant received, but likely to yield similar results. It will cost “around £6,000”, Tennyson says. “Though our ultimate aim is to make it available on the NHS, to help as many people as possible.”
It’s not a magical cure. People should definitely try talking therapy first. It does work, and is much less invasive

Tennyson comes from a corporate finance background (Merrill Lynch, Bank of Ireland and 10 years in the risk consulting arm of the insurer Aon, . Like Sessa, he’s evangelical in his belief that the services offered by Awakn have never been more necessary. “Twenty per cent of the population have a mental health issue on an annual basis. The industry that is meant to be fixing this is significantly underperforming,” he says. In fact, according to figures from the mental health charity Mind, that figure is closer to 25%.

Tennyson’s job is to drive sales and generate investor interest. Financially, Awakn needs the clinics to be a success, but it’s also gearing up for a round of funding to help start its own research trials. Tennyson is coy about exactly how much this might cost (one academic confirms it runs to tens of millions) but says, “Ultimately, you can’t solve problems of this magnitude without capital.”

The capital, it seems, is following the science into a psychedelics gold rush. Peter Rands is the CEO of Small Pharma, a London-based life sciences company preparing to run the world’s first formal trial evaluating the combination of DMT (a short-acting but powerful hallucinogen) and psychotherapy to treat patients with major depressive disorder. “2020 was a relatively easy year to raise money into a psychedelics company,” he says, partly because investors understand the proposition now more than ever: “I don’t think this seems like a niche industry any more.” But it’s also because the pandemic proved drugs can suddenly have global demand. “Covid showed how much value there is in responding quickly to a major unmet medical need. Pre-pandemic, the biotech industry was worth a fraction of the price it is now. When drugs were suddenly being touted as a Covid cure, there was huge investor interest.”

A lot of investment, Rands says, is coming from Canada. Small Pharma plans to list on the Toronto stock exchange, and Awakn is incorporated in Toronto. “The Canadian investor community has a higher risk appetite to emerging industries,” Tennyson says. Rands agrees, pointing out that, “until recently, Canadian companies were pretty much all mining companies. And mining has a similar risk-return profile to drug development.” In both industries, he says, huge sums are invested upfront to excavate the necessary goods: “In drug development, that’s through clinical trials.”

In September 2020, Compass Pathways floated on the Nasdaq exchange. In October, it was valued at $1.3bn.

The company was founded in 2016 by Dr Ekaterina Malievskaia and her husband, George Goldsmith, after a years-long battle to find adequate mental healthcare for their son, who had OCD and depression. Goldsmith is quick to correct the narrative about his work. “We don’t see ourselves as part of a ‘psychedelics industry’ – we are a mental healthcare company.”

He is sanguine about how quickly these interventions could become more widely available, likening the process to climbing Everest. “A medicine is a drug plus the evidence that says it’s safe and effective to use for a certain type of patient. We’re about halfway through the process of collecting that evidence. But I think if everything works out well, by 2025 psilocybin-assisted therapy could be prescribed on the NHS for treatment-resistant depression.”

Sessa, whose focus is MDMA-assisted therapies to treat addiction, has a shorter timeline in mind. “MDMA is further along than psilocybin in the regulatory process,” he says. “It is thought it will be approved as a medicine by late 2022 or early 2023.” By that point, if Awakn has realised its ambitions, it will have a clinic in every major city in the UK.


'My mother-in-law called me Walter White': how magic mushrooms rescued me from grief

Despite the widespread evangelism from within the psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy field, Higbed resists the idea that it is some kind of panacea. She points out that it doesn’t work for all people, and that many would be put off by the hallucinogenic experience. “It’s not a magical cure,” she insists. “People should definitely try talking therapy first. It does work, and is much less invasive.” She also points out that antidepressants and other kinds of medications work “incredibly well for many people. This is really only for the subset of sufferers who aren’t being helped by what’s currently out there. It’s an innovation in an industry that hasn’t innovated in a long time.”

Dr Andrea Cipriani, a professor at the department of psychiatry, University of Oxford, shares the enthusiasm about the potential for psychedelics, but cautions that there is still a long way to go before they are more widely used. “These are very potent medications which, from a public health policy point of view, means it’s not a straightforward path to delivering this in a wider clinical setting,” he says. “I don’t think ketamine will ever get into the NHS as a first-line treatment; you reach this option only if previous ones have failed. And for the other psychedelics, I think it’s more difficult.”

Meanwhile, Grant hasn’t picked up a drink once since his ketamine treatment. “I haven’t even thought about a drink,” he says. “Problem drinkers struggle so much to control this – they avoid aisles in the supermarket, they carry all this shame. If everyone who needed it had access to this, I truly believe it would change the world.”

This article was amended on 13 and 14 March 2021. The insurer Aon was previously referred to as “an Irish insurance broker”; Awakn plans to open 15 to 20 clinics in the UK and EU in the next two years, not just the UK as Dr Ben Sessa told us in an earlier version; and we incorrectly referred to “John Hopkins University” in the US, rather than Johns Hopkins University.

 

Psychedelics improve mental health, cognition in special ops veterans

Chart review reports effects of 2-drug treatment at Mexico clinic

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

One treatment each of two psychedelic drugs lowered depression and anxiety and improved cognitive functioning in a sample of U.S. special operations forces veterans who sought care at a clinic in Mexico, according to a new analysis of the participants’ charts.

The treatment included a combination of ibogaine hydrochloride, derived from the West African shrub iboga, and 5-MeO-DMT, a psychedelic substance secreted by the Colorado River toad. Both are designated as Schedule I drugs under the U.S. Controlled Substances Act.

In addition to relieving symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the combined treatment also alleviated cognitive impairment linked to traumatic brain injury – which stood out to researchers from The Ohio State University who led the chart-review analysis. Many special operations forces veterans seeking treatment for complex psychiatric symptoms do not respond to more traditional therapies.

“What sets this group apart from some other veterans and civilians is that often, they are exposed to repeated traumatic events as a routine part of their jobs. This build-up of exposure to these difficulties seems to produce a cluster of challenges that include traumatic brain injury, which we know in and of itself predisposes people to mental health problems,” said lead author Alan Davis, associate professor and director of the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education (CPDRE) in Ohio State’s College of Social Work.

“So the fact that we saw that there were improvements in cognitive functioning linked to brain injury were probably the most striking results, because that’s something we didn’t predict and it’s very new and novel in terms of how psychedelics might help in so many different domains.”

The study is published in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse.

Most of the veterans attending the clinic retreat program had been on active duty after 9/11 and reported seeking care for memory problems, brain injury, depression, anxiety, PTSD, sleep problems, anger and fatigue. Head injuries were reported by 86% of attendees, most of whom attributed memory problems, irritability, disordered sleep and ringing in the ears to those long-ago head traumas.

Eighty-six veterans completed pre-treatment questionnaires assessing a range of mental health symptoms as well as satisfaction with life, anger levels and suicidality. Each attendee received a single oral ibogaine hydrochloride dose and, on a separate day, at least three incremental inhalation doses adding up to 50 milligrams of 5-MeO-DMT, also commonly called Five or Bufo. Preparation and reflection sessions preceded and followed each treatment.

Overall, participants reported large improvements in self-reported PTSD symptoms, depression, anxiety, insomnia severity and anger, as well as a significant increase in satisfaction with life, from pre-treatment to the one-month follow-up, and sustained benefits at the three- and six-month follow-ups. Additional reported improvements that continued for six months included reductions in disability and post-concussive symptoms, and very large increases in psychological flexibility and cognitive functioning.

Davis said the improved cognitive functioning warrants more research into whether better thinking results from lowered mental health symptoms or biological changes to signaling in the brain, or a mixture of both types of effects. And they noted that changes to psychological flexibility – one’s capacity to act in ways that are consistent with their values regardless of whatever internal or external experience they might have – have been found in previous research to be connected to insightful and mystical psychedelic experiences.

“I think we’re seeing a similar picture emerging here where the more one is psychologically flexible, the more likely it is that one’s mental health symptoms will be reduced or ameliorated,” Davis said.

Most attendees also reported moderate to strong desirable changes across a range of attitudes, behaviors and relationships. One month after treatment, almost half reported the psychedelic experience was the most spiritually significant (48.6%) or psychologically insightful (42.9%) of their lives, and 17.1% called it the most difficult or challenging experience in their life.

Davis and colleagues took a conservative approach to analyzing outcome data, building in an assumption that attendees who didn’t complete all of the follow-up surveys may not have gotten the relief they had hoped for from the treatment. But they said finding that a population of veterans with complicated trauma histories can benefit from psychedelic therapy supports the importance of continuing to test psychedelic-assisted therapies in U.S. clinical trials.

Psilocybin-assisted therapy is currently being studied at Ohio State for the treatment of PTSD among military veterans.

This work was funded by Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions. The authors are also supported by the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University, the CPDRE, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Co-authors of the study include Yitong Xin and Nathan Sepeda of Ohio State and Lynnette Averill of Baylor College of Medicine and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

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Contact: Alan Davis, Davis.5996@osu.edu

Written by Emily Caldwell, Caldwell.151@osu.edu; 614-292-8152

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JOURNAL

The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse

DOI

10.1080/00952990.2023.2220874 

ARTICLE TITLE

Open-label study of consecutive ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT assisted-therapy for trauma-exposed male Special Operations Forces Veterans: prospective data from a clinical program in Mexico

 

In psychedelic therapy, clinician-patient bond may matter most

Study links relationship strength to reduced depression for up to 1 year

READ LEARY AND ALBERT 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Drug effects have dominated the national conversation about psychedelics for medical treatment, but a new study suggests that when it comes to reducing depression with psychedelic-assisted therapy, what matters most is a strong relationship between the therapist and study participant.

Researchers analyzed data from a 2021 clinical trial that found psilocybin (magic mushrooms) combined with psychotherapy in adults was effective at treating major depressive disorder.

Data included depression outcomes and participant reports about their experiences with the drugs and their connection with therapists. Results showed that the stronger the relationship between a participant and clinician – called a therapeutic alliance – the lower the depression scores were one year later.

“What persisted the most was the connection between the therapeutic alliance and long-term outcomes, which indicates the importance of a strong relationship,” said lead author Adam Levin, a psychiatry and behavioral health resident in The Ohio State University College of Medicine.

Past research has consistently found that as mental health treatments changed, a trusting relationship between clients and clinicians has remained key to better outcomes, said senior author Alan Davis, associate professor and director of the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education in The Ohio State University College of Social Work.

“This concept is not novel. What is novel is that very few people have explored this concept as part of psychedelic-assisted therapy,” Davis said. “This data suggests that psychedelic-assisted therapy relies heavily on the therapeutic alliance, just like any other treatment.”

The study was published recently in the journal PLOS ONE.

Twenty-four adults who participated in the trial received two doses of psilocybin and 11 hours of psychotherapy. Participants completed the therapeutic alliance questionnaire, assessing the strength of the therapist-participant relationship, three times: after eight hours of preparation therapy and one week after each psilocybin treatment.

Participants also completed questionnaires about any mystical and psychologically insightful experiences they had during the drug treatment sessions. Their depression symptoms were assessed one week, four weeks, and up to one year after the trial’s end.

The analysis showed that the overall alliance score increased over time and revealed a correlation between a higher alliance score and more acute mystical and/or psychologically insightful experiences from the drug treatment. Acute effects were linked to lower depression at the four-week point after treatment, but were not associated with better depression outcomes a year after the trial.

“The mystical experience, which is something that is most often reported as related to outcome, was not related to the depression scores at 12 months,” Davis said. “We’re not saying this means acute effects aren’t important – psychological insight was still predictive of improvement in the long term. But this does start to situate the importance and meaning of the therapeutic alliance alongside these more well-established effects that people talk about.”

That said, the analysis showed that a stronger relationship during the final therapy preparation session predicted a more mystical and psychologically insightful experience – which in turn was linked to further strengthening the therapeutic alliance.

“That’s why I think the relationship has been shown to be impactful in this analysis – because, really, the whole intervention is designed for us to establish the trust and rapport that’s needed for someone to go into an alternative consciousness safely,” Davis said.

Considering that psychedelics carry a stigma as Schedule I drugs under the Controlled Substances Act, efforts to minimize negative experiences in future studies of their therapeutic potential should be paramount – and therapy is critical to creating a supportive environment for patients, the authors said.

This study ideally will help clearly position psychedelics treatment as a psychotherapeutic intervention moving forward – rather than its primary purpose being administration of a drug, Levin said.

“This isn’t a case where we should try to fit psychedelics into the existing psychiatric paradigm – I think the paradigm should expand to include what we’re learning from psychedelics,” Levin said. “Our concern is that any effort to minimize therapeutic support could lead to safety concerns or adverse events. And what we showed in this study is evidence for the importance of the alliance in not just preventing those types of events, but also in optimizing therapeutic outcomes.”

This work was supported by the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, funded by the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, the RiverStyx Foundation and private donors. It was also supported by the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education (CPDRE), funded by anonymous donors.

Additional co-authors are Rafaelle Lancelotta, Nathan Sepeda and Theodore Wagener of Ohio State, and Natalie Gukasyan, Sandeep Nayak, Frederick Barrett and Roland Griffiths of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University, where Davis is an affiliate.

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0300501 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

The therapeutic alliance between study participants and intervention facilitators is associated with acute effects and clinical outcomes in a psilocybin-assisted therapy trial for major depressive disorder

‘Magic mushrooms’ for therapy? Vets help sway conservatives

By LINDSAY WHITEHURST

Matthew Butler, who spent 27 years in the Army, holds a 2014 photograph of himself during his last deployment in Kabul Afghanistan, on Wednesday, March 30, 2022, in Sandy, Utah. Butler is now one of the military veterans in several U.S. states who are helping convince conservative lawmakers to take cautious steps toward allowing the therapeutic use of hallucinogenic mushrooms and other psychedelic drugs. The therapeutic used of so-called magic mushrooms and other psychedelic drugs is making inroads in several U.S. states, including some with conservative leaders, as new research points to their therapeutic value and military veterans who have used them to treat post-traumatic stress disorder become advocates. 

(AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)


SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Matthew Butler spent 27 years in the Army, but it took a day in jail to convince him his post-traumatic stress disorder was out of control.

The recently retired Green Beret had already tried antidepressants, therapy and a support dog. But his arrest for punching a hole in his father’s wall after his family tried to stage an intervention in Utah made it clear none of it was working.

“I had a nice house, I had a great job, whatever, but I was unable to sleep, had frequent nightmares, crippling anxiety, avoiding crowds,” he said. “My life was a wreck.”

He eventually found psychedelic drugs, and he says they changed his life. “I was able to finally step way back and go, ‘Oh, I see what’s going on here. I get it now,’” said Butler, now 52. Today his run-ins with police have ended, he’s happily married and reconciled with his parents.

Butler, who lives in the Salt Lake City suburbs, is among military veterans in several U.S. states helping to persuade lawmakers to study psychedelic mushrooms for therapeutic use.

Conservative Utah has become at least the fourth state over the last two years to approve studying the potential medical use of psychedelics, which are still federally illegal. A string of cities have also decriminalized so-called magic mushrooms and an explosion of investment money is flowing into the arena.

Experts say the research is promising for treating conditions ranging from PTSD to quitting smoking, but caution some serious risks remain, especially for those with certain mental health conditions.

Oregon is so far the only state to legalize the therapeutic use of psilocybin, the psychedelic active ingredient in certain mushrooms. But studying them for therapy has made inroads not only in blue states like Hawaii, Connecticut and Maryland, but also GOP-led Texas, Utah and Oklahoma, which passed a study bill through the state House this year.

The progress stands in contrast to medical marijuana, which Utah lawmakers refused to allow until a ballot measure helped push it through. However, the proposal to study a broad range of psychedelic drugs passed easily this year.

Texas has yet to legalize medical marijuana, but former Republican Gov. Rick Perry helped shepherd through a bill last year to use $1.4 million to fund a study of psilocybin for treating PTSD.

“The stigma attached to psilocybin and most psychedelics dates back to the 60s and 70s. It’s been very hard for them to overcome,” said Democratic Rep. Alex Dominguez, who sponsored the bill. “My approach was, ‘Let’s find the group that all sides claim that they are supportive of.’ And that would be veterans.”

He also heard from conservatives like Perry who support the use of psilocybin to treat PTSD — and let advocates from that end of the political spectrum take the lead publicly.

Maryland also gave bipartisan approval to spending $1 million this year to fund alternative therapies for veterans, including psychedelics. Democratic sponsor Sen. Sarah Elfreth, whose district includes the U.S. Naval Academy, noted the spike in suicides among veterans.

“I don’t envision the VA acting anytime soon,” she said. “We’re at a true crisis level and it’s time for the states to step up.”

Psilocybin has been decriminalized in nearby Washington, D.C., as well as Denver, which decriminalized it in 2019, followed by Oakland and Santa Cruz in California, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

There’s also plenty of venture capital being invested from people who have had positive experiences and are “highly motivated” to invest in psychedelics as treatment, said John Krystal, the chair of psychiatry at Yale University.

Rhode Island lawmakers are weighing a proposal to decriminalize psilocybin this year, and in Colorado there’s an effort to get statewide decriminalization on the ballot. But similar measures have stalled in Statehouses elsewhere, including California and Maine.

Studying psychedelics, though, has gained more traction. In Oklahoma, a bill from Republican Reps. Daniel Pae and Logan Phillips would legalize research on psilocybin.

“I believe the research will show that there is a way to use this drug safely and responsibly, and it could save the lives of thousands of Oklahomans,” Pae said in a statement. The bill passed the House last month and is now under consideration in the Senate.

It’s a stunning turnaround for a field that captivated researchers in the 1950s and 1960s, before mushrooms and LSD became known as recreational drugs. They were federally outlawed during the Nixon administration, sending research to a screeching halt.

New studies, though, have indicated psilocybin could be useful in the treatment of everything from major depression to alcoholism, said Ben Lewis, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Utah Huntsman Mental Health Institute.

“People are referring to this current period of time as the psychedelic Renaissance,” he said. Up to 30% of depression sufferers are considered resistant to current treatment, and there have been few recent leaps forward in drug innovation, he added.

The risk of addiction or overdose is considered low with psychedelics, especially under medical supervision, and while some cardiac conditions can present a physical risk, many people’s physical reactions aren’t dangerous.

But there are serious psychological risks, especially for people with certain forms of mental illness or a family history of conditions like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

“Then there’s a possibility that a high-dose psychedelic experience could sort of trigger that and lead to long-lasting mental health issues,” said Albert Garcia-Romeu, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Classic psychedelics include LSD, mescaline, psilocybin and ayahuasca. Plant-based psychedelics have long been used in indigenous cultures around the world.

Today, their therapeutic use at Johns Hopkins is carefully monitored, Garcia-Romeu said. Patients are rigorously screened and typically have at least three appointments: one for preparation, a second to take the drugs and a third to work through the psychedelic experience.

For Butler, the 2018 arrest at his parents’ home was a turning point. He started researching new ways to deal with the PTSD he has suffered since deploying six times to Iraq and Afghanistan and working in counterterrorism and hostage rescues in Somalia for the U.S. Special Forces before retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 2017.

Eventually he came across ayahuasca, long a part of traditional cultures in South America. Last summer, he took part in a ceremony involving the psychoactive brew, overseen by a woman knowledgeable about its effects. She talked to him as the experience took hold, including a feeling of euphoria, the sight of geometric shapes and a sense he was entering his subconscious.

She spoke to him about his childhood and how the military had shaped his life.

“It really was as simple as having an experienced person who understood the medicine, who understood that subconscious space and understood PTSD. It was as simple as listening to her,” he said.

He credits that single session with getting his PTSD about 80% under control, though he occasionally does another if he finds his symptoms returning.

About two-thirds to three-quarters of people in studies have experienced significant improvements in their symptoms, Garcia-Romeu said. Those are promising results, especially for quitting smoking, where current treatments only work for about one-third of people, he said.

The Food and Drug Administration designated psilocybin a “breakthrough therapy” in 2018, a label that’s designed to speed the development and review of drugs to treat a serious condition. MDMA, often called ecstasy, also has that designation for treatment of PTSD.

How quickly states move from study to wider availability remains to be seen. Connecticut recommended legal medical use only after psilocybin is approved by the FDA, which may take until 2025 or later as the agency works through its process, including risk assessment.

Approval is important to safety as well as access, the Connecticut assessment said — without it, many insurance companies likely wouldn’t cover the treatment, leaving it open only to the wealthy.

In Utah, the study team is expected to complete its work in the fall.

“We’ll see what can and can’t be done,” said Republican Rep. Brady Brammer, who sponsored the bill. “If if they feel like it’s safe, it’ll be an interesting ride.”


Associated Press writers Brian Witte in Annapolis, Maryland; Sean Murphy in Oklahoma City; Susan Haigh in Hartford, Connecticut, and Jim Vertuno in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.

Psychedelic mushrooms for depression: 'This is the one that changed things'

Psychedelic drugs like psilocybin are back in human trials to treat people with mental health conditions. It's a second revolution for a class of drugs shunned by 1960s society. But more research is needed. Here's why.



Psilocybin was shunned by mainstream society in the 1960s as "Substance 1" — dangerous and of no medical use. And for decades, evidence suggesting that psilocybin could be therapeutic lay buried in books. But over the past decade, a resurgence in psychedelic research has yielded new insights, with some labs running human trials.

David Nutt calls it the "brave new world of psychedelic psychiatry." Nutt is a neuro-psycho-pharmacologist and professor at Imperial College London. He suggests psychiatry is slowly emerging from a 30-year dark age, during which anti-depressants were the only accepted medicinal treatment for mental health conditions.

Apart from being costly, Nutt says anti-depressants help only a small percentage of the people who take them. Side effects can include a blunting of the emotions.

"I like to think of it as a force field," says Nutt. "They protect you. They cocoon you from the stresses of life, which are many and repeated, and they allow your brain to heal."

But the effects only last as long as you take anti-depressants. When you come off them, you can experience severe withdrawal symptoms. And perhaps more importantly, anti-depressants do not deal with the root cause of depression or anxiety, says Nutt.

Meanwhile, psilocybin appears to offer a different and longer-lasting alternative.

Nutt and his team of researchers have been concluding a second human trial of psilocybin to treat depression.

Read more: Coronavirus and mental health: 'We are not made for social isolation'

Neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt warns of severe withdrawal symptoms of anti-depressants.

Controlling the trip

Volunteers with moderate to severe depression are given a 25 milligram (0.000881849 ounce) pill of psilocybin. That's a macrodose which causes a powerful, deep "trip" for about four hours.

But it's not like hippies tripping in a field. The tests are done in a controlled environment, with two therapists assigned to each volunteer.

"Depressed people having a trip aren't having fun," says Nutt. "They are often going back to the most horrible experiences of their lives and reliving things which they've often forgotten but which are causing the depression."

The therapists prepare the volunteers for what they might experience. They hold the volunteers' hands during the test to provide a sense of security. And after the trip, the therapists help the volunteers make sense of the experience through psychotherapy.

"This is not something you just go and do outdoors by yourself," says Nutt. "This is serious medicine. This is powerful medicine." A glimpse of the first clinical trial at Imperial College London can be found in this youtube video:

Rapid and lasting effects

In one trial, 20 patients who had not responded to treatment for depression, were given two doses of psilocybin one week apart. Nutt's team found rapid and long-lasting improvements in the patients' health. None of the patients required traditional anti-depressants for the first five weeks after the tests. Six months later, they had follow-up tests that showed many of their symptoms had stayed away.

But there was no control group—no way to compare the results directly. A team under Robin Carhart-Harris at the Centre for Psychedelics Research in London is now running similar tests with such controls in place.

Patient testimonies, available online, report huge improvements in health. One patient, called Andy, says that all standard treatments had failed him. No therapy had helped him find an underlying cause for his depression. But he says psilocybin gave him a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle. It was "the one that changed things."

Read more: Happiness, where are you?


Andy participated in the first ever clinical trial of psilocybin to treat depression

Science and society

It's been difficult for some health professionals and scientists to accept any therapeutic benefits of psilocybin despite the evidence.

For decades, doctors have told people how dangerous these drugs are—and those dangers or risks are real when psychedelics are taken in uncontrolled, so-called "recreational," settings.

In controlled settings, however, psychedelics could offer patients, suffering from depression or addiction, treatments that work better for them than traditional anti-depressants, or plain will power.

"They should at least have the opportunity of treatments which might work for them," says Nutt. "To deny them that on the basis of some kind of moral philosophy against drugs is, I think, unethical."

Stephen Ross, a psychiatrist based in New York, has had to confront that belief himself. In his entire medical training at the University of California, Los Angeles, there was no mention of psychedelics.

Psilocybin is the active ingredient found inside magic mushrooms

Psychedelics buried deep in literature

Then in 2006, Ross heard about a conference, marking the 100th birthday of Albert Hofmann, a Swiss scientist who discovered lysergic acid diethylamide and synthesized psilocybin.

Ross was puzzled. "Why would anybody be celebrating the discovery of LSD? All I had heard about LSD from my training was that it was a bad, dangerous drug."

So, he started looking into the medical history and found a huge body of research hidden in plain sight. The 1950s, 60s and 70s were a rich time for psychedelic research. Among the reports Ross found, there was a strong focus on using LSD to treat alcoholism. As an addiction psychiatrist, Ross' curiosity was piqued.

But with LSD shunned as a Substance 1 drug, it was a struggle to get funding for research.

To increase his chances at success, Ross turned to psilocybin, a psychedelic that like LSD had been branded a Substance 1 drug, but it was one with "less cultural baggage." And he turned to a condition with less social stigma than depression or addiction: cancer.

Read more: Never tried LSD - the drug my father discovered

Stephen Ross is conducting clinical trials of psilocybin on terminal cancer patients.

Psilocybin and cancer
"Cancer is a very scary thing in any culture. Cancer patients start to have this existential distress, where they feel hopeless, that life is meaningless, pointless," says Ross, now associate professor at New York University's School of Medicine. "And there's no treatment for that kind of existential distress."

In 2016, Ross completed the first human trial with psilocybin to reduce depression and anxiety in 29 patients with terminal cancer.

He says that psilocybin helps people reconceptualize cancer as "a part of their life," rather than it being their whole life.

"A lot of patients come out of the experience and say that they connected to this profound sense of love or universal love or God's love, or that the feeling of love was profoundly healing to them," says Ross.

Read more: Differences in personality: What psychiatrists can learn from mice to treat depression

The spheres show connectivity inside a human brain.

Under the influence of a psychedelic drug like psilocybin, more and more neurons interact with each other. These neurons may not have been interacting before because the mind was in a rut or fixed pattern of thinking. Psychedelics add flexibility. A placebo is shown to compare how evident the effect is.

Careful, it's a new revolution
Psychedelics could also be used to treat other conditions, including anorexia, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and personality disorders.

But Ross says we still need to be careful with psychedelics. He says there may be a bias among researchers—after years of struggling to get psychedelic studies funded, combined with the excitement of new results—to believe that psilocybin will cure everything.

Their work is finding a new audience and perhaps a new form of acceptance, with popular science books out on the shelves. But researchers say there is a lot more work to be done before psychedelics can be used in medicinal treatment.

"I'm not saying that psychedelics should be used clinically yet at all. We need more research," says Ross. And even then, psychedelic treatments may not be for everyone. Researchers warn against using psychedelic treatments with patients suffering a psychosis, or young people whose brains are still developing.

Link to the documentary: A New Understanding: The Science of Psilocybin

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