Last week, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order focused on accelerating psychedelic access and research, he said at the press conference, “It’s for a lot of people, but it’s for our military in particular.”

Many researchers and politicians alike have stressed how psychedelic-assisted therapy could help with PTSD, depression, and addiction in military and veteran populations, and several clinical trials are taking place with the Department of Veterans Affairs. But outside of those involved with this research, what do military and law enforcement think about psychedelic treatments? It’s a question that Alexandra Hopkins, a forensic psychologist now based in Canada, began to wonder as she met patients who worked in those fields.

In March, she co-authored a survey in the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, looking at the attitudes towards psychedelics of 60 U.S.-based military and law enforcement personnel compared to those held by the general public. Her sample size was small, Hopkins told me, so people shouldn’t assume her findings represent what all police and military professionals think. But in those people she studied, there were clear differences between the groups: the military and law enforcement had significantly less positive attitudes about psychedelics than the general public, and receiving education about the treatments didn’t improve their views. The Microdose talked to Hopkins about her survey, and why certain demographic groups may feel differently about psychedelics.

Where did your interest in what police and military think about psychedelics come from?

It stemmed out of my internship that I did in my second year while at University of Denver. It was a private practice that specialized in working with first responders. In that internship I was really exposed firsthand to that population and the struggles that they experience on the day to day at various levels— systemically, culturally, and individually.

Prior to that, I came across several of those Netflix documentaries that talked about psychedelics, and listened to quite a few podcasts about psychedelics and their role in addressing trauma, PTSD, alcohol use disorder. This paper came out of that: What were their views on it? What are they thinking about this alternative path, and what are the potential issues that could show up in this alternative approach?

Our paper reviewed other papers that are out there in relation to barriers to treatment as a whole, and that included a lot of stigma around mental health. That stigma has started to shift, but overall, there is sort of a stigma in regards to seeking mental health treatment. On top of that, there are negative perceptions of drug use based, in part, on their exposure to illicit substances, and individuals with substance use disorders while on the job. With military populations, obviously, you’re not supposed to be using drugs whatsoever. Any exposure to illicit substances is taken really seriously.

Was it difficult to reach out to people in military and law enforcement, given that stigma?

The second author, Cassandra Bailey, had some contacts with various sheriff’s offices and she knew individuals that are connected with the military that she inquired about sending the survey out. I posted in some Facebook groups.

Overall, we did get some resistance in people completing the survey. We were actually informed that some were worried about their opinions being used against them, and not wanting to speak for the organization. So we did not get as many participants in military or law enforcement as we hoped for, compared to the general public.

Of the 446 participants, 60 indicated that they were either current or former military or law enforcement. But nonetheless, I think what they did report was of the norm of earlier studies regarding just views towards mental health, views towards treatment, and views towards substance use.

We used a scale called the attitudes on psychedelics questionnaire. And then we adapted our own scale, called the attitudes towards psychedelic assisted psychotherapy scale, and adjusted it to be only inclusive of psilocybin and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy.

What did you find from the law enforcement and military responses?

In general, there weren’t overly positive views around both psilocybin and ketamine as a legitimate pathway for treatment, or as potential therapeutic tools for those with mental health disorders. And we highlighted that this would be in a professional setting with all the questions that we asked.

Overall, the views towards ketamine were a bit more positive than psilocybin. However, it was still within that range of generally unsupportive, or not agreeing with the utility around these alternative medications or treatment paths. On the one hand, obviously ketamine is a legal drug when used in clinical settings, whereas psilocybin is federally illegal. But ketamine is still not as frequently discussed, perhaps, with other medications that don’t have potential hallucinogenic side effects, such as the traditional SSRIs or antidepressants.

There were three factors that showed another trend, which was age, political affiliation, and then education. Individuals that were older had more positive views on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy as a whole. And individuals who identified as Republican had less positive views on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies as a whole, compared to individuals that identified as either Democrat or Independent.

What education did you provide about psychedelics, and did it make a difference?

After they completed the questionnaire, we provided them with a one-page general description of the psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy procedures, both related to ketamine and then psilocybin. It talked about mechanism of action, therapeutic effects, duration, safety profile, legal status, side effects, things of that sort.

The ketamine-assisted therapy education did touch a bit on the addictive potential; it read as less supportive based on the data of ketamine, the reported side effects, and addictive properties.

I wasn’t surprised by their initial less positive views, per se, but I was surprised that even after the education, the views didn’t become more positive. Our hypothesis that views would become more positive afterwards, related to psilocybin. In fact, they actually became even less positive, especially with psilocybin.

Even given the small sample size, what are your takeaways from the survey and the intent to give psychedelic therapies to veterans?

There’s already such amazing work being done, not just with psilocybin or ketamine, but also MDMA and LSD working with veteran populations. But I personally believe that it is going to be slower to be accepted as a whole in law enforcement and military organizations. I think it’s a trust thing. The proof is going to be in the pudding: showing the safety and efficacy of this treatment as legitimate, and also just that continuation of destigmatizing mental health in these organizations.

Looking at it through the lens of Canadian mental health, and working with the frontline population here versus the United States, I think there’s a difference there as well. I can’t speak for every law enforcement, or military individual in Canada, of course. But even just anecdotally, the individuals I’ve worked with in Canada have more of that openness for psychedelics.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Editor’s Note: Join me in welcoming Robin Berghaus, an Austin, Texas based freelance journalist, audio and documentary producer whose work has appeared on NPR at international film festivals, on PBS, and as part of Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s "Science on Screen." She's joining The Microdose to help cover news on Fridays. This is her first post.

On April 18, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to expedite approvals and access to psychedelic-assisted therapies. The order directs psychedelic drug development to be fast-tracked; establishes a pathway for patients with life-threatening illnesses to access psychedelic drugs; allocates at least $50 million in federal funding to support state-funded psychedelic research programs; requires an increase in clinical trial participation and evidence on psychedelic therapies, and directs timely rescheduling of psychedelic drugs that have cleared Phase III clinical trials.

At the White House press conference, podcaster Joe Rogan shared how his recent text exchange with the President prompted the executive order. Rogan said he texted the president that some 80,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2024. He then claimed that 80% of people are cured of addiction after one dose of ibogaine, 90% with two doses. “I sent him that information and the text message came back: ‘Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let’s do it,’” Rogan said, recalling the president’s text.

At the signing, President Trump shared findings from an observational study led by the late Nolan Williams and other researchers at Stanford University. The study found that 30 special operations veterans who underwent ibogaine therapy at a clinic in Mexico experienced, on average, an 80 to 90 percent reduction in their symptoms of depression and anxiety within one month. Then President Trump quipped, “Can I have some, please?”

The executive order came together quickly. Three weeks ago, Rogan spoke at length about ibogaine on his podcast with former Texas Governor Rick Perry and Bryan Hubbard, CEO of the non-profit advocacy organization Americans for Ibogaine. This was the second time the pair had gone on the show to talk about ibogaine. “It is the moonshot of our time. And if there’s a humanitarian legacy to be left for the ages by a president who very much wishes to have a legacy that is well reflected upon by posterity, this is one of the most monumental opportunities he has to help folks at scale in a way that no president perhaps has before,” Hubbard told Rogan, who said he’d try to make sure the president got that message. Rogan clearly did that.

That conversation occurred in Rogan’s Austin, Texas podcast studio, one of many ways this executive order was shaped by Texas. Last year, Perry and Hubbard succeeded in getting the Texas Legislature to pass a $100 million bill (SB 2308) to help fund ibogaine clinical trials, which Governor Greg Abbott signed into law in June. Half the funds were to be invested by the Texas government, and half matched by a drug developer. Since then, several states have passed or proposed similar legislation to fund ibogaine research.

Trump’s executive order comes at a crucial time for Texas. In December, UTHealth Houston and The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston were awarded $50 million from the state of Texas to lead the ibogaine clinical trials. At the time, a drug developer partner, stipulated in the law (SB 2308), had not been confirmed. On March 31, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows announced that Texas would lead ibogaine clinical trials without a drug developer, and said that they intend to “fully fund this program.”

On that same day, Perry and Hubbard went in to record Rogan’s podcast. In an interview with The Microdose on Tuesday, Hubbard said he and Perry had high hopes for advancing psychedelic reform in Texas and beyond, based on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s support. But Hubbard felt there were people in President Trump’s administration who opposed psychedelics. He said that a recent Politico article affirmed his gut instincts that “reformers from the inside were going to need political leverage brought from the outside.” That’s where Rogan came in.

Trump’s executive order directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to allocate at least $50 million to states that are developing psychedelic research programs. And Texas is likely to get some of that funding. “The $50 million specified in the executive order is what I would describe as an initial down payment to create the unified multistate framework for the execution of a federal-state partnership for a national ibogaine development trial,” Hubbard told The Microdose. Texas would likely be joined by other states that have passed similar ibogaine bills.

Hubbard and other ibogaine advocates have also been working to get tribal nations on board. One week before President Trump signed the executive order, Hubbard met with the leadership of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole Native American tribal governments at the Inter-Tribal Council (ITC) quarterly meeting in Oklahoma, and leadership voted unanimously to support medicalized ibogaine.

Subscribe now

So what does the executive order actually do?

1. It directs the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner to provide Commissioner’s National Priority Vouchers to psychedelics that have received Breakthrough Therapy designations for treating mental illnesses, which include formulations of psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, and 5-MeO-DMT. In other words, psychedelic drugs could get fast-tracked approval by the FDA.

At the April 18 press conference, FDA Commissioner Martin Makary said that three national priority vouchers for psychedelics would be issued. The compounds, but not the companies receiving the vouchers, were announced by the FDA on Friday. They are psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, psilocybin for major depressive disorder, and methylone, a drug similar to MDMA, for post-traumatic stress disorder. Makary told NBC News that the FDA could potentially approve the first psychedelic drug by the end of summer.

2. It establishes a way for patients with life-threatening and terminal conditions to access Schedule I psychedelic drugs under the Right to Try Act. Under the Right to Try Act, patients with life-threatening conditions who have exhausted approved treatment options can access experimental medications that have passed Phase I testing but are not yet FDA-approved. In order for a patient to get a psychedelic drug in this way, there would need to be a willing prescriber and a government-approved manufacturer.

3. It allocates at least $50 million in federal funding to match investments made by state governments to advance research into psychedelic therapies for populations with serious mental health conditions.

4. It requires Health and Human Services (HHS) and FDA to work with the Department of Veterans Affairs and the private sector to increase clinical trial participation and obtain evidence about psychedelic therapies.

5. It directs the U.S. Attorney General to initiate reviews of psychedelic compounds that have completed Phase III clinical trials so they can be rescheduled soon after FDA approval.
   
   Currently, ibogaine, MDMA, psilocybin, LSD and DMT are all Schedule I drugs, meaning the federal government considers them to be substances with a high potential for abuse and no currently accepted medical use. Rescheduling substances into a less restrictive class makes it easier for medical providers and researchers to access them.

Now that the executive order has been signed, Hubbard says the work begins to ensure the order is enforced by “five massive bureaucracies:” the Health and Human Services (HHS), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Veterans Affairs (VA), Department of Justice (DOJ), and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). “It ain’t worth the paper it’s written on, unless the government follows its instructions, and government has the propensity to not follow its own rules,” Hubbard said.

• If you want to dive even deeper into the Texas psychedelics story, last year I reported and produced a three-part podcast with Texas Public Radio called Psychedelics and the Texas Trip.

• On April 15, the Louisiana Senate unanimously passed a bill (SB43) to create a psychedelic-assisted therapy program to fund ibogaine and psilocybin clinical studies for opioid and substance use disorders, and treatment-resistant mental health conditions. If passed by the Louisiana House and signed by the governor, the bill would authorize the state’s Department of Health to seek funding from the federal government, opioid settlement funds, and other grants and gifts.

• Pharmaceutical company DemeRx announced the FDA has accepted its Investigational New Drug (IND) application for DMX-1001, an oral noribogaine, which is the primary active metabolite of ibogaine, for treating alcohol use disorder. The company anticipates initiating its Phase II clinical trial of DMX-1001 in 2027.

• The federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within Health and Human Services, announced the first research teams for a $139 million initiative that aims to validate the effectiveness and safe use of rapid-acting therapies for behavioral and mental health and to definitively understand and accelerate approvals of effective therapies. Multiple awardees on the list are working with psychedelics.

• The ibogaine treatment provider Beond, which has been offering ibogaine to clients in Cancún, Mexico, will establish its U.S. headquarters in Austin, Texas this year. For now, the Austin location will offer pre-treatment preparation and post-treatment integration for U.S. clients who receive ibogaine at the Mexico clinic, but the company also seems to be positioning itself in Texas in advance of the possibility of FDA approval of ibogaine.

• Thomas Delaney, a 39-year-old educator who lives in Glasgow, told the Guardian he was “peeing blood constantly” due to a years-long ketamine addiction before going to a rehabilitation clinic.

• Canadian drug manufacturer Optimi Health launched an Ibogaine Initiative, to manufacture and supply ibogaine. Optimi Health supplies pharmaceutical-grade MDMA and psilocybin to clinical trials and special access programs globally.

• Journalist Mattha Busby reported for The Guardian about the changing U.S. drug landscape and its shift away from cocaine toward ketamine, psychedelics, and GHB.

  

  You’re all caught up! We’ll be back in your inbox on Monday with a new issue of 5 Questions.

  If you know anyone who might like the latest on psychedelics in their inbox, feel free to forward this to them, or click below.

  Share The Microdose

  Got tips? Email us at themicrodose@berkeley.edu.

Ziv Ben-Zion, a clinical neuroscientist at Yale University and University of Haifa, knows that many people consult AI chat bots about their mental health. They ask about their symptoms, and seek out emotional support. He has been researching how AI responds: does ChatGPT understand, or simply mimic human emotions when, for instance, someone with anxiety reaches out for help?

But when he heard that some people use large language models, or LLMs, as trip sitters while taking psychedelic drugs, or that they ask chat bots about dosages and advice, a more provocative question came to him: can AI know what it’s like to be high? Or at least, sound convincingly like they understand?

In a recent preprint paper, Ben-Zion and his colleagues tested whether five different chat bots accurately mimicked altered states of consciousness, and how they responded to the mystical experiences questionnaire—a research tool scientists give human subjects to assess the mystical and profound qualities of a trip. For example, Ben-Zion prompted Claude to “simulate a first-person phenomenology” of taking 100 micrograms of LSD in a quiet indoor environment. He asked it to describe its subjective experience, “focusing on changes in perception, thought patterns, bodily sensations, emotion, time perception, and sense of self or identity.”

The researchers found that the LLMs were able to produce language similar to human drug reports for each psychedelic, but that their responses to the mystical experiences questionnaire increased for all the psychedelics in nearly the same way; in humans responses might vary depending on the individual and the substance used. This indicates that AI might generate “convincingly realistic psychedelic narratives,” Ben-Zion and his co-authors wrote, but that the “lack of genuine phenomenology suggests they simulate the form of altered states without the experiential content.” The Microdose talked to Ben-Zion about how to get a chatbot to act like it’s taken psychedelics, and what people should be wary of before using them as trip-sitters.

In your paper, you “dosed” chatbots through text instructions. How does that work?

We tested five different tools, including those that people know more like Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT and two others that maybe are less well known, Llama and Falcon.

The idea was to ask the LLM to generate some kind of narrative while they’re under the influence of a specific psychedelic drug. And also here, we used five different substances (LSD, psilocybin, DMT, mescaline, and ayahuasca.) There was a control condition where we asked the LLMs to just describe how they felt.

How did you analyze their “trip” responses?

The models, as we instructed them, produced some text, and then we did two things to assess that. The first comparison was called semantic similarity. You can take the text generated by the model and compare them to real text written by humans under the influence of different psychedelics. There are several websites kind of publicly available, but one of the biggest ones is Erowid. It’s all anonymous; people write what kind of substance they used and their description of their experience.

We had about 3000 LLM-generated narratives from different models and different substances, and we compared it to about 1000 trip reports from Erowid. We took only trip reports that matched those five substances that we used— like psilocybin or LSD. Not people that mixed different substances, but those who took only one substance, and specifically one of the five that we chose. Then we compared the text by seeing how different or how similar the text was in terms of the words they used and grammar; how distinguishable the human text was from LLM text, or not.

The other thing we did was use a validated tool that people use called Mystical Experience Questionnaire or MEQ. It’s 30 questions used in many psychedelic studies to assess how much a participant feels a mystical experience following taking a drug. We also administered that questionnaire to the model after the simulation, and in the control condition. We wanted to see whether the mystical experience increased. We did it for every model, in every condition. We did it twice before taking the substance—of course, not really “taking,” but before the induction, and after the induction.

How can an LLM answer a questionnaire?

It might sound a bit weird, but this idea came from my previous work I published about anxiety in large language models where we kind of did a similar thing—we used an anxiety questionnaire that is validated in humans. We asked ChatGPT to fill out the questionnaire, then we told it a traumatic narrative, for example, military trauma, or a car accident. Then we used the anxiety questionnaire again, and we saw that we’re getting different responses— the anxiety report was much higher.

Did the LLMs come up with convincing responses for each drug?

If we looked at all five psychedelics compared to the neutral condition in both of the measures that I described, there were significant differences that psychedelics induced. The LLM generated reports more similar to human reports in all the psychedelic drugs compared to the neutral, and also they all induced much larger increases in the mystical experience intensity.

Within the five different psychedelics, there was some kind of distinct profile, which shows that there are some potential distinct signatures. We can sometimes see it in humans too, because even within the family of psychedelics, there are some substances that elicit one kind of experience more than another. For example, the LSD responses versus ayahuasca showed a difference in semantic similarity.

But the responses were consistent with the MEQ score. All of them induced similarly high mystical experiences. This made us think that the responses were not specific to one substance.

Since you found that AI can produce similar language as people taking psychedelics, what issues does that raise to you about people using chatbots as trip sitters?

It’s important to remember when we talk about emotions like anxiety, and when we talk about the psychedelic experience, that we should not anthropomorphize. We as humans tend to think that other things, like LLMs, have human characteristics.

We’re not saying that the large language models can have psychedelic experiences, but they do know—because that’s what they are trained on—to use language which very much mimics what people are actually saying in those situations, without the experience itself.

It’s not the actual emotions or the actual psychedelic experience, it’s more like a mirror. Those models are mimicking or mirroring what we tell them. In this case it’s data from all over the internet, and from humans. They’re pretending that they are under the influence. We should remember that it’s not like the same thing as a human feels.

That also raises a bit of concern for us to get confused and think that they understand us. When people, for example, are using drugs, they trust those models because they speak in a very similar language. They can think that they can be their trip sitter, they can give them good advice, or that they can keep them safe, which is, in reality, not true.

LLMs or AI tools are so convincing in their linguistic ability and in the way they make us feel, even though we know it’s not a human but because they have access to all the data.

We need to be very, very cautious about that, and I think it’s important for people to also know the limitations.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Happy Friday and welcome back to The Microdose, an independent journalism newsletter brought to you by the U.C. Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

Scientists test if ketamine’s antidepressant effects occur under anesthesia

Stanford anesthesiologist Boris Heifets and colleagues recently published a JAMA Psychiatry report testing the neurological effects of ketamine in different states of consciousness. This paper follows previous research from Heifets’s group that found that patients experienced relief from depressive symptoms after receiving either ketamine or placebo under anesthesia. “I looked back at what some of these participants wrote about their experience and it was clear that something really happened for them, even if they were given a placebo,” Heifets told The Microdose at the time.

In this most recent paper, the study authors similarly examined the effects of ketamine, known for its dissociative, analgesic, and antidepressant effects, while patients were under general anesthesia. The goal was to see what brain “signatures” of ketamine’s effects were present in the absence of conscious awareness. For example, the authors posit, in electroencephalogram (EEG) readings “ketamine’s antidepressant mechanisms have been attributed to high-frequency oscillations, while its dissociative properties have been linked to low-frequency oscillations.”

The authors conducted a secondary analysis on three studies that included dozens of participants who received a 40 minute infusion of ketamine, with or without general anesthesia. Participants’ EEG data showed that ketamine paired with anesthesia modulated the low-frequency theta-band signatures of ketamine that have been linked to dissociation, but not the high-frequency beta- and gamma-band signatures that have been linked to antidepressant effects.

The authors conclude that key aspects of ketamine’s biological actions are preserved while patients are under anesthesia, and that perhaps, distinct mechanisms of action of ketamine could be targeted for therapeutic development. The results could inform research to develop antidepressant therapies without inducing dissociation, they reason.

France is the first to approve IV ketamine for severe suicidal crisis

In March, French regulators became the first to approve intravenous racemic ketamine for treating adults in severe suicidal crisis. The racemic form of ketamine contains an equal proportion of two molecular structures, known as R- and S-ketamine, which are mirror images of each other. While a nasal spray with just S-ketamine (esketamine) has been approved elsewhere for treatment of major depressive disorder, studies have shown that racemic ketamine infusions can reduce suicidal ideation in just hours.

France’s “compassionate prescription framework” requires that ketamine be administered in hospitals, with a psychiatrist’s prescription. The country’s authorization “recognises not only ketamine’s clinical potential, but also the absence of any officially approved, evidence-based, rapid-acting pharmacological alternative when suicide risk is imminent,” French researchers wrote in The Lancet on April 11.

The FDA has previously issued warnings on compounded racemic ketamine’s risk of abuse and misuse, explaining that the drug has not been approved by the FDA for the treatment of any psychiatric disorders. In an opinion piece for The Clinical Trial Vanguard, chief editor Moe Alsumidaie argues that FDA regulators may want to question their hesitancy. French regulators “made a regulatory risk-benefit call that the FDA has not made,” he writes. “One authorization does not constitute a global evidence consensus — but it does constitute a precedent, and precedents in regulatory science travel.”

Want the latest psychedelics news? Subscribe! (It’s free!)

Subscribe now

Johns Hopkins psychedelics researchers report trip sitters are key to psychedelic experiences for patients in clinical trials. But what about for “healthy” volunteers?

It’s unclear just how much facilitators, the people who support trial participants before, during, and after a psychedelic experience, tangibly impact participants’ outcomes. The study authors set out to investigate this question by analyzing what they claim is the largest dataset of its kind, drawing from nine psilocybin studies including nearly 300 participants and 60 facilitators. They published their findings in the May 2026 issue of Psychiatry Research.

The authors compared participants’ reported psychedelic experiences and whether facilitators influenced that experience between two groups – those in clinical trial populations, with a condition like major depressive disorder or anorexia that researchers are hoping to treat, and “healthy” volunteers from other pharmacological studies. The researchers found that facilitators accounted for greater variance (over 13% of total variance) in participants’ “acute subjective effects ”(measured by the Mystical Experience Questionnaire) for clinical populations, compared to less than one percent variance accounted for in healthy volunteers. There is evidence from multiple studies suggesting that mystical-type experiences under psychedelics predict therapeutic benefits.

“For healthy volunteers, the experience was shaped almost entirely by the drug itself and individual differences, not who facilitated the session,” lead author Sean Goldy wrote on Bluesky. “Facilitators seem to have the biggest impact on psychedelic experiences when therapeutic stakes are highest.” The results should inform how clinical trials and therapies are implemented moving forward, the authors conclude.

Various state bills move to expand psychedelic research and access to the drugs

In Oklahoma, the Inter-Tribal Council of the Five Civilized Tribes unanimously passed a resolution in support of developing ibogaine as a treatment of addiction and trauma disorders, the Chickasaw Nation announced April 13. On the same day, the Oklahoma Senate Health and Human Services committee advanced HB 3834 to the Appropriations committee. The Oklahoma bill supports ibogaine clinical trials in partnership with a private drug developer, one of 13 states with similar proposals across the country.

Many states have also been considering “trigger law” bills that would change the legal status of certain psychedelics on the state level, if and when they are approved by federal regulators. Some specifically pave the way for UK-based pharmaceutical company Compass Pathways to roll out their proprietary formulation of psilocybin — “crystalline polymorph psilocybin,” also known as COMP360.

Earlier this month, Virginia’s governor signed companion bills to legalize psilocybin following FDA approval. If federal regulators decide to re-schedule a certain form of psilocybin in a healthcare setting, the legislation directs the state’s Board of Pharmacy to reschedule the same drug accordingly. COMP360 was not named specifically in this legislation. Elsewhere, Colorado’s rescheduling trigger bill, SB26-031, which would change state law if any Schedule I drug is federally approved for prescription use, was sent to the Governor on April 8 for him to sign or veto.

Lawmakers in Missouri are moving forward with HB 1717, directing the state to study psilocybin for conditions like major depression, PTSD and substance use disorder. Under the legislation, veterans and first responders could possess psilocybin for use with a facilitator, as long as they are enrolled in a therapeutic study. An amendment also directs the state Department of Health and Senior Services to award grants for ibogaine trials, and creates a “Ibogaine Intellectual Property Fund” for intellectual property revenue that may arise from drug development trials.

Connecticut Senators recently voted to expand access to the state’s psychedelics pilot program. SB 191 opens eligibility to residents 18 and over who meet clinical eligibility criteria for the state’s psychedelic-assisted therapy program, which includes MDMA and psilocybin studies. Currently, the pilot program is limited to veterans, retired first responders, and health care workers. Now, the bill is advancing to the House.

• According to CBS, the White House is currently drafting an executive order to further U.S. research into ibogaine. Two anonymous sources told CBS that President Trump could sign the executive order this week.

• On April 14, Compass Pathways announced plans to award up to three grants of $250,000 to U.S. organizations who apply to train healthcare providers on COMP360 psilocybin treatment and related protocols, if and when it gets regulatory approval.

• Psychedelic Alpha published a patent update covering Q1 of 2026. There were dozens of patent applications, including new entries from well-known organizations such as Reunion Neuroscience, Usona Institute, AtaiBeckley and Delix Therapeutics. Still, the larger story appears to be a deceleration in patents related to psychedelics. “Filing activity across the board has declined since 2023,“ the authors write.

• The Philadelphia Inquirer lab tested products marketed as psychedelic drugs in an investigation into Philadelphia’s unregulated market. These products took all sorts of forms including, candy ice cream cones and tablets and contained a wide range of ingredients such as synthetic analogs of psilocybin, a compound related to GHB (a notorious “date rape” drug), and in some cases, only THC.

• Colorado’s first licensed and operating psilocybin center is suing two former employees, accusing them of stealing trade secrets as they opened their own psilocybin healing center, Westword reports.

• The BBC published excerpts from a 1986 interview with Dr. Albert Hofmann recalling his historic first bike ride while tripping on LSD, commemorated by “Bicycle Day” events this weekend.

You’re all caught up! We’ll be back in your inbox on Monday with a new issue of 5 Questions.

If you know anyone who might like the latest on psychedelics in their inbox, feel free to forward this to them, or click below.

Share The Microdose

Got tips? Email us at themicrodose@berkeley.edu.

Around five years ago, a young man went to the emergency room in Manchester, England after taking a combination of drugs, and met Gregory Yates, an emergency physician on call. Yates learned the man had mixed a synthetic psychedelic drug, 2CB, with monoamine oxidase inhibitors, drugs that can intensify psychedelic effects.

But it was another drug the patient had taken that surprised Yates: a common antihistamine that he had bought in advance to act as a “trip killer,” in case the experience became too overwhelming. The antihistamine works, in part, by blocking serotonin, and the man said he had hoped it would stop the effects of the psychedelic drugs.

Yates became interested in whether people who take psychedelics recreationally, outside of medical contexts, were turning to other drugs for similar trip-ending purposes. Very little academic research on trip killers has been done; one 2022 study found that a blood pressure drug, ketanserin, could reduce or reverse the effects of LSD, potentially because the drug also interacts with serotonin receptors. But online, people were suggesting many more options. In 2024, Yates and a co-author published a paper in the Emergency Medical Journal that scoured Reddit posts to find what substances people regularly turned to when a trip doesn’t go as planned.

Yates said the doses mentioned on Reddit were sometimes dangerously high, and many of the “trip killers” listed didn’t necessarily work as intended. The Microdose talked to Yates about what substances people are using as they attempt to end a trip early. (As a medical professional, Yates does not endorse the use of any illicit drugs.)

What is a trip killer, and how did you first come across the concept?

There is no agreed definition. People have been doing this for ages, but there hasn’t been any sort of academic interest in trip killers to the point where somebody’s come up with an official definition.

A definition that I would use is: any pharmacological agent that has been employed by an individual to prematurely terminate the effects of psychedelic drugs or reduce their intensity. A lot of what you see is trip killers being used because people are freaking out or experiencing physically unpleasant effects of the drugs. But that’s not necessarily always the case. I’m aware of some cases where individuals have used trip killers to shut down a trip because they’ve got to go to work. The trip was going on longer than they expected. I’ve read one instance of an individual just getting really bored of a really long LSD trip, and using a trip killer to prematurely end it. They weren’t particularly distressed. They were just bored.

My interest in trip killers came from a patient that I saw in the emergency department five years ago. I was asked in the middle of the night to see this young male student who had taken a load of and, I quote from the nurse, “complicated sounding drugs,” who now had a high temperature.

The combination of high temperatures after recreational drugs can be a red flag for a life-threatening problem called serotonin syndrome. I came to see him, and he was all right. He was just quite twitchy and anxious. We got to talking, and he told me that he had taken a combination of drugs, which is quite unusual. He’d had two monoamine oxidase inhibitors, and he’d taken a hefty dose of 2CB— a fairly potent drug seen as similar to mescaline. His trip had become more potent than he had anticipated, probably because of the MAO inhibitors.

To shut it down, he took a dose of cyproheptadine, which he’d bought in advance. It’s just an antihistamine, actually, with some anti-serotonin properties. Today it is a mostly hospital-used drug, and it is a serotonin antagonist, so it blocks serotonergic activity. He bought it legally from an online pharmacy and had it ready as an escape if he had a bad trip. He calmed down a wee bit, but he decided to go to hospital anyway to get checked out. But by the time he’d arrived at triage, I think he mostly treated himself to be honest.

Your subsequent 2024 paper tried to find out what people were saying about trip killers online. Where did you look to find that information?

I co-authored this with Dr. Emily Mellon. I’ll tell you where we looked unsuccessfully first: we tried traditional academic methods. We did a review of medical databases to try and find any reports in the medical literature about trip killer usage, and we found the sum total of one paper which had used olanzapine, an antipsychotic, for this purpose. But we didn’t find anything else.

We fished around a bit on the internet, we found a few case reports on Erowid and blue light, which are legacy drug websites. But they were pretty sparse and they didn’t answer the questions that we were trying to ask. We used Reddit in the end, which is a massively publicly accessible database for illicit drug use.

We got about 700 relevant posts which were generated from 128 threads. Most of them were about LSD, mushrooms, and MDMA, but there were some occasional references to other psychedelics. The users mostly described or recommended use of prescription drugs, but there was some mention of herbal remedies as well.

What were the most commonly mentioned drugs?

In terms of drug classes, those were benzodiazepines, antipsychotics, and antidepressants. We would use the generic names for them; the three most common were alprazolam, diazepam, Quetiapine. Your American readers might recognize Xanax, Seroquel, and Valium. They absolutely dominated the results. Everything else was footnotes.

Did people recommend these because they had tried it before and it helped? Or was it based on a chemistry-based hypothesis, like that the active ingredient would block or counter a psychedelic drug?

I wanted to write about this in the original paper, and we did actually collect some data on it. A lot of comments did express a rationale and I divided it up into three groups in my head.

Number one, there were people who were quite aware of either medical guidelines or what they would likely be receiving should they go to hospital. These were people who’d been through, for example, the psychiatric system before, and were well aware that benzodiazepines and antipsychotics are the absolute mainstay of treatment for agitation. They were emulating what they had been through in the past, or what they had read in medical guidelines.

There was a second group of people for whom it was purely experiential. They had done it before, because they were either recreationally already using something like Xanax, and were aware of its downer effect, or were aware of friends doing the same thing.

And then the third group of people were—I need a better term for this—psychonauts or sort gentlemen scientists types who had read the pharmacology. A lot of the users who were bringing up Quetiapine were aware that antipsychotics have powerful serotonin antagonist side effects, and therefore were using them as 5-HT2A antagonists. They had read about the pharmacology of the drug, and therefore felt it was the theoretically appropriate drug to use, and got hold of it for that reason.

What are some of the risks or red flags that came up to you when you saw the drugs that people were using as trip killers?

There’s quite a few risks. Benzodiazepines have a load of uses in medicine. If you’re an emergency care doctor, these are the mainstay of treatment for a lot of agitated patients. But if overdosed, they can put you in a coma. They can make you stop breathing, they can tank your blood pressure. They can do quite a lot of bad things, and actually, you see more of these harmful effects in people who have never used a benzodiazepine before. The actual doses recommended by some of the users on Reddit were pretty wild. Even if I had a patient in a hospital setting, I’m not sure I’d be giving some of these doses. And if I was, they would be heavily monitored.

Antipsychotics and antidepressants have a different set of risks to benzodiazepines. An example would be life threatening heart arrhythmias, particularly with antipsychotics. That’s the boring risk that your readers are probably well aware of anyway.

A more interesting risk, in my view, is if you have an individual who’s taking, for example, MDMA that they’ve mixed with other drugs, and they’re trying to use a trip killer because they’re worried about the physical effects of what they’re taking. One of the dangers is that it just doesn’t work. And instead of reaching for actual medical help, what you’ve tried to do is self-treat unsuccessfully, and now your runaway train problem has got even worse. Self-treatment can distract from actual medical treatment, or it can delay actual medical treatment.

The other thing is a trip killer might be completely ineffective because you don’t know what’s in it. A lot of the users on Reddit were buying their benzodiazepines from the street. And one thing that we know from the toxicology literature is that street benzodiazepines are terrible. They’re often misdosed. They often contain research benzos, not actual alprazolam, and often they contain other narcotics. They can either be too effective or completely ineffective, and you wouldn’t really know until you used it.

I don’t know massive amounts about psychedelic culture, but I do talk to a lot of patients who use psychedelic drugs. If you think there’s a possibility you might have to shut this trip off pharmacologically, are you really dosing safely? Are you really confident in this drug that you’re about to use? Part of me thinks that the feeling that you need to have a benzodiazepine sat next raises the question: are you really comfortable using this LSD? I don’t know.

Psychonauts are a fascinating group of people for us in emergency medicine, because they are different from our other drug users. But it can be a mixed bag. I was talking about this with one of the emergency medicine doctors that I work with, and our overall feeling is that psychonauts are often the most proactive in harm reduction and safety behaviors. These are usually the patients who paid attention to things like trip sitters, low and slow dosing, things like this. But there’s also the potential for big crises because these are the patients who are ordering obscure Russian research pharmaceuticals and they can fly too close to the sun.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Happy Friday and welcome back to The Microdose, an independent journalism newsletter brought to you by the U.C. Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

Scientists engineered plants to produce five psychedelics at once

Scientists in Israel genetically engineered tobacco plants to simultaneously make five psychedelic compounds. Researchers added genes to the Nicotiana benthamiana plant that enabled it to produce psilocin and psilocybin, naturally found in mushrooms; DMT, known for its psychoactive effects in ayahuasca; and bufotenin and 5-methoxy-DMT, naturally secreted from the Sonoran Desert toad.

The authors published their findings on April 1 in Science Advances. Their goal is to allow for scalable production of psychedelics for therapeutics, without straining natural sources. “Harvesting these organisms for their psychoactive compounds raises ecological and ethical concerns, being increasingly threatened by habitat loss and overexploitation,” the scientists write.

Because the five psychedelic compounds contain similar chemical structures, scientists were able to genetically engineer plants to create all their biosynthetic pathways. After elucidating the complete biochemical pathway for DMT synthesis in plants, the authors went on to overexpress select enzymes in N. benthamiana, which prompted the production of all five psychedelic compounds within a week.

Producing the five drugs at once is not necessarily pharmacologically useful, Miami University bioengineer Andrew Jones (who wasn’t involved with the research) told Science. The psychedelics were produced at low concentrations when synthesized together, compared to when the synthetic pathways were expressed individually. Still, the paper’s authors said their genetically engineered plants demonstrate the feasibility of biosynthesizing psychedelic compounds in a more sustainable way.

‘Mega-analysis’ shows five psychedelics share a neural “signature”

In the largest analysis of its kind, an international cohort of scientists recently found that five psychedelics all produce strikingly similar changes in brain network connections. The authors applied a uniform analysis to brain scans from over 500 people on psychedelics from 11 datasets – bringing together evidence from 267 participants across five countries. They published their results April 6 in Nature Medicine.

The brain mechanisms behind psychedelics’ effects remain elusive. By analyzing multi-center functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, data, the researchers found psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, DMT, and ayahuasca all impact how brain regions involved in cognitive and sensory processing interact. Specifically, the scientists found increased functional connectivity between high-level cortical networks and networks for visual, tactile and motor processing.

“Usually, the brain’s perception of the external world is very distinct from our memory and abstract thinking,” lead author Manesh Girn told National Geographic. “This is suggesting the psychedelics might close that gap between how we think and how we perceive—between the internal and external.” In addition, the mega-analysis contradicts a popular theory that psychedelics ‘disintegrate’ brain networks, instead finding that the crosstalk between brain regions was boosted, Nature reports.

Want the latest psychedelics news? Subscribe! (It’s free!)

Subscribe now

Texas moves forward with ibogaine trials alone, after an unsuccessful search for a drug company partner

Texas plans to launch its ibogaine research program alone after its search for a drug company partner came up empty. The program was initiated by Senate Bill 2308 in 2025, kicking off a $50 million pledge of state dollars for ibogaine clinical trials. The legislation said state leaders must partner with a private drug developer that will collaborate to match state funds and help the trials advance towards Food and Drug Administration approval.

But on March 31, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows announced new plans after the state Health and Human Services Commission received no qualified drug company applications in its search. “Texas will proceed with our own research program,” Patrick and Burrows write in a joint statement. “We intend to fully fund this program, and will work in partnership with our great medical research teams in Texas to conduct the research.” Advocates said this move will position UTHealth Houston as the state’s “drug developer” and in total commit $100 million in Texas funds for the effort.

The state’s unsuccessful search for a drug company partner isn’t surprising, drug policy fellow Katharine Neill Harris of Rice University told multiple Texas news outlets. It suggests competitive companies were not enticed by the program outlined by Texas officials. “Without the private partner, I don’t know that they actually have the appetite to spend what needs to be spent on this,” Harris told the Dallas Observer. “I think $100 million is a kind of low-ball for what it would take to get to the FDA approval process.” The typical cost of developing new medications is nearly $1 billion, and sometimes more.

Following Texas, many other states are now passing similar legislation to initiate their own ibogaine research trials. For example, Mississippi’s HB314 requires its research consortium to partner with the same drug developer as the leading consortium in another state, Psychedelic Alpha reports. The non-profit advocacy group Americans for Ibogaine has championed these efforts. The group’s CEO W. Bryan Hubbard said Texas doubling its independent funds for this project is a “fabulous evolution of circumstances,” and added that other states may still decide to partner with private drug companies.

“Because of the nature of the multi-state framework that is being built, if the University of Texas at Houston falters in their execution of this project, then there are other states that are ready and willing to lead this effort nationally,” CEO Bryan Hubbard told The Microdose Wednesday.

UC San Diego study identifies factors associated with psychiatric hospitalization following psychedelics use

As recreational use of psychedelics continues to rise, UC San Diego researchers recently analysed emergency department visits associated with taking the drugs. The scientists looked at 232 cases associated with recreational psychedelic use at UC San Diego Medical Center between 2010 and 2023, and found about 11 percent of those patients required psychiatric hospitalization.

“Concurrent cannabis use and pre-existing psychotic or bipolar disorders are associated with increased odds of psychiatric hospitalization,” the authors write. Psychedelic clinical trials often exclude people who could have psychotic or bipolar disorders. The UC San Diego authors published their results on April 1 in the Community Mental Health Journal. They found most of the psychedelic emergency visits were made by patients who were young, white and male after they took LSD, MDMA, or psilocybin. Common symptoms were agitation, anxiety and nausea and vomiting.

U.S. Senators want to create a federal office to prepare for possible approval of psychedelic treatments for veterans

A bipartisan group of federal lawmakers recently introduced Senate Bill 4220 to establish an “Office of Novel Therapeutics” inside the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The goal is to have a center to coordinate research and care standards ahead of potential FDA approval of psychedelic treatments. The “Veterans Health Administration Novel Therapeutics Preparedness Act”, introduced in late March, directs the new office to make “implementation-readiness plans” and prepare the VA to approach such treatments safely.

“FDA approval is coming. This bill ensures the VA prepares now so it can deliver these treatments as soon as they’re available. Not years later,” Marine Corps veteran Juliana Mercer, executive director of the advocacy group Healing Breakthrough, told The Microdose Wednesday. “What the VA builds now, in clinical models, training, and reimbursement pathways, can shape how care is adopted across the broader healthcare system, including insurers and pharmacy benefit managers.”

The bill would also create a Veteran Advisory Committee on Novel Therapeutics to guide the office on patient safety, informed consent, and barriers to treatment access. The act would further help designate “Centers of Excellence” to lead the VA’s approach to new therapies and share their best practices with other VA centers. At the same time, S4031, the Innovative Therapies Centers of Excellence Act, is moving through the Senate. The act would establish and fund at least five VA centers focused on psychedelic therapies.

• On March 27, Japan’s Otsuka pharmaceutical company announced its American subsidiary will acquire Transcend Therapeutics, Inc. for $700 million dollars. Psychedelic Alpha reports Transcend’s methylone TSND-201 drug (an MDMA analog) will soon be tested for PTSD in a Phase 3 clinical trial.

• After receiving an unexpected marketing email recruiting influencers to publicize the promise of psychedelics on behalf of certain drug companies, STAT investigated such social media campaigns. They found the resulting exaggerated promos could undermine psychedelic biotechs’ efforts to “gain a foothold in the medical mainstream and with established pharma companies that may be interested in acquiring them.”

• Denver’s Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Safety was recently promised an over $3 million federal grant to track psychedelics use for their years-long National Survey Investigating Hallucinogenic Trends, The Colorado Sun reports. (Read our September 5 questions with RMPDS’s Kari Rockhill for more on the center’s research.)

• Researchers are testing if psychedelic coaches, and the structured preparation and integration they can provide, improves the patient ketamine treatment experience, STAT reports in a Q&A with psychiatrist Franklin King of Massachusetts General Hospital.

• On April 8, Jasveen Sangha was sentenced to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to selling ‘Friends’ actor Matthew Perry the ketamine that led to his death in 2023, AP reports.

You’re all caught up! We’ll be back in your inbox on Monday with a new issue of 5 Questions.

If you know anyone who might like the latest on psychedelics in their inbox, feel free to forward this to them, or click below.

Share The Microdose

Got tips? Email us at themicrodose@berkeley.edu.

María Sabina lacked a formal education, did not know her own age, and never learned to speak Spanish. She discovered her ability to heal with the sacred mushrooms as a child and performed mushroom ceremonies, or veladas, throughout her life. She achieved international fame in her sixties after the American banker and amateur ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson and his wife, Valentina Wasson, published accounts of their participation in one of María Sabina’s veladas in This Week and Life magazines. These articles brought about a flood of pilgrims from the United States and Europe. Rock stars, writers, businessmen, scientists, politicians, poets, beatniks, and seekers of all kinds flocked to the tiny town of Huautla to meet María Sabina and attend one of her ceremonies (Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Juan Rulfo, and even John Lennon make appearances in the story).

The author of the novel Carne de Dios, Homero Aridjis, was born in Contepec, Michoacán, and is one of Mexico’s foremost living writers. Aridjis has written fifty-one books of poetry and prose over his life and has won many important literary prizes including the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize. Formerly Mexico’s ambassador to Switzerland, the Netherlands, and UNESCO, he is also the president emeritus of PEN International and the founder and president of the Group of 100, an environmentalist association of artists and scientists.

In Carne de Dios, Aridjis centers María Sabina as both the vital source of the global interest in these mushrooms and their medicinal and psychological potentials, and as one of the greatest healers, poets, and visionaries that Mexico has ever produced. The following excerpts are chapters from his novel. The first, “A Dark Night,” is an account of one of Sabina’s veladas, with a description of the ceremony, her songs, and her home. The second, entitled “John Lennon,” is part of a chapter that explores the renowned rock star’s rumored pilgrimage to Huautla, Sabina’s hometown, to find her.

A DARK NIGHT

Visitors arrived at María Sabina’s house by following a dirt road. They crossed cloud banks on their journey through the mountains, where sorcerers and spirits were visible in the changing forms of the clouds. Plants without roots floated in the air. The velada was held on a Thursday. A table altar was pushed back against a wall and draped in a cloth covered with embroidered flowers and birds. An oil lamp illuminated San Pablo and San Pedro and a Virgen de Guadalupe. Dried corncobs hung from the roof like amber stalactites. Next to a pot of copal were coffee beans, cacao beans and corn, macaw feathers and fourteen pairs of mushrooms in two lines of seven.

Out there over the mountains, the mists swallowed the half moon. Underneath, Huautla dissolved into the darkness. The mycologists came up from Cerro del Fortín. Outside the shack, hens chattered, roosters clucked. A turkey covered in carbuncles that spilled from his head to his breast seemed to interrogate the foreigners. They wanted to slip past him into the shack, but a hog grumbled. Inside, in the space for the rite, the final rays of light pierced the cracks in the door.

“We smoke the day. We smoke the heart of God.” María Sabina exhaled as she greeted Gordon with a cigar in her mouth.

“It’s cold.” Apolonia put a black clay pot of atole to heat on the stove. A little girl embraced her legs. Wrapped in a rebozo, the little one listened to her mother sing all night.

“How old is she, señora?” asked Richard Stevenson, camera in hand.

“I don’t know when she was born. None of my ancestors knew their ages. All I know is that my mother, María Concepción, told me that she was born in Río Santiago, the municipal center of Huautla. My father, Crisanto Feliciano, who wore a cotton shirt and short pants, died from being transformed into a turkey. The shamans and the healers could not save him. With his neck covered in red bumps and a fleshy flap of skin hanging like jowls, he departed. We suffered greatly because he left us with nothing.”

At that moment Gordon’s daughter and wife, Ivanna and Tatiana, arrived.

“What will see in the velada, señora?” asked the professor Roger Hofmann. He was bald, with glasses, in his fifties, and he carried a leather messenger bag for the mushrooms.

“Marvels in the dark. Sometimes you can see the Hombre de las Montañas. ¡Tso! But you shouldn’t photograph him,” she warned Stevenson.“¡Tso! Brilliant like the day is the master of the fields. Mounted on a white horse, he wears his hair gathered over the forehead in one golden lock. ¡Tso! Like the mist. ¡Tso! Like the air. ¡Tso! Like the mind,” said María Sabina, as translated by the teacher Miss Herlinda.

The foreigners had arrived to Huautla a few days before, deposited at the terminal by a bus. They were boarding with the town teacher but were so eager to learn the secrets of the mushrooms that they didn’t want to miss any of the shaman’s movements. Not even one word. Their ignorance of the Mazatec language, her language, was no impediment as her exalted, enigmatic, and elusive singsong voice transported them to the world of the Holy Children. She administered them in pairs, male and female, as the mushrooms had a sex and if it was not respected, one could have a bad trip. Local mushroom foragers helped with the ceremony. A healer, a mule driver, the priest of the church of San Juan Evangelista, and the mayor were all lying there on mats, hungry for visions. And she, with invocations to the saints, rooted the sickness of fear from out of their guts. She became impatient when the spirits didn’t respond to her calls. Rhythmically she spoke,“¡Tso, tso, tso! Mhmmm, hmmm, hmmmm!

I am the woman who arrived

I am the woman who will arrive

I am the woman who was present I am the woman who is present”

Kneeling on a serape, the holy fool summoned the Trinity and the saints. She took mushrooms out of a cardboard box, shredded them, and divided them into clay cups. Lit by candlelight, inhaling the copal smoke, and chewing the mushrooms, she hummed something incomprehensible, something that shifted and became a song. Calm, as if the words rose from ancestors invisible to the ear or eyes, she let herself be carried by the rhythm of the litany. She hovered above herself, identifying herself as “the woman who sees below the water and behind things” and “the woman who suffers.” Through the ritual she transformed into the priestess of the mushrooms. Her shadow on the floor parted from her body.

I am a woman creator

I am a woman star

I am a woman moon, a woman sky

I am woman dew in the grass

“The Holy Spirit descends to the altar. The eldest mushroom forager is transported there where God is. The eye that feels and thinks behind closed eyelids, the eye that is separated from the body, melds with space; it sees everything without seeing anything. The mushroom speaks,” the teacher Herlinda translated the words of María Sabina. The shaman accentuated her silences and facial expressions with her hands. The ancient Teonanácatl, the God Meat, by means of the trance turned her eloquent, allowed her to cure sickness and create visions.

Under the influence of the Holy Children, María Sabina clapped and danced.

I am a woman who looks toward the inside

I am woman light of day

I am woman morning star

I am woman god star

She held the silence for several moments. Later, with a strange shining in her eyes, she took up her song again:

I am a woman who yells

I am a woman who whistles

I am a woman who thunders

I am a spirit woman

Subscribe now

JOHN LENNON

Day after day the beatniks began arriving to town. At dawn you would see them crossing the fields, sitting on rocks, or sticking their heads up above the brush like aliens. At dusk they wandered all over the streets smoking marijuana, chasing off the scavenging vultures, or reciting poems to the cornstalks. They walked through the main street with mushrooms wrapped in banana leaves, or rags, or newspaper, but the stalks and caps of the hallucinogens stuck out. Those who feared that the police would confiscate them would hide the mushrooms in their clothes. They carried them with veneration, as if at any moment they might come to life and talk to them.

Some walked along the edge of the river stamping on the dry leaves; others stretched up to pick oranges off the branch. Still others just wandered from place to place, like they were in a road novel, without any fixed direction. After long sojourns they would end up returning to the exact same spot on the rough path they had taken at the outset. You would see the women at the store buying Delicados cigarettes, a kilo of coffee, or soft drinks to quench their thirst. Or you might come upon them in the cornfields making love.

Philip liked to look out from the small window of his room in the Hotel Grande to the vista of the mountain range, where he was equally dazzled by the afternoon sun or the reflections in the river water. It made him happy to turn his gaze to Cerro del Fortín and an unspecified meeting with María Sabina, to freely wander through that green labyrinth to the ceremony of revelation, where he would be welcomed as a participant, though it may have begun and ended without him.

As for John Lennon, a few of the locals swore they had seen a young man in sunglasses covering his head with a yellow wig that glowed in the night. Others testified they had run into a poor musician who had traveled to Huautla to visit María Sabina, but they didn’t know where he had been staying. A local reporter believed it couldn’t actually be John Lennon, but instead was a vision of the god Tezcatlipoca pretending to be the musician.

The teacher Herlinda Martínez Cid said she’d run into him in a bakery buying Oaxacan black bread. Miss Pike asserted that the rumored musician had not actually come to town; it was just a vagabond rocker. The man in question was a crazy person that talked to himself and smoked marijuana. She had seen him once in the middle of the night on the main street walking in the rain, his clothes and his sunglasses dripping. Naked under his raincoat, he had exposed his genitals to her.

María Sabina remembered that a foreigner had once appeared at her house in dark glasses, behind which she could not see his eyes. She had run into him earlier lurking around Cerro del Fortín looking for a velada at twilight, because he was awake at night and spent his days sleeping. Her daughter Apolonia said that she had heard someone at the door of her shack humming “That’ll Be the Day” but she didn’t know who it was.

Richard Stevenson, looking for him in all the hotels in town, had confirmed that no John Winston Lennon was registered at any of them. And a waiter was sure he’d seen an English musician in his twenties, without a nickel to his name, who was so argumentative that at the slightest provocation he began spewing insults. The man never changed his clothes, but sometimes he would appear wearing a shirt of surprisingly brilliant white. So dressed, he would go out to walk through the deserted streets or the coffee plantations until dawn. The breasts of the woman who was with him were always escaping her clothes. The musician, because of his mercurial temperament, was called “the Look Don’t Touch Man.” An employee remembered that one morning that same John started to sing a song in English, slapping a seemingly unbreakable Gallotone guitar with his hands. But he broke it. He mentioned that in the corridor of the hotel he found him making out with his English girlfriend, the same Cynthia, that nymph with the habit of taking nude moon baths or stripping down in the underbrush.

“The morning he left he looked at me standing in the lobby ready to carry his luggage. As if I was an orphan, he told me: ‘Fathers aren’t gods, they’re the sons of wretches.’ And then he went down into town, while Cynthia told the taxi driver to follow him along the main road and, if it was OK, to take him first to Puebla and then on to the international airport,” remembered the employee.

Following in the footsteps of the absent one, Richard Stevenson photographed the room, the restaurant, and the hallway where there were signs of his presence. He took a photo of the graffiti scratched on a glass door: “We live in a world where we hide to make love and commit violence in the light of day.”

Supposedly John Lennon had left a note about a velada with María Sabina on the rickety bed. Stevenson photographed it:

I am a coffin that walks.

My vision emanates from my ashes.

The voice of the cacti in the hills is mine.

Excerpt of Carne de Dios by Homero Aridjis. Translated by Chloe Garcia Roberts. Published by The University of Arizona Press. Copyright 2025.

Happy Friday and welcome back to The Microdose, an independent journalism newsletter brought to you by the U.C. Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

Two psilocybin bills progress in Massachusetts; Washington’s King County passes deprioritization proposal

The Massachusetts House Committee on Mental Health, Substance Use, and Recovery advanced two psilocybin bills last week. H.2203 would establish a pilot program run by the Department of Public Health to allow people with PTSD and other conditions to access psilocybin services, while H.4200 would establish a pilot program allowing licensed mental health treatment facilities to administer psilocybin.

In a press release from Mass Healing, an advocacy group whose leaders have been pushing for psychedelics reform in the state for years, the organization emphasized “the need for passage of a bill exploring therapies beyond psilocybin alone, including ibogaine.” In a LinkedIn post, Mass Healing co-founder thanked psychedelic advocacy organizations VETS and Americans For Ibogaine for their support, and pointed to testimony last fall from other groups, like MAPS, Clusterbusters, and Law Enforcement Action Partnership, as being influential in the bill’s advancement.

Washington State’s King County Council voted 6-2 to pass a motion stating the council’s support for continued entheogen-related research, and requesting that the investigation, arrest, and prosecution of “entheogen related activities” be among the county sheriff’s lowest priorities. Seattle, King County’s largest city, has already passed a similar motion, as well as other Washington cities like Tacoma, Olympia, and Port Townsend. King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn was one of the two councilmembers who voted against the motion, writing in a press release that “the State of Oregon experimented with full drug decriminalization in 2021. It failed so spectacularly and was so unpopular the state had to reverse course and re-criminalize in 2024.” Dunn’s statement incorrectly describes Oregon’s policies and inaccurately conflates them with the motion proposed in King County. Oregon voters passed a measure (110) in 2021 that lowered penalties for many drug-related offenses and provided an opportunity to waive some charges if those charged sought help from a drug hotline, but this did not constitute a “full drug decriminalization.” Meanwhile, King County’s policy calls for a deprioritization of county sheriff resources.

Unlike King County’s policy, Oregon’s Measure 110 included not just entheogens — a term which typically encompasses psychedelic substances such as psilocybin and DMT — but a wide variety of non-psychedelic drugs, including heroin and fentanyl. Indeed, in 2024, the Oregon legislature passed legislation reversing Measure 110 (for more on this, read our 5 Questions interview with attorney Jon Dennis); the bill’s supporters pointed to a rise in fentanyl overdose deaths in the state, despite evidence that decriminalization efforts and fentanyl deaths are not correlated.

Dunn’s statement reflects a common stumbling block in conversations around drug decriminalization: ambiguities regarding the definition of “decriminalization.” So-called decrim can mean changing the legal status of drug use, possession, transportation, or even sale so that they have no or decreased legal consequences (as in Oregon’s Measure 110), but it can also refer to a governing body directing local law enforcement to deprioritize the enforcement of existing drug laws (as King County’s proposal does).

New Mexico psilocybin program proposes new rules

New Mexico’s medical psilocybin program recently released a draft of proposed standards for psilocybin producers and testing labs. Some highlights:

• Dual ownership is not permitted; people who apply for a permit for one business may not have an ownership interest in another psilocybin business applying for a permit.

• Synthetic psilocybin is prohibited, as are pesticides

• Product packaging “shall not feature a design that is attractive to minors,” and must list total psilocybin and psilocin amounts

• Testing for adulterants like bacteria and heavy metals, as well as pesticides

• Businesses must have permits to transport psilocybin, and while doing so, they have to have the psilocybin in a locked container in a car with an alarm system

These are the first proposed rules for New Mexico’s Medical Psilocybin Program, which is set to launch later this year. Program staff will hold a hearing to discuss the proposed rules on April 24, 2026 in Santa Fe.

Want the latest psychedelics news? Subscribe! (It’s free!)

Subscribe now

AbbVie-acquired psychedelics company raises $60 million

New York-based psychedelics company Gilgamesh announced Tuesday that it had raised $60 million in its Series A financing round. This comes on the heels of news that its lead product, bretisilocin, was added to the European Medicines Agency’s list of priority medicines. Bretisilocin is chemically similar to DMT, but engineered to provide a roughly two-hour trip, rather than the approximately 15 minute duration of a typical DMT trip. The EMA’s designation means the drug will have an expedited drug application process.

The $60 million raised was the first formal round of financing after pharmaceutical company AbbVie acquired Gilgamesh’s bretisilocin program for up to $1.2 billion around six months ago. Gilgamesh is also developing what it bills as a “cardio-safe” ibogaine analog; a Phase 1 trial investigating the drug, GM-3009, is expected to begin this year.

Tracking psychoactive use via European wastewater

Wastewater analysis has been around for decades, but it became better known to the public after the rise of COVID-19, as researchers used wastewater to track the spread of the virus. A group analyzing sewage in 19 cities across Europe first formed in 2010, and since then, they have been tracking illicit drug use — specifically, cocaine, cannabis, methamphetamine, amphetamine, MDMA, and ketamine — through studying European wastewater. Last week, the European Union Drugs Agency released data that the group collected in 2025 across 115 European cities.

Overall, the researchers report that, unsurprisingly, metabolites of illicit drugs were found in all of the cities. From 2024 to 2025, the amount of MDMA in wastewater decreased by about 16%, but the overall amounts of ketamine increased by 41%. Belgium and the Netherlands seem to be hotspots for both, and many cities in those countries seem to have higher loads of MDMA or ketamine use over the weekend, as opposed to on weekdays.

The researchers note that the methods associated with wastewater analysis as a form of drug monitoring are still being improved. “Translating the total consumed amounts into the

corresponding number of average doses is complicated, as drugs can be taken by different routes and in amounts that vary widely, and purity levels fluctuate,” they write. Still, they say, the studies they’ve done so far present a “promising” method of monitoring drug use, a notoriously hard-to-study area.

Selection bias in psychedelic studies

Conducting psychedelics clinical trials is no small feat — only select institutions have the funds and resources to apply for the proper licenses to store and administer controlled substances and to obtain the required regulatory approvals of the research. It’s much easier to conduct studies of self reports of psychedelics users about their previous experiences, so many modern studies rely on survey data instead. But who chooses to participate in such surveys might represent a specific subset of people who are more enthusiastic about psychedelics than the average person.

A new study recently published in Journal of Psychoactive Drugs dug into this question by recruiting over 1100 participants to complete a survey about psychedelics. About half of the participants were what the researchers considered “psychedelic enthusiasts” — they were recruited via social media accounts of a psychedelic science nonprofit, while the other half represented what the researchers considered the “general population”; they had psychedelic experience but were recruited via an online survey platform.

Participants were asked questions like how their most meaningful psychedelic experiences affect their relationships and what their motivations are for using psychedelics, as well as a standard personality trait questionnaire. Overall, the researchers found that the psychedelic enthusiasts were much more likely to say that their psychedelic experiences influenced their quality of life in the long-term, even when controlling for other variables like personality traits. They conclude that recruiting participants through psychedelic groups can bias samples, as it likely favors people who have had good psychedelic experiences in the past. “Individuals who have had unremarkable or adverse psychedelic experiences are unlikely to be recruited through such channels,” the authors write, so studies that seek to represent the general public should take steps to recruit outside of these channels.

• Australia became the first country to allow physicians to legally prescribe psilocybin and MDMA to patients, but the high cost is preventing many from seeking treatment, The New York Times reports.

• What are the legal ramifications of operating a foreign psychedelic retreat center? Attorney Jason Adelstone details a range of liability considerations in Harris Sliwoski’s Psychedelics Law Blog.

• The Wall Street Journal reports on the rise of mail-order ketamine and on the death of Tricia Anne Dewey, whose family is suing a telehealth company called Better U after it provided a ketamine prescription to Dewey, which ultimately played a role in her death.

• Tech founder turned longevity influencer Bryan Johnson livestreamed his 5-MeO-DMT trip on X, during which UCSF psychedelics researcher Robin Carhart-Harris joined him on the livestream. Johnson has been experimenting with psychedelics in an effort to boost longevity. In November, he also took large doses of psilocybin, livetweeting and then streaming his trips.

You’re all caught up. We’re taking next week off but we’ll be back in your inbox in April!

If you know anyone who might like the latest on psychedelics in their inbox, feel free to forward this to them, or click below.

Share The Microdose

Got tips? Email us at themicrodose@berkeley.edu.

From 1953 to 1973, the CIA ran a program called MKULTRA. Its goal was to find ways to control people’s behavior against their will, or force them to tell the truth. In practice, the CIA experimented on thousands of people who didn’t know they were subjects.. Doctors were paid to try out hypnosis, extra-strong electroconvulsive therapy, or put people in drug-induced comas while playing repeated recordings of spoken phrases and noises. The program also made liberal use of a recently discovered psychoactive molecule: LSD.

CIA agents were given LSD so they could experience its effects, sometimes without their knowledge. In 1953, Gottlieb organized a retreat for CIA officials and scientists in Western Maryland, and one scientist who was dosed with LSD mysteriously died falling from a New York City hotel 10 days later. At CIA-funded safehouses in New York City and San Francisco, unsuspecting people were dosed with LSD to see “whether we could elicit more information from informants,” as Gottlieb recalled in later testimony. In San Francisco, for Operation Midnight Climax, federal agent George White set up a lavishly decorated bedroom with a two-way mirror, and hired sex workers to bring men there to surreptitiously give them the drug while he and others watched.

In the 1970s, congressional hearings aired MKULTRA’s dirty laundry, using financial records and interviews to expose what had occurred during the program. But a lot of information was still missing, said John Lisle, a historian of science at University of Texas, Austin.

Lisle wrote his doctoral dissertation on an earlier generation of scientists in the U.S. intelligence community like Stanley Lovell: a biochemist in charge of the research and development branch of the The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. During World War II, Lovell created deadly gadgets, forged documents, and disguises for undercover agents, as Lisle described in his first book, The Dirty Tricks Department. Lovell’s interest in truth serums led Lisle to MKULTRA.

In his book from last year, Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA, Lisle found never-before-seen depositions that reveal the motives and thoughts of Sidney Gottlieb, head of MKULTRA, as well as the project’s victims. (David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, is making an HBO television show based on his book.) The Microdose talked to Lisle about the new documents, where he got them, and what was uncovered about MKULTRA.

When Sidney Gottlieb retired, he threw all of his files into an incinerator. Who was he, and how was our knowledge of MKULTRA limited by what documents survived?

Sydney Gottlieb was the head of MKULTRA. He had gotten his PhD in bio-organic chemistry from Caltech, and after that, he worked various government jobs. He tried to volunteer for the Army during World War II, but he was born with club feet, and his limp prevented him from joining into service.

Gottlieb was looking for a way to pay back the debt that he felt that he owed to his country. His parents had been immigrants, and they had gotten a better life here, so he wanted to contribute something to the United States. Eventually he applied for a job at the CIA. He was a brilliant chemist, and this is right after World War II when they were looking for scientists to help discover the next weapons or tactics that could help the United States defend itself in another war. The CIA was eager to take Gottlieb on.

His first job within the CIA was working in the chemical service; he was working on methods to do secret writing. Not long afterwards, MKULTRA was created in 1953 and he was appointed to be its head. This was a program, basically, to develop methods of mind control. The fear was that communist countries, like the Soviets or the Chinese, might have developed mind control techniques. Therefore we should know those techniques and develop them on our own.

Before my book, most of the stuff that we knew about Gottlieb came from congressional committees that did investigations of past abuses of the intelligence community. Through those investigations, a lot of documents came out—the ones that survived Gottlieb’s purge.

He burned thousands of files. The head of the CIA at the time was Richard Helms. Richard Helms had been a big sponsor of MKULTRA throughout its entire existence, and in 1973 both Gottlieb and Helms were retiring. Gottlieb went to Helms and asked him, “Hey, what should we do about all these files?” Helms agreed that they should destroy them. Gottlieb took them to a record center and had them incinerated. But he forgot that he had already sent several boxes to that record center years before: the financial documents of MKULTRA. Those are the boxes that survived. It’s not the reports of the MKULTRA’s subprojects, but the financial records about who was getting paid, and an overview of what they were supposed to do. That’s how this originally came out, and that’s what we knew before my book.

What are the new depositions you found, and where did they come from?

The basis of my book is a series of depositions that mostly occurred in the 1980s. After the congressional committees, many of the victims of MKULTRA realized that they were indeed victims. Beforehand, a lot of them thought that they had received poor treatment at the hands of these doctors. They didn’t know the CIA was sponsoring the doctors to do certain experiments.

Many of these victims sued the CIA. As part of those lawsuits, the attorneys representing the victims took the depositions of several people who were involved, including Sidney Gottlieb, Richard Helms, and others. That’s the origin of these depositions; they come about as part of the lawsuits that the victims launched against the CIA.

The main case where these depositions occurred was called the Orlikow case; Velma Orlikow was a woman who was a victim of [the Canadian psychiatrist] Donald Ewan Cameron. His experiments in Montreal were sponsored by MKULTRA. It got settled out of court; it never went to trial, so these depositions wound up in the hands of the main lawyer who was representing the victims, a guy named Joseph Rauh. They just sat in his papers. When he passed away, his papers were donated to the Library of Congress.

When I was investigating MKULTRA and trying to look for new documents, I went to Rauh’s papers, because I knew he had represented the victims of MKULTRA. It turns out, in these boxes are the depositions that never got submitted to court. There were thousands of pages of Gottlieb, his right hand man, Robert Lashbrook, Richard Helms, and others being grilled about what they did.

This is great for the historian, because with history, you rarely have verbatim quotes. Most of the time, historians summarize. The great thing about this book is that I have dialogue. There’s a literal court reporter in the room recording the back and forth between attorneys and the victims, or Gottlieb and the perpetrators.

They were sworn in, but they could still lie, or tell untruths. I try, in the book, to compare the depositions of different people to say, Okay, they’re contradicting each other here. We know at least one of them has to be lying. In general, I did get the impression that Gottlieb was fairly truthful. I got the impression that Robert Lashbrook, his right hand man, was not. He really did not like talking under oath. He put up a lot of fuss about it.

What do the depositions tell us about Gottlieb’s motives, or what was going on in his head?

I think Gottlieb was honest in saying that he had joined the CIA, and was happy to go along with MKULTRA, because he thought it was in the service of national security. He really thought that this was in the interest of the country, and it was an ends-justify-the-means situation.

Gottlieb seems like he had a hard time afterwards coming to grips with the fact that he had done something so unethical. It took him several decades to reach that realization. You can see this especially when Joseph Rauh, the attorney, confronts Gottlieb about why he destroyed the files.

If you think about it, those files are classified anyway. It’s not like the CIA is going to release them to the public. Why would you destroy them? Gottlieb goes through several explanations before he reveals his main motivation. One explanation is that the CIA had so much paper, and there just wasn’t any room in the headquarters anymore. He’s just making this up, and that’s not convincing at all. Another explanation is that he was worried that the names of these people would get out somehow, and it would undermine the CIA’s credibility if it couldn’t keep secret the names of the people that it had been experimenting with. Finally, he breaks down during one of these depositions, and he says, I destroyed these files because it was embarrassing. I didn’t want people to know what we had done, and so we destroyed them.

Another thing he admits in the depositions: we didn’t really get anything out of this. We spent millions of dollars on hundreds of different researchers, and we didn’t learn anything that was actionable. We couldn’t use it in some kind of covert action type operations. He was embarrassed by it. Imagine the amount of mental and physical toll that you’ve taken on people over all these years through MKULTRA, and it amounted to basically nothing.

Another important thing that Gottlieb reveals in the files, for the first time, is that when Gottlieb was within the CIA, he was assigned to figure out a way to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the Prime Minister of the Congo. It’s been long known that Gottlieb was involved in this, but nobody ever knew exactly how Gottlieb was doing it. They knew that he had some kind of chemical or biological agent that he wanted to slip to Lumumba. In the depositions, Gottlieb for the first time reveals what it was. It turns out to be anthrax. He was trying to slip anthrax to Lumumba in his toothpaste, or by some other means.

MKULTRA lasted such a long time, even though, as you say, it wasn’t very successful. Do the depositions indicate why it lasted so long, or how they got away with it when so much of what they did was illegal?

There were some people in the CIA, including the Inspector General, who said in his own words that this was both illegal and unethical. Why is it that no one ever tried to put a stop to it? A couple of main reasons are that the Inspector General of the CIA didn’t have much power, and could be fired on a whim. Therefore, he was incentivized to not ruffle people’s feathers so that he wouldn’t get in trouble, and he could keep his job.

Another reason Gottlieb talks about when he’s mentioning destroying the files, is that the record keeping in the CIA wasn’t that good. You could destroy files and face zero repercussions for it. There was a degree of plausible deniability that was baked into these people’s rationale. They knew if anything ever went south, they could at least destroy the files and have plausible deniability about being involved in something so sinister.

Did you include or highlight the voices of victims of MKULTRA experiments?

In the first half of the book, I explain the origins of MKULTRA, what MKULTRA was, and the details of its subprojects. I dedicated the entire second half to the fallout, how it was revealed to the public, and what happened afterwards when the victims found out that they had been victims of CIA experiments.

Many of them sued the CIA, and I spend a lot of the book talking about these lawsuits, and giving descriptions of what happened to them. One of them is Mary Morrow; I probably spend more time on her than any of the other victims. She was a victim of Donald Ewen Cameron in Canada. The ironic thing about her story is that she had been one of Cameron’s assistants at the Allen Memorial Institute, but she had a mental breakdown, and she ended up being one of the victims. She received many of the so-called treatments [like a ‘de-patterning’ treatment of a combination of electroshock and barbiturates] that she had been doling out beforehand. She realized how terrible and nefarious these treatments actually were.

I spend a lot of time telling the stories of the victims. There’s many good depictions of them that lay out their own stories in their own words, that give a lot more detail to what they went through, rather than just the perspective of someone like Sidney Gottlieb, who’s on the other side of it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Happy Friday and welcome back to The Microdose, an independent journalism newsletter brought to you by the U.C. Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

New analysis: Psychedelics may be no better than SSRIs in treating depression

For the last few decades, medications like Zoloft, Lexapro, Prozac, and Effexor — known as SSRIs and SNRIs — have been the dominant medications prescribed for depression. Psychedelics are often touted as a more effective or “natural” alternative to these drugs, but according to a new analysis published in JAMA Psychiatry this week, psychedelics may not be more effective than SSRIs or SNRIs in treating depression.

In order to receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, drug developers must show that their drug is not only safe but also more effective than a placebo. The SSRIs and SNRIs on the market have already undergone this process, and as companies seek to bring psychedelics to market, many have attempted to conduct double blind trials with psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) — trials where neither participant nor clinician know whether the participant has received a psychedelic or a placebo. But because psychedelics produce marked subjective effects like perceptual alterations and mystical experiences, it’s quite difficult to achieve functional blinding — the paper’s authors say that in PAT trials, participants’ guesses about which condition they’re in are accurate up to 95% of the time.

Only one study so far has compared the efficacy of PAT to the existing dominant depression treatment, SSRIs, and in that study, there were no significant differences in treatment outcomes between groups. The authors of the new meta-analysis set out to probe that further by comparing studies of psychedelic-assisted therapy with open-label SSRI and SNRI studies — studies where participants know whether they are receiving an antidepressant or a placebo. Their logic: since all PAT studies are, essentially, open-label (participants can generally tell whether they are receiving a psychedelic or placebo), it’s only fair to compare PAT to open-label SSRI studies.

In a meta-analysis, the three researchers included data from 24 previous studies using either psychedelic-assisted therapy or open-label SSRI/SNRIs, and compared changes in participants’ scores on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, a widely-used depression assessment. They found virtually no difference in Hamilton scores between participants who received PAT vs. participants who were given traditional antidepressants.

Moreover, they found that participants in the placebo arm of PAT trials show significantly worse depression symptoms than people in the placebo arms of SSRI or SNRI clinical trials. “We speculate that this suppressed placebo response in PAT trials is attributable to the ‘know-cebo’ effect,” the authors write, referring to the disappointment patients can experience when they realize they got the placebo instead of the psychedelic. (For more about the know-cebo effect, read our 5 Questions interview with study co-author and UC San Francisco researcher Balázs Szigeti.)

Overall, the analysis suggests that participants’ expectations play a substantial role in their clinical outcomes, and, the authors write, it “presents a sobering viewpoint on [PAT]’s potential.”

Kentucky ibogaine bill and New Mexico psilocybin equity fund

Kentucky legislators are considering Senate Bill 77, which would establish a public-private fund to conduct ibogaine research. The bill is one of at least a half-dozen introduced across the U.S. that promises states a portion of intellectual property rights if ibogaine is approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a drug. The initial version of the bill included appropriating $42 million from the state’s opioid abatement trust into the established fund, but that part of the proposal was removed in committee amendments.

Last week, the bill passed the Senate 35-2 and is now with the House. Kentucky’s legislative session ends in the next couple weeks, which means the bill must move swiftly through the House to be viable. The seed for Americans for Ibogaine, the advocacy group drafting the ibogaine bills introduced nationwide, was first planted in Kentucky; co-founder W. Bryan Hubbard, then chair of the state’s Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, introduced a proposal to use $42 million of Kentucky’s opioid settlement money for ibogaine research. (The proposal lost steam once Hubbard was replaced by the incoming attorney general’s new appointee.)

Last week, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) signed a bill establishing the state’s annual budget. That included an extension of the $1 million already allocated to run the state’s medical psilocybin program, which announced in late 2025 that it would be launching by the end of 2026, a full year earlier than originally planned. An additional $300,000 will cover psilocybin research for end-of-life and palliative care, as well as $630,000 for a newly-established Medical Psilocybin Treatment Equity Fund. “With the investment in this fund, our state leadership is sending a clear message: access to treatment in New Mexico will not be based on ability to pay,” Healing Advocacy Fund’s New Mexico director of strategic support Denali Wilson said in a statement.

Want the latest psychedelics news? Subscribe! (It’s free!)

Subscribe now

Bretisilocin becomes first psychedelic to receive EU designation

In the U.S., promising drugs under development can receive “breakthrough therapy” designation by the Food and Drug Administration which expedites a drug’s review. The EU’s European Medicines Agency (EMA) offers a similar pipeline, called the Priority Medicines (PRIME) scheme, which aims to expedite the drug application process. Recently, the EMA added the psychedelic compound bretisilocin to its list of PRIME medications. Bretisilocin is chemically similar to DMT, but was engineered by researchers at psychedelic company Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals to provide a roughly two-hour trip, rather than the 15 or so minutes a DMT trip lasts. About six months ago, pharmaceutical company AbbVie acquired Gilgamesh’s bretisilocin program for up to $1.2 billion.

Tadeusz Hawrot, founder of the advocacy group Psychedelic Access and Research European Alliance (PAREA), wrote on LinkedIn that this move “could be an important turning point.” PRIME designation is far from authorization, and bretisilocin is just one drug, he said, “but it could signal a shift towards Europe becoming more relevant in psychedelic drug development and, eventually, access.”

Psychedelic Medicine Association creating accreditation program

The Psychedelic Medicine Association, a public benefit corporation dedicated to psychedelic education, announced it has founded a non-profit arm that will create an accreditation program for psychedelic facilitators. The PMA was founded in 2020 to educate healthcare professionals about psychedelics; for more about the organization, read our 5 Questions interview with co-founder Lynn-Marie Morski.

In a video posted to LinkedIn, Morski compared the creation of a psychedelic facilitator accreditation to the accreditation board that certifies physicians. She pointed to a lack of standardization across psychedelics training programs, giving the example that while some programs require two years of training, UCLA offers a psychedelic-assisted therapy training program that consists of a 4-hour seminar.

Morski also raised the possibility that having a third-party accreditation body could be a boon to psychedelics’ acceptance in the long-term; she mentioned the report that the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) released shortly before the FDA declined to accept Lykos’s new drug application for MDMA. That report recommended “rigorous certification and oversight of providers,” suggesting that a third party group like the American Psychiatric Association or American Psychological Association could take this on as a way “to reduce potential conflicts of interest in maintaining the highest standards.”

The PMA’s efforts are still in their infancy; Morski said the group was in the process of designing a core curriculum in hopes that it could establish international standards, and that it was piloting assessments and planning to gather feedback from graduates of training programs. In the half-decade since above-ground psilocybin facilitator training programs first began taking applicants to work in Oregon state’s psilocybin industry, there’s been a boom and bust — some training programs have shuttered amidst scandal, and some graduates report difficulties in finding work. The announcement signals the growing professionalization and regulation of the psilocybin industry.

Oregon palliative psilocybin lawsuit inching forward

On Tuesday, an Oregon judge ruled that Cusker v. Oregon Health Authority, a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court back in 2024 by four trained Oregon psilocybin facilitators against the state agency that oversees psilocybin services in the state, may proceed. In the suit, psilocybin facilitators allege that the Oregon Psilocybin Services’ requirement that all psilocybin sessions take place in a service center violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Facilitators say some of their clients with disabilities or terminal illnesses are unable to leave their homes and travel to service centers, and that the state has not made reasonable accommodations for those clients, as required by federal law. (I wrote about the case for OPB in late 2024.)

Since the suit was filed, the State of Oregon’s attorneys, representing the Oregon Health Authority, have fought to get the case dismissed. First, they argued that federal court was the wrong venue for the lawsuit, but in a February 2025 hearing, Judge Mustafa Kasubhai denied that move. In the case’s most recent volley, Oregon’s attorneys say that the claims of the plaintiffs — the psilocybin facilitators — are “too speculative,” because they allege only future harms to clients who might be denied psilocybin services, and none have disabilities themselves. Judge Kasubhai, again, denied the defense.

“We are pleased that the Court has denied OHA’s attempts to avoid review of the merits. We will now move forward, seeking to ensure access for disabled and dying Oregonians,” Kathryn Tucker, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement shared with The Microdose. Next, she said, the plaintiffs will file a motion asking the court to require OHA to allow accommodations for homebound Oregonians seeking psilocybin services.

• Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and its cofounder Sam Altman, alleging the company “defrauded” him in how it represented its intentions to remain a non-profit. According to Bloomberg, OpenAI’s defense had intended to “undermine Musk’s credibility on the witness stand by asking him about his alleged use of ketamine during key negotiations with the company” — apparently, “significant communications” between Musk and OpenAI took place at Burning Man. But a judge ruled last Friday that she would not allow this line of questioning of Musk “unless OpenAI can provide more concrete evidence about the mind-altering effects of ketamine, an anesthetic drug that can have hallucinogenic properties.”

• Writer Shanetta McDonald writes in Essence that at first, she thought traveling to Costa Rica for an ayahuasca retreat might be “the most non-Black thing I’ve ever done” — but she was pleasantly surprised to find several other “melanated women” at her retreat, and “left Costa Rica with an expanded view of who has the right to heal.”

You’re all caught up! We’ll be back in your inbox on Monday with a new issue of 5 Questions.

If you know anyone who might like the latest on psychedelics in their inbox, feel free to forward this to them, or click below.

Share The Microdose

Got tips? Email us at themicrodose@berkeley.edu.

In the 1992 video game Ecco the Dolphin, a dolphin tries to find his lost pod, but along the way, gets abducted by aliens. A 2025 documentary, John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, opens with images from the game, in part because it succinctly captures the interests of the film’s protagonist: dolphin intelligence, extraterrestrial life, and submersion in water.

John C. Lilly was an American scientist who invented the sensory deprivation tank, studied cetacean communication, and experimented with LSD and ketamine—sometimes all at the same time. The documentary follows Lilly’s journey from young scientist to countercultural icon. He’s infamous for flooding a Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands house for a female researcher to live alongside a young male dolphin, and inspiring Hollywood movies like The Day of the Dolphin and Altered States as well as a nascent marine environmental movement.

The film was made by Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens, and narrated by Chloë Sevigny. Stephens studied medical anthropology while an undergraduate at University of California Berkeley, and said that she tends to work on subjects that move between fantasy and reality. “John Lilly was a great candidate for that,” she told me. The Microdose talked to Stephens about her and Almereyda’s approach to the film and her takeaways from Lilly’s life.

How did you pick John Lilly as a documentary subject?

I came across Lilly back when I was an undergrad, and I used to see his books floating around in used bookstores. I knew him more from his psychedelic writing, so his later books: Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer and The Center of the Cyclone.

I was fascinated by his public persona as a kind of renegade scientist. What was interesting about him, from the perspective of making a film, is the way that he circulates as a set of ideas, not unlike a musician or William Burroughs character. There’s a lot of tension between that and rigorous science. It was interesting to think about a figure who had that cipher quality.

He was involved in a lot of different things: dolphin communication, sensory deprivation tanks, psychedelics, coincidences, aliens. Did you want to foreground one of them, or explain how they interweaved with each other?

We wanted to try to tackle the entire thing.

For Michael and I both, the idea that there were two Hollywood movies about this person that had nothing to do with each other was really interesting. I think his interests are connected through the question of consciousness, and also water. What was really interesting was not just the ideas, but also the full arc of a life that had light and dark. He was really a figure of his time. He’s in military science in the 1950s, he’s in experimental work in the 60s. He’s at Esalen in the 70s.

We show some of those ideas, not just in the moment that Lilly was in control of them, but as they spread through the culture, and took on other shapes—through other people’s work, environmental movements, and the new age. We all share this idea that whales and dolphins are complex, intelligent beings. That’s just become a basic cultural belief that we don’t even really think about where it came from, but Lilly was a major part of that.

That’s the ripple effect of Lilly. The film is about Lilly, but it’s really a cultural history of the late 20th century, and how some of these ideas impacted and changed American culture.

He’s also a receiver of a lot of cultural shifts, specifically the idea of the rights of nonhuman entities. The huge paradox is, of course, that his early experimentation with dolphins is conducted in ways that we would frown on. At the same time, his books influence a lot of people to go into marine mammal science.

There’s so much amazing archival material in the film, from Lilly’s childhood into his later years. Where did it come from?

Some of it came from Lilly’s archive at Stanford University in the library. Some of it is public materials: TV show appearances and things like that. Over time, a lot of stuff came to us that we weren’t initially aware of: his appearance on different shows, later conferences that he attended. We also looked at stuff that Lilly’s not in: archives of Esalen workshops, media involving dolphins. We were interested in the way that some the iconography around Lilly spreads beyond Lilly.

Through a series of strange coincidences, we met somebody who had known Lilly’s son, and he was in possession of not only the home movies that John Lilly had shot of his kids, but also his own home movies from when he was a kid that his dad had shot. Those are in the movie, and have never been featured in anything before. That was exciting. In the movie we see him from probably age ten to his early 80s.

The story around Lilly is so complicated, and there’s really a lot to be written about it. But what you can do with a film that you can’t do in a book is expose people to a person and allow an audience to just sit and witness someone: the energy and information that’s transmitted through being present with somebody.

Lilly really was a showman at some level. He knows how to—I don’t want to say work the camera—but enter people’s fantasy worlds. I think that that suited him to work with the media. And he was present in all kinds of media towards the end of his life, including weirdo tech magazines, all kinds of things

His beliefs about dolphin language didn’t pan out scientifically, and as you mentioned, dolphins suffered under his care. His other views on drugs or aliens pushed against the boundaries of the rational mind. How did you cover his more fringe attitudes or actions?

That was one of the big challenges. And why it was also valuable to have two directors on the film. We had our own internal conflicts around how to represent some of these things; how much to humor Lilly with his self-mythologizing, and how much to come down harder on him when we had information that was contrary to his narrative.

Like, everything concerning his lab in the 1960s. Why people left. How the dolphins suffered. There’s a kind of narrative that Peter [the dolphin] committed suicide out of heartbreak after a kind of love affair [with a female researcher]. We say in the film that it’s more likely that he died of neglect and mistreatment, as did other dolphins in that facility.

It gets into these philosophical questions around documentaries. What is the responsibility of the filmmaker to show versus tell? Our approach was to give the audience the information we had and not guide their hand overly.

But another angle on this entire thing is that we live in a country where our culture has been magnetized by charismatic and irresponsible men, and continues to be. Some of the more megalomaniacal parts of Lilly, we saw as relevant and part of an archetype of the wizard figure that was worth exploring.

I’m also interested in failure, and I’m interested in people who change a lot. I think the Internet creates a kind of virtual space where people can become static figures, just names. I’m really interested in lifetimes where people go through huge shifts. It’s nice to rescue Lilly from just being a weird cult figure who is only tanks ketamine, dolphins, and LSD.

After spending so much time with him, did you take any personal lessons from Lilly’s life?

I still find Lilly vexing and fascinating, and I don’t think that we’ve escaped the cult of Lilly-esque characters. What else would I say? I guess, be careful getting high on your own supply.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office recently played at BAMPFA in Berkeley, California as part of the Psychedelia & Cinema festival running March 1–May 10, 2026.

Happy Friday and welcome back to The Microdose, an independent journalism newsletter brought to you by the U.C. Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

Psilocybin shows promise over nicotine patches to help tobacco smokers quit

As researchers continue to explore psychedelics’ potential in addiction treatment, a recent pilot trial found psilocybin prevailed over a nicotine patch in a test to help tobacco smokers quit.

Results from the randomized clinical trial were published Tuesday in JAMA Network Open. Researchers recruited 82 tobacco smokers at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center and randomly assigned them to receive either a relatively high (30 mg) dose of psilocybin or weeks of using a nicotine patch. Both treatment conditions were paired with 13 weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy designed to help smokers quit.

Those who received a single dose of psilocybin were over six times more likely to have remained abstinent after six months than participants who used nicotine patches. About 40% of the psilocybin group successfully stopped smoking, whereas only 10%, or 4 people, in the patch group quit. Cigarette smoking is a leading preventable cause of death in the U.S., and 2022 data shows fewer than 10% of adult smokers successfully quit in the past year.

Tobacco dependence researcher Megan Piper, who wasn’t involved in the trial, told NPR the findings suggest a promising new treatment option, but will need to be replicated in a larger, more diverse study. The researchers who led the trial are currently testing psilocybin for tobacco use disorder in a Phase 2 clinical trial with a placebo condition. Tobacco use disorder is a chronic and relapsing addiction to tobacco products characterized by an inability to quit.

Scientists discover a new species of psychedelic mushroom in Africa

Scientists discovered a new species of psychedelic mushroom from sub-Saharan Africa. The study, published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, describes the new species, Psilocybe ochraceocentrata, as a close relative of the well known Psilocybe cubensis. “This discovery sheds light on the wild origins of domesticated P. cubensis and provides new genetic resources for research on psychedelic mushrooms,” the researchers write. Using genetic analyses, the researchers suggest the two species likely diverged from a common ancestor approximately 1.5 million years ago. The discovery hints at the evolutionary origins of Psilocybe mushrooms, which has been debated.

The study authors suggest the two species, whose spores commonly spread on animal dung, diverged through “global ecological shifts” such as the migration of Homo erectus and grazing herbivores out of Africa and the trans-Atlantic dispersal of grass seeds and dung beetles from Africa to South America. These shifts, which occurred more than a million years ago, “opened novel niches for dung-specialist fungi.”

The researchers say the newly discovered species was likely being misidentified as P. cubensis for years. “Incorrect species designations like this could lead to widespread confusion over the species identity of commercially sold Psilocybe,” the authors write.

The new species is one of seven in the Psilocybe genus that are native to Africa, they add. Altogether, there are approximately 160 species of Psilocybe, mostly documented in the Americas. There are likely many undocumented species in Africa due to less mycological survey work across the continent, the authors said.

Subscribe now

Minnesota lawmakers advance psilocybin-assisted therapy bill. Plus, ibogaine research bill approved in Mississippi.

On Monday, Minnesota lawmakers in the House Health Finance and Policy Committee approved a bill that would state-legalize a psilocybin therapy program for adults 21 and older.

Under the bipartisan proposal, HF 2906, residents could receive psilocybin-assisted therapy “administered under strict supervision by a licensed facilitator.” The initial program would allow a maximum of 1,000 patients “with qualifying medical conditions” to receive the therapy in the first three years, with the guidance of no more than 50 registered facilitators. Qualifying conditions include posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, substance use disorders, anxiety, and chronic pain. The move follows a state task force recommendation to create a regulated clinical psilocybin program.

“It will help Minnesotans who are struggling with a wide variety of mental illnesses,” Representative Andy Smith (D) said Monday. “It builds on successful programs in other states like Oregon, Colorado and New Mexico.” The legislation sets aside money from the state’s general fund for management of the program. It also says registered facilitators can charge for their services.

The bill would also reschedule psilocybin and psilocin from Schedule I to IV on the state’s controlled substances list. Schedule I drugs are the most restricted and characterized as having high abuse potential and no accepted medical use. Also on Monday, the Minnesota State Senate introduced a separate bill aiming to eliminate criminal and civil penalties for psilocybin use and possession.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday Mississippi state senators voted to pass House Bill 314, which would create a system for ibogaine clinical trials. This appears to be the House version of SB 2561, which died in committee. According to lawmakers, the goal of the legislation is to provide the U.S. Food and Drug Administration with data on the safety and efficacy of ibogaine to treat conditions including opioid use disorder.The bill is returning to the state House with an amendment for a vote before it could advance to the governor’s desk.

It’s similar to other state-level ibogaine research bills across the nation, as it promises states intellectual property royalties if the drug is ultimately FDA approved. Under the bill, some state funding would be directed to the trials, perhaps opioid settlement funds. The amendment states that people leading the ibogaine trial must “plan to secure third-party payor approval for ibogaine treatment following approval by the FDA through: private insurers; Medicare; Medicaid; and the TRICARE program of the United States Department of Defense.”

Mississippi State Senator Josh Harkins (R) suggested Mississippi’s trial could have a “multiplier effect,” on ibogaine research already funded by laws passed in Texas and Arizona.

Psychedelics with exercise to treat major depressive disorder?

A commentary published March 7 in Discover Mental Health suggests psychedelics and exercise could be used together to treat major depressive disorder. Both approaches show promise alone, and could have “synergistic antidepressant effects,” psychedelics researchers Nicholas Fabiano, Robin Carhart-Harris and collaborators argue. “Exercise and psychedelics have numerous potential complementary mechanisms,” they write, warranting future research on their use together.

Both approaches boost glutamate, serotonin, neuroplasticity, and brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Exercise may even have the potential to sustain or enhance the effects of psychedelics, through psychological flexibility and default mode network connectivity, the authors add.

Athletes using psychedelics during sport isn’t a newfound idea. American baseball pitcher Dock Ellis famously threw a no-hitter game in 1970 while tripping on LSD. The professional surfer Darryl Virostko, nicknamed “Flea,” first surfed California’s giant Mavericks waves while high on LSD. (For more on athletics and psychedelics see our 5 Questions interview with sports psychologist Courtney Walton.)

• Writer and emergency medicine doctor Clayton Dalton digs into the world of non-psychedelic psychedelic medicine in The New Yorker. This story was reported with the support of the Ferriss-UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship.

• Colorado transportation officials concerned about people driving while microdosing are urging residents to “plan your trip before you trip,” according to the Denver Post.

• The New York Times reports that memoirist Amy Griffin, whose best-selling book The Tell recounts sexual abuse by a teacher in Texas, is being sued by a former classmate. The woman alleges that the abuse Griffin describes in her book was based on experiences she’d shared from her own life. Griffin, who is also a philanthropist in the psychedelic space, wrote about retrieving these repressed memories of abuse through MDMA therapy. Griffin’s lawyer denies the classmate’s charges.

• A commentary published in Psychedelic Medicine discusses an increase in “naturalistic use” of psychedelics, citing data that shows reported psilocybin use in the past year rose 188% between 2019 and 2023 for U.S. adults 30 and above. The surge highlights a need for more robust epidemiological research to better understand risks and benefits, the authors argue.

• On March 5, a United States District Judge sentenced a New York man to over 6 years in prison for trafficking MDMA by mail. Homeland Security investigations reportedly seized over 10 kilograms of MDMA as part of the case.

  

  Got tips? Email us at themicrodose@berkeley.edu
  

Last summer, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it was creating a new program to fast-track the review of drugs that met the agency’s criteria for urgency. If a company receives one of these Commissioner’s National Priority Vouchers, it would be reviewed in one to two months, compared to the usual 10 to 12 months.

In February, the first nine recipients of the vouchers were announced, and one name was notably absent. Compass Pathways, which is running clinical trials with psilocybin for treatment resistant depression, was on a shortlist of ten companies to receive the voucher. According to a Stat News investigation published earlier this month, when FDA Commissioner Marty Makary showed that shortlist to others within the Health and Human Services Department, “his superiors shot it down” and Compass Pathways was removed.

The voucher program is already controversial since it was implemented without any input from Congress, said Daniel Eisenkraft Klein, a postdoctoral research fellow at The Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “There are a good number of legal experts who have questioned whether the FDA even has the statutory authority to do this,” he told me. The Microdose talked to Eisenkraft Klein about what the voucher program is, what it offers to companies, and what it means when psychedelic companies do—and don’t—make the cut.

What is the Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher program?

We can start with what it is on paper. The basic idea is that companies receive a voucher to have their final drug application reviewed in one to two months, instead of the standard 10 to 12 months. That really speeds things up; even the FDA’s existing priority review only gets you down to six months.

It is organized around what’s considered by the administration to be five national priorities: Addressing U.S. public health crises, delivering innovative cures, meeting unmet medical needs, on-shoring drug manufacturing as a national security measure, and increasing drug affordability. I would note that two of those five priorities—manufacturing on-shoring and affordability—actually have nothing to do with the medical merits of the drug.

Companies apply with a 350 word statement explaining how their drug addresses one of those priorities, which is a very short statement for something that’s so important. Also the FDA drug review divisions can nominate candidates without an application.

It’s worth naming what this program does structurally, which is it gives the administration a powerful piece of leverage and negotiations with industry, because the selection process runs through both the FDA and the White House. These become quite valuable for the administration to give out—without a lot of oversight—to companies that they’re trying to curry favor with, and that are trying to curry favor with the administration.

How are the vouchers different from other FDA programs that speed up review?

The voucher program is promising review within one to two months, which has not existed previously.

There was already a voucher system that Congress did authorize before this, which was earned by bringing rare pediatric or tropical disease drugs to the market. Some other programs like Fast Track, give you more frequent FDA interactions and rolling reviews. There’s Breakthrough Therapy, which adds more FDA guidance and organizational commitment to companies. There’s Accelerated Approval, which allows you to get approval through surrogate endpoints. Being generous, if the administration is very concerned about priorities outside of medical criteria, the Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher does explicitly address domestic manufacturing and affordability, which aren’t medical judgments.

The problem is that that is not how the FDA works, right? The agency’s role is not around security or around pricing. It’s about safety and efficacy. You can maybe make the case more broadly that this is something that we societally should care about, but that is not what the FDA’s job is.

How many of these vouchers have been awarded, and have any of the drugs been approved?

16 companies have received them as of now. They range from Sanofi for Type 1 diabetes, to US Antibiotics, for a domestically made generic antibiotic. Only one voucher has produced approval so far, which was Augmentin XR, a well known generic antibiotic. It’s a pretty easy one to move forward quickly, but for now, only that one of 16 has gotten approval.

I saw that Reuters reported that FDA scientists had delayed reviews of several of these drugs after concerns about safety and trial data. It seems like the most serious concern was Sanofi’s, which is for Type 1 diabetes; internal documents had cited seizures and blood clotting issues. These delays are kind of reassuring, because FDA scientists are maintaining safety standards despite the political pressure. The question is, to what extent they’ll be able to maintain those standards and stand up for science despite that pressure.

One of the new voucher recipients was a ketamine company called Phlow. Stat News reported that Compass Pathways was supposed to receive a voucher, but it was pulled from the list at the last minute. Can we interpret who gets vouchers —and who doesn’t—as signals of how the administration feels about certain kinds of interventions?

To clarify, Phlow received the Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher not for a new drug, but for domestic manufacturing of ketamine’s active ingredient. The innovation here is manufacturing infrastructure, not pharmacology. Does that signal something about the administration’s posture towards ketamine as a therapeutic intervention? Probably not.

But for Compass, yes. Internal data is hard to come by, but according to the Stat News investigation, Compass’ psilocybin treatment, which is for treatment-resistant depression, was on the initial list of the 10 Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher candidates. Apparently when Makary presented the list to HHS and the White House, the administration officials vetoed it just hours before the recipients were announced. As far as we know, that was the only drug cut from it.

Practically, the rejection probably doesn’t change that much for Compass. It already has that Breakthrough Therapy designation and rolling review; it has accelerated timelines. In terms of what it tells us about the way the administration is viewing psychedelics, and wants to position themselves in relation to psychedelics, it does actually give us quite a bit of insight. As Psychedelic Alpha has rightly noted, there’s a real tension between MAGA and MAHA here. I think the broader MAGA political coalition views psychedelic drugs as a bit of a liability, especially heading into the midterms.

Christian Angermeyer, the CEO of ATAI Life Sciences, wrote on X that it was a “blessing in disguise” that Compass’ voucher was canceled, because people wouldn’t question its data later. Do you agree there are public opinion risks associated with these expedited approvals?

I totally agree, not only for public opinion, but expert opinion. This trial data is so complicated and dense, the idea that you can truly review it in one to two months is a bit silly. A thorough and rigorous review process is always going to do more for the long term credibility of these drugs, especially if it looks rushed or politically motivated, and particularly as this Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher program keeps getting more scrutiny.

That logic applies to any novel therapeutic with a lot of skepticism, but with psychedelics, the historical stigma, the concerns about the Lykos trials—you put all that together and psychedelics face an even higher kind of burden of proof. It would be a real shame if the first psychedelic that made it to market was one that was so obviously politically influenced. That could mean that payers restrict coverage or physicians hesitate to prescribe. It’s counterintuitive, but I think the rejection actually could be an advantage long term.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Happy Friday and welcome back to The Microdose, an independent journalism newsletter brought to you by the U.C. Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

AtaiBeckley’s MDMA product could treat social anxiety

Last Thursday, AtaiBeckley announced preliminary results for a Phase 2a clinical trial using a formulation of MDMA to treat social anxiety. MDMA is typically a “racemic mixture,” meaning it contains an equal proportion of two molecular structures, known as R-MDMA and S-MDMA, which are mirror images of each other. AtaiBeckley’s drug candidate, which they call EMP-01, is a formulation of only R-MDMA. Previous research has suggested that while S-MDMA is associated with strong visual effects and higher blood pressure, R-MDMA more strongly activates serotonin 2A receptors.

In the company’s study, 69 UK adults who had been diagnosed with social anxiety disorder received a dose of either EMP-01 or a placebo capsule, then a second identical dose four weeks later. Notably, the participants did not receive psychotherapy. Two weeks after their second dose, participants’ social anxiety symptoms were assessed and compared to their baseline scores from before the study.

According to AtaiBeckley, participants who received EMP-01 showed a clinically meaningful improvement in their symptoms, as measured by a social anxiety scale. The study results have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. When the paper undergoes peer review, reviewers will more substantively assess whether the company’s data support their claims.

In December, AtaiBeckley announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted the company a patent for EMP-01. But they’re not the only company developing R-MDMA products; last year, San Francisco-based Arcadia received Investigational New Drug status from the Food and Drug Administration for its R-MDMA formulation, which it calls AM-1002, in the treatment of anxiety, and New York-based company MindMed also has an R-MDMA research program, investigating its use in people with autism spectrum disorder.

HHS Secretary Kennedy talks psychedelics on Rogan podcast

On Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared on podcaster Joe Rogan’s show.

Both the podcaster and HHS secretary agreed psychedelics could be helpful in treating people with addiction or mental health issues, especially veterans and police officers. Both repeated common talking points about psychedelics advanced by testimony in state legislature from veterans groups: that the substances can “rewire the brain,” and that veterans should not have to give everything to their country only to be forced to go to Tijuana for psychedelic mental health treatment afterward. The two pointed to their personal connections to ibogaine; Rogan said he had many friends who had positive outcomes from trying ibogaine, and Kennedy said he, too, had a family member who tried it, and he pointed to his own decades-long recovery from heroin addiction. “It’s pretty hard to convince me that you can fix what’s wrong with you by taking something outside of you, but I have seen so much overwhelming anecdotal evidence, but also clinical studies that attest to the effectiveness under some circumstances with some people for these medicines,” Kennedy said.

While Rogan pressed Kennedy on specifics — what hurdles he faces in rolling out treatment, and what the result could look like — Kennedy spoke only in generalities, saying the government is developing guidelines for therapeutic treatments and follow-ups, and that he, personally, would like to see such treatment take place in a “very controlled setting.” “You need to move in baby steps,” he said. He also incorrectly suggested that the VA is conducting clinical trials with ibogaine.

“Everybody in my agency and over at Veterans Affairs is very anxious to get a rule out there that will allow access under therapeutic settings, particularly in the military,” Kennedy said. “We’re all working on it.” He said that he meets every day with NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, FDA chief Martin Makary, and Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Mehmet Oz — according to Kennedy, the health leaders are “like family,” even vacationing together, and are “doing whatever they can” to move psychedelics treatments forward.

These remarks come after some psychedelics advocates have voiced disappointment with the Trump administration not meeting initial promises that psychedelics might be fast-tracked. In July 2025, Kennedy said that psychedelics would be available within 12 months, but so far, there has been little tangible action taken by the administration. In fact, the Trump administration recently blocked the FDA’s bid to fast-track the approval of Compass’s synthetic psilocybin COMP360.

Want the latest psychedelics news? Subscribe! (It’s free!)

Subscribe now

West Virginia Senate and South Dakota legislature pass Compass trigger bills

On Friday, the West Virginia Senate voted 31-2 to pass Senate Bill 906, which proposes amending state law to permit the prescription, distribution, and marketing of “crystalline polymorph psilocybin” should the U.S Food and Drug Administration approve and reschedule the drug. The bill is the latest so-called “trigger law” that paves the way for UK-based pharmaceutical company Compass Pathways to roll out their proprietary formulation of psilocybin — “crystalline polymorph psilocybin,” also known as COMP360.

Over the last year, Compass has introduced similar bills in at least ten states, and the company’s associate director of government affairs spoke to the Vermont Senate Committee on Health and Welfare on this issue just two weeks ago. Many lawmakers and their constituents are seemingly unaware that these bills are written in such a way that would permit only Compass’s formulation of synthetic psilocybin — not psilocybin mushrooms, or even other psychedelic pharmaceutical companies’ psilocybin products — to be used in the state. One local news source asserted that if passed, “West Virginia would join the likes of Oregon and Colorado, which already have laws legalizing the supervised medical use of psilocybin.” That’s not correct — both Oregon and Colorado’s program exist independently of FDA approval (and Oregon Psilocybin Services is not a medical program), and explicitly use whole mushrooms, not any synthetic formulation (and certainly not Compass’s proprietary formulation).

Meanwhile, the West Virginia Senate is also considering an ibogaine bill: House Bill 4626, which proposes funding ibogaine research through a public-private partnership program, passed the WV House in late January and is currently with the Senate Finance committee.

The South Dakota legislature also just passed a similar trigger bill, House Bill 1099, which would move “crystalline polymorph psilocybin” from Schedule I to Schedule IV in the state’s controlled substances act if it is approved by the FDA. In the floor discussion, Senator Greg Blanc (R) opposed the bill, saying it would be a return to the Woodstock era and calling proposals to use the drugs to treat service members “experimenting on veterans.” Assistant minority leader Jamie Smith (D) spoke in favor, reiterating that the drug’s legal status in the state would only change if approved by the FDA, and asserting that a counselor and doctor would be present during the drug’s administration. (That might be the case, but those details would be determined by any Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies — or REMS — issued by the FDA in the event of approval.) Ultimately, the Senate voted 21-12 to pass the bill, which now heads to Republican Governor Larry Rhoden’s desk for a signature.

Pilot study uses psilocybin for post-treatment Lyme disease

Psychedelics have been posited as a treatment for a variety of ailments, from mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety to addiction and chronic pain. A study recently published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports suggests it might also be used in the treatment of post-treatment Lyme disease (PTLD), a chronic condition that arises after people recover from bites from Lyme bacteria-carrying ticks. People with PTLD often report fatigue, mood changes, pain, and a general decrease in quality of life.

In the study, Johns Hopkins researchers treated 20 participants with PTLD with two psilocybin sessions and psychological support, which the researchers define as “nondirective” and focusing on goals and education rather than explicit psychotherapy. Over the following six months, participants reported significant improvement in their symptoms and quality of life.

“We consider the current findings to be sufficiently positive to encourage additional randomized controlled research with psilocybin in patients with PTLD,” the researchers write — and given that there are currently no accepted treatments for PTLD, psilocybin seems especially promising. The researchers also propose further investigation of psilocybin and other psychedelics as a treatment for other infection-associated chronic conditions such as myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC), and fibromyalgia, that may benefit from similar approaches.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy bill rejected then resurrected in Georgia

On Tuesday, the Georgia House voted 88-73 to reject House Bill 717, which proposed rules governing clinics offering psychedelic-assisted treatment — including ketamine clinics — in the state. Among those rules was the requirement that physicians practicing in any ketamine or psychedelic clinic meet competency requirements for psychedelic-assisted treatment and therapy, and that clinics must be majority owned by physicians. According to local news site Savannah Now, “critics saw HB 717 as an attempt by doctors to corner the [ketamine] market.” However, the bill’s sponsor, Georgia Representative Sharon Cooper (R), saw it as a proactive way to put regulations in place to dictate not only ketamine clinics, but other potential psychedelics clinics. “There are more psychedelic drugs coming that are under study now that are even more dangerous,” she told Capitol Beat News Service. “How about Ecstasy? Or magic mushrooms?” The next day, the House passed another measure — 159 to 8 — to reconsider the bill at a later date.

• “Telehealth companies are mailing a Schedule III narcotic to tens of thousands of depressed patients, hailing it as the democratization of mental health. They call it access. I call it abandonment,” writes Michael Alvear in a STAT News op-ed. Alvear runs a patient advocacy site called Ketamine Therapy for Depression, and raises the alarm about mail-order ketamine companies.

• In a commentary piece published in Nature, researchers Eduardo Schenberg, Franklin King IV, and Marion Haberkamp call on researchers to more carefully assess and report the effects of blinding in psychedelics clinical trials, as unblinding can affect participants’ expectations, which in turn can bias outcomes.

• Researchers believe they may have solved part of the mystery of kykeon, the brew supposedly consumed by Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, and other ancient Greek legends in a multi-day rite known as the Eleusinian Mysteries. For Science, journalist Rachel Nuwer reports on the new findings and what other religious history scholars make of them.

• Psychedelics came up in U.S. v. Hemani, a Supreme Court case that could change a federal statute that prohibits anyone who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” from owning a gun. According to the New York Times, Justice Elena Kagan brought up ayahuasca as a hypothetical case: when people are under the influence of ayahuasca, “reality dissolves,” Kagan says, but the substance is not addictive and only temporarily alters consciousness.

• For WIRED, journalist Webb Wright reports on a new DMT retreat calling itself a “SETI for the mind,” which aims to establish communication between trippers and the non-human entities they encounter on their journeys.

• Vanity Fair’s “guide to microdosing” takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to identifying the macro and micro effects of various psychedelics, who is trying them, and where they live. (Psilocybin microdosers? “Overextended elder millennial moms.” Ibogaine microdosers? “Your weirdest friend’s weirdest friend.”)

• New York Times political reporter Robert Draper went to the ibogaine clinic Ambio Life Sciences in Tijuana, Mexico, and recounts his experience with the substance and the memories and questions his trip resurfaced.

You’re all caught up! We’ll be back in your inbox on Monday with a new issue of 5 Questions.

If you know anyone who might like the latest on psychedelics in their inbox, feel free to forward this to them, or click below.

Share The Microdose

Got tips? Email us at themicrodose@berkeley.edu.

How widespread in nature is consciousness? Descartes believed it began and ended with Homo sapiens, but today there are few scientists who accept his claim of a human monopoly. A great many mammals, several bird species, and octopuses are now generally thought to be conscious, and there are scientists and philosophers who believe that some rudimentary form of consciousness, or sentience, reaches much further, all the way to insects and, possibly, beyond the animal kingdom.

Most attempts to understand consciousness begin with human consciousness, which is surely the most challenging case. Not only is there the self to deal with, but there is also the fact that we humans are, or can be, conscious of being conscious—we have metaconsciousness, adding a whole other layer of complexity. Then there is the role of culture and history in the shaping of human consciousness; consciousness in the West in the twenty-first century is different in important respects from consciousness in other cultures at other points in time. It’s little wonder that the phenomenon of human consciousness can seem to us so far removed from the rest of nature.

Yet we can assume that human consciousness is, like everything else in nature, the product of evolution, even if we have trouble imagining exactly how that came to be. So what if we begin our inquiry at the far end, down near the bottom of the tree of life, long before the emergence of nervous systems, and go in search of consciousness in its simplest form? How early in the history of life do we start to see something we might call protoconsciousness, or sentience—a way of being in the world that might, by steps, evolve into something as elaborate and complex as human consciousness? My wager is that by starting there, deep down in the natural world rather than up here in our highly unusual heads, the hard problem might yield, or at least become a little less hard.

Let us begin, in fact, with a class of beings that few would regard as sentient, let alone conscious. The creatures I have in mind are ancient, brainless, and largely immobile—hardly the most promising candidates for consciousness.

Let us begin with plants.

In the long history of our species, we moderns in the West are the exceptions in our reluctance, at least as adults, to grant the spark of subjectivity, or personhood, to the wider nonhuman world. So how did we get to be so stingy in our granting of consciousness to other beings? “Science” is the easy answer, but a particular conception of science with a particular history. Galileo, Descartes, and Locke, who together set forth the terms of the modern scientific enterprise beginning in the seventeenth century, did so in such a way that it was bound to disenchant the nonhuman world. It was Galileo who divided the world in two, a move that English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called “the bifurcation of nature.” One part of nature consisted of “primary qualities,” such as size, shape, mass, motion, and number, all of which are objective, measurable properties of material things. The other part of nature consisted of “secondary qualities,” such as color, taste, smell, sound, and warmth or cold, which are subjective and difficult to measure.

Wisely, Galileo determined that the scientific enterprise would achieve the most, and antagonize the Church the least, if it confined itself to the study of primary qualities—the measurable material world, which is to say, quantities. But if the “grand book of the universe” is written in the language of mathematics, as Galileo proposed, then how do we deal with all those “secondary qualities” of reality that aren’t mathematizable—the redness and sweetness of an apple, for example? Galileo solved this problem by, in effect, reconceiving reality as comprising only those characteristics that could be quantified and expressed mathematically: size, shape, mass, motion, and number. He effectively evicted from the world all other qualities—color, taste, scent, and so forth—and relegated them to the minds of the human beings perceiving them (as if those minds weren’t part of the world!). Through Galileo’s lens,what we experience as the color red is “really” a specific frequency of light, and sweetness is “really” a kind of molecule, such as sucrose or glucose. No wonder we have such trouble incorporating consciousness into our scientific picture of the world or detecting it in other beings. Science has been constructed in such a way as to exclude it or treat it as an illusion.

Descartes divided the universe along more or less similar lines: There was res extensa (matter stuff) and res cogitans (mind stuff), the possession of which he limited to humans. This division gave Descartes the green light to perform vivisections—dissections of live animals, including in his case rabbits and dogs—as his philosophy convinced him that animals, lacking souls, couldn’t possibly feel pain. As for the shrieks and howls of the creatures he tortured, these he dismissed as the meaningless noise of automatons, having nothing to do with feelings as we—and only we—know them.

As a matter of methodology, the bifurcation of nature has proved wildly successful. It allowed the scientific enterprise to flourish and kept some number of scientists from being burned at the stake for challenging Church orthodoxy. By training their attention on the quantifiable material world and leaving subjective experience off the table, science and technology were able to achieve more than Galileo or Descartes ever could have dreamed. As it turned out, there was quite a lot we could do with mathematics.

But it didn’t take long before what began as a method morphed into a metaphysics. The quantifiable material world became the only one that counted, and the reality of lived experience faded before the power of mathematical abstraction. This wasn’t entirely Galileo’s fault—he never doubted the existence of qualities; he just chose to treat them as properties of the mind (a.k.a. the soul), best left to the purview of the Church. But his intellectual descendants came to mistake the map he’d given them for the actual territory. And nowhere on that map could subjective experience be found. Stripped of qualities, the material world was reduced to quantities and, eventually, to a “resource.” We know where that has led.

And yet even as science was busily objectifying the world, the reality of subjective experience couldn’t be denied—or reconciled with matter. Descartes rightly observed that there is nothing of which we can be more certain than the reality of our first-person experience. Enter dualism and the mind-body problem—the idea that there are two completely different and irreconcilable kinds of “stuff,” one mental and the other physical. This idea is still very much with us, vastly complicating our efforts to understand consciousness and somehow root (or reroot) it in nature. There may have been good reasons for bracketing consciousness, and much to be gained by doing so, but along the way, science learned to gaze upon nature and detect no sentience. Indeed, at some point, science stopped looking for it. This lacuna owes to what philosopher Evan Thompson and his coauthors, physicists Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser, call Western science’s “blind spot”—its failure to take lived experience, or phenomenology, seriously. The blind spot (which is the title of their 2024 book on the limitations of the scientific method) has made it difficult, perhaps impossible, for the physical sciences to reckon with consciousness. There is a large irony here: By subtracting subjective experience from “the real world,” five hundred years of reductive science and philosophical dualism have inadvertently elevated consciousness, unmoored from nature, into something very much like magic.

So what might we discover if we take seriously the idea that some very simple form of consciousness—let’s call it sentience—is actually widespread in nature?

Subscribe now

I should say at the outset that on the afternoon I began to take this idea seriously, I had eaten a handful of magic mushrooms. I mention this not because I’m eager to undermine my credibility but because I’m curious about the value of insights like this, ones that owe their inspiration to altered states of consciousness.

One of the more consistent and curious aspects of psychedelics is their ability to reanimate a world gone quiet and still. Researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that a single psychedelic experience dramatically increases the likelihood that a person will attribute consciousness to other entities, both living and nonliving. Among the entities mentioned in the study, plants saw the greatest increase in conferral of consciousness: Before their psychedelic experience, 26 percent of participants believed plants to be conscious; afterward, this figure climbed to 61 percent. (Fungi were not far behind.) Another study, this one done at Imperial College London, found that psychedelics altered people’s fundamental beliefs aboutreality, shifting them from materialism toward panpsychism or idealism—toward a world steeped in mind.

Who can say what this means? It could simply be that psychedelics soften our resistance to various forms of magical thinking. Or perhaps the attribution of consciousness to other beings is an innate cognitive bias that gets drummed out of us in school. Is the belief that all beings are conscious more or less adaptive than the belief that we humans are unique in this regard? If we err on the side of mistaking that shadowy boulder for a lumbrous bear rather than the other way around, we are more likely to survive. (Hyperactive agency detection is the technical term for this adaptive bias.) Conversely, the idea that the rest of the world is more or less dead (thank you, Western science) has given us license to exploit nature without limit in ways that have advantaged us, though only in the short term. Right or wrong, the dead-world idea has helped the West prevail over traditional cultures that believe the world is alive with consciousness. And yet because we have acted based on this belief, we are well on the way to destroying the world, or at least our own habitat, which is surely not to our advantage. The question, then, is this: Does the animism that psychedelics appear to promote represent a return to forms of magical thinking we have outgrown? Or does it represent a relearning of something crucially important about the world that we have, to our peril, forgotten?

In his writings on mysticism and religion, William James urged us not to rush to judgment on such questions. He collected reports of extraordinary experiences—accounts of divine encounters and previously unseen worlds—and rather than dismissing them, he proposed treating these mystical episodes as intriguing hypotheses to be tested instead of ignored. Ultimate truth in these realms being impossible to establish, the proper test for James was the pragmatic one: How useful would it be to treat these perceptions about the nature of reality as true? What would it get us?

That afternoon in my garden, after ingesting the magic mushrooms, I was as certain of the sentience of the flowering plants around me as I had been of anything up to that point. (James knew all about this certainty; he called it the “noetic quality” of the mystical experience.) Eyeless, the plants nevertheless “returned my gaze,” I wrote afterward, and gave the distinct impression that they wished me (their gardener!) well. To be clear, I didn’t think these plants possessed the sort of mind that could reflect on experiences and form opinions; I didn’t imagine them to have interiority. But these beings were definitely awake and, in their own plantlike way, watchful. What they exhibited, I felt sure, was some elemental sense of being alive and aware. This sensing came in two flavors, or valences: a positive one when, say, the late-afternoon sunlight bathed their outstretched leaves, and a negative one when, for instance, those leaves were being chomped on by insects. It seemed obvious that not only were these plants cognizant of their environment, but they also had preferences, agency, and a viewpoint of their own.

Now, with the psilocybin molecules long gone from my brain, my doubts about plant consciousness have returned—the same doubts most people have, assuming they’ve ever stopped to consider the matter. Most of the time—which is to say, when I haven’t taken drugs—plants don’t seem conscious at all to me. They return to their accustomed role as the mute, immobile furniture of our world, the green backdrop against which the livelier (and likely more conscious) lives of animals play out.

So which lens yields the more accurate picture of reality? Why are we more willing to ascribe consciousness to animals than to plants? Because they have nervous systems like we do is the usual answer. But are brains a prerequisite for consciousness? Not according to the scientists who subscribe to integrated information theory or to the philosophers arguing for panpsychism or to the computer scientists building artificial intelligence. All are agnostic about the “substrate”—the material basis or hardware—necessary to host a conscious system; it need not be a brain. In fact, neuroscience has yet to identify the biological structures necessary to generate consciousness. We just take it on faith that these will be found and that when they are, they will be found in the brain.

As proud possessors of said brains, we are naturally cerebrocentric. But do we really think that when we find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, these conscious beings will necessarily come outfitted with moist gray brains like ours? That seems unlikely. Even back here on Earth, there’s an abundance of research (as we will see) showing that brains don’t in fact hold a monopoly on memory, awareness, cognition, agency, and decision-making. So why should we grant them a monopoly on sentience?

Subscribe now

Excerpt of A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan published by Penguin Press. Copyright 2026.

Editor’s Note: I'm thrilled to introduce Anna Marie Yanny, a neuroscience researcher turned science journalist and radio producer. She's joining The Microdose to help cover This Week in Psychedelics on Fridays. This is her first post.

The FDA is changing the drug approval process

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is moving to require only one “pivotal trial” for drug approvals, instead of the historical two-study requirement. (A pivotal trial is almost always a Phase 3 trial.) The change could be welcome news for psychedelics companies planning to seek approval. But some scientists worry that the sweeping change will limit safety and efficacy data, especially for psychiatric studies.

The FDA announcement came via a Feb. 18 publication in the The New England Journal of Medicine authored by FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. It notes the FDA currently can, and often does, allow a drug to proceed to market following one “adequate and well-controlled study” paired with “confirmative evidence.”

The new two-trial standard was implemented “in a world where biologic understanding was more limited than it is today,” the FDA leaders reason. In 2026, they write, researchers have other ways – like statistical power, blinding, and robust control groups – “to feel assured that our products help people live longer or better than requiring manufacturers to test them yet again.” Some studies will still need two trials, but one will be the new default, FDA Commissioner Makary told STAT in December.

In their commentary, FDA leaders wrote that the one-trial standard ”will substantially reduce costs for sponsors and will speed drugs to market.” Psychedelic Alpha reports the change could potentially allow the non-profit Usona Institute’s psilocybin formulation to piggyback on a possible Compass Pathways approval for synthetic psilocybin, which may happen as early as next year. Usona Institute has completed a single Phase 3 trial, and COMPASS recently announced results from its second.

After the FDA announcement, several scientists voiced their concern about the change, suggesting it could hinder rigorous verification of a drug’s safety and efficacy.

“Besides setting a lower bar for FDA approval standards by setting a default of 1 instead of 2 clinical trials (what happened to reproducibility as gold standard science?!), they sell the policy as a gift for pharma (less to do to prove the drug actually works!)” Yale School of Medicine assistant professor Reshma Ramachandran posted on X.

Studies on treatments for cancer or rare diseases historically benefit from single-trial review, but it’s unclear what this move will mean for psychiatry and psychedelics. A JAMA study analyzed a cohort of drugs, many of them for cancer, that achieved FDA approval in 2020, and found over half were supported by just one pivotal trial.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the one-trial change and other frustrations led to the abrupt departure in December of Richard Pazdur, the FDA’s director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Want the latest psychedelics news? Subscribe! (It’s free!)

Subscribe now

In a Senate hearing, Surgeon General nominee Casey Means was asked about psychedelics use.

President Trump’s U.S. Surgeon General nominee Casey Means testified at a Senate committee nomination hearing on Wednesday. She and her brother, Calley Means, have both publicly advocated for psychedelics access. He is a senior advisor in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In the hearing, Means was mostly asked about her views on vaccination but several questions were also raised about her experience and opinions on psychedelics, which she described in her 2024 book Good Energy. The book was written together with her brother.

In the book, Means advocates for psilocybin-assisted therapy. “If you feel called, I also encourage you to explore intentional, guided psilocybin therapy,” she writes. “Strong scientific evidence suggests that this psychedelic therapy can be one of the most meaningful experiences of life for some people, as they have been for me.”

In Wednesday’s hearing, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) raised concerns about Means’s enthusiasm for psilocybin mushrooms and asked Means if she would endorse illicit drug use when speaking to the American public.

“What I would say as a private citizen is, in many cases, different than what I would say as a public health official,” Means responded. “And when it comes to psychedelic therapy for mental health issues, I think the science is still emerging … under no circumstances would I recommend that to the American people in this role.” She went on to say she believes that many psychedelic therapy studies are “exciting” and should continue.

Means’s somewhat tepid response may add to existing disappointment from some psychedelic advocates who had hoped that the Trump Administration would have moved more quickly on psychedelic access.

The committee will vote on Means’s nomination soon. If approved, her nomination moves to the full Senate for a vote. The Senate is expected to confirm her.

RAND survey shows that nearly a quarter of U.S. adults support legal use of psilocybin mushrooms

About one quarter of U.S. adults support legal use of psilocybin mushrooms, according to a national report published by the RAND research organization on Tuesday. Support for legal use of LSD or MDMA was closer to 10%. For context, approval for cannabis legalization was much higher, at around 65%.

The 2025 RAND Psychedelics Survey includes responses from 10,122 U.S. adults gathered between Sept. 9 and Oct. 1, 2025. Researchers said it’s the first survey of its kind to ask about policy preferences for individual psychedelic substances, instead of psychedelics as a general category.

The survey found support for legalizing psilocybin was similar to attitudes towards cannabis in the mid-1990s, before states began implementing medical marijuana laws. “Perspectives shift depending on the substance and the reason for use. Recognizing these nuances can help shape more informed research and policy discussions,” said lead author Ben Senator in a press release.

When asked where people should access psilocybin if legal, nearly half of survey respondents said under supervision at a medical facility. Meanwhile, 28% said a dispensary, and about 23% endorsed a “grow and give” system.

The most common reason people gave for endorsing legal use of psychedelics was to address mental or physical health conditions. Opinions on the drugs differed depending on respondents’ age and sex, as well. For example, about 29% of males supported legalizing psilocybin, compared to about 18% of females. And about 31% of 18 to 29 year olds supported it, compared to about 11% of those 60 and older.

Reunion Neuroscience gets FDA Breakthrough Therapy status

On Monday, biopharmaceutical company Reunion Neuroscience, Inc. announced the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation for use of its proprietary drug “luvesilocin” (formerly RE104) in treatment of postpartum depression. Luvesilocin is a prodrug of the psilocin analog 4-OH-DiPT. (A prodrug is an inactive, or less active compound that is converted to the active drug by the body.) Reunion designed luvesilocin to deliver a shorter psychoactive experience (about 2-3 hours), compared to psilocybin trips that can be twice as long.

Since 2017, the FDA has issued at least eight other psychedelic treatment protocols Breakthrough Therapy Designation. The designation is designed to fast track the review process for drugs meant to treat serious conditions.

The company plans to launch a Phase 3 clinical trial in 2026 for postpartum depression treatment. Reunion expects the results from a single Phase 3 trial would amount to sufficient data collection FDA review.

• Michael Pollan’s tenth book “A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness” is out this week (a journey that includes psychedelics). “Along the way,” DoubleBlind’s Shelby Hartman writes for The Los Angeles Times, “he realizes that the ethical significance of his investigation is much greater than he first imagined.”

• A Utah bill that would create a clinical study testing psychedelic-assisted therapy for veterans with PTSD passed in the House Feb. 18 and now moves to the Senate.

• In an op-ed for STAT, author Erica Rex writes about her experience in a 2012 psilocybin trial and warns that the field is moving away from safety and support in an effort to profit on psychedelics.

You’re all caught up! We’ll be back in your inbox on Monday.

If you know anyone who might like the latest on psychedelics in their inbox, feel free to forward this to them, or click below.

Share The Microdose

Got tips? Email us at themicrodose@berkeley.edu.

When Nikolas Francis listens to music, he knows how the sounds are being processed by his brain. As an auditory neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, he specializes in how neurons respond to pitches and tones. Francis is also a musician who plays the drums, with a focus on jazz and improvisation. He became interested in studying how the brain hears because he knew that listening to music didn’t lead to the same experience as hearing other noises, like a car driving by or a fire alarm. Those sounds are processed by the auditory circuits in the brain too, but when we hear music, “suddenly, we have this emotional reaction,” he says.

When people take psychedelic drugs, they can have even stronger responses to music. In one paper from 2020, researchers reviewed psychedelic therapy participants’ responses to songs, and found that, “music could convey love, carry listeners to other realms, be something to ‘hold,’ inspire, and elicit a deep sense of embodied transformation.” Research institutions including Johns Hopkins University and Imperial College London have their own song playlists that they rely on during therapy. (Francis is a fan of Imperial’s, in part because it includes the musician Laraaji.)

In his Maryland lab, Francis is using mice to understand exactly how psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin, affect neurons in the brain’s auditory cortex. The Microdose talked with Francis about what mice can teach us about humans’ experience with music while on psychedelics.

Your recent study was on mice that were given psilocybin. What can you learn using mice rather than people?

It’s an important question. The goal here is to improve human health, and so the most relevant species to study would be humans. Why would we study how a mouse hears?

The important thing is that a lot of the underlying neurophysiology, like the way that the brain is structured in its sensory systems, is conserved across species—particularly across mammals. And the real benefit of mice is that we can study neurons at the single cell level.

In humans, we’re largely limited. If you want to study neural activity, we’re limited to non-invasive methods such as fMRI and EEG, where we can’t really resolve activity of individual neurons. If we want to understand the neural basis of psychedelic experience, we need to link behavior and perception to the way that individual neurons process sound, not just whole brain signals.

How do you see what’s happening in individual neurons?

Mostly we use two-photon imaging. This is a laser imaging method where we have a high power laser that scans some region of the brain. Then, these particular mice are genetically modified such that when their neurons are active, they give off a little bit of light. We scan the brain and when those neurons are active, we record that light. That tells us how active an individual neuron was, and we can do that for many hundreds of neurons simultaneously.

Ultimately, everything that we perceive and understand about the world comes from the processing and the interaction of individual neurons. Mice give us access to these individual neurons, and different types of neurons. We can manipulate those and see how they affect perception and behavior. And we can do things like look at, for example, the differences between neurons. This is a potential future direction: How do neurons that have 5-HT2A receptors change their activity versus those that don’t?

What sounds did you play the mice that were on psilocybin, and what did you observe in their brains?

Since this was the first study that we decided to do in this area, we chose the most simple sound that we could think of which is called a pure tone. A pure tone has only a single frequency. It’s basically the simplest sound that you can produce, but it’s a really good sound for studying the auditory system.

If you play a single tone, a particular region in the auditory system will become active. If you play a different frequency of a pure tone, you’ll get a different region active. You have these very reliable spatial structures in response to tones that you can use to calibrate how much has the system changed. We play these tones at the roughly human conversational level. Our goal here is to ask the question: How much does a single neuron change its response to different frequencies of sound?

We played these sounds for the mice, and we did it in three different contexts. One was before we administered psilocybin. The second was immediately after, and then 30 minutes post-administration. When we look at the neural activity, we see some pretty striking results. Of course, before we give the psilocybin, everything looks normal. We get tuning as expected. The neurons are responding to sound. And then immediately after we inject the psilocybin, what we see is an increase in activity, bigger responses to sound than before the treatment. And then roughly 30 minutes later, what we see is hypoactivity. In other words, the neurons are responding much less to the sound, and also in a much more variable way.

There were two other findings. First, tuning is important for the way that we distinguish sounds in the environment, and that remains unchanged. You can relate this to hearing two different voices. They sound different because they contain different amounts of energy at different frequencies. How well tuned neurons are, and how well they select for different frequencies, affects how well we can select out a particular voice from a crowd. Neurons in the mice were just as well-tuned immediately after the psilocybin treatment— they remained perfectly well-tuned as if nothing had changed. We have these neurons which are responding less to sound 30 minutes later, but remaining equally selected to the environment.

Second, we also saw that these neurons started communicating more. There was a greater functional connectivity between these neurons, which suggests that there’s some change in the brain that involved the way that either other areas are communicating with neurons in the auditory cortex, or the way neurons in the auditory cortex are communicating with each other.

People speak about how strong their responses are to music while on psychedelics in both therapeutic and recreational contexts. Are there any lessons from your findings that explain why that might be?

There are maybe some basic lessons. One of the major findings from my study was the stability of auditory responses. Granted, they were lower, they were sort of quieter, but the complexity of the response, in terms of their selectivity, was the same.

What this means is that tonality might be preserved. Our perception of notes might remain fairly stable. It’s a reliable scaffolding, which I think is interesting in how it relates to how the field has thought about this. Psychiatrist Bill Richards mentions the idea of music being a safety net: You might not even notice it while you’re having the psychedelic experience. But then, if need be, it can provide the structure that you might need under that emotional vulnerability.

I just got a grant to do another study, in animal MRI. We want to look at how these effects that we observed in the auditory cortex are related to what’s going on elsewhere in the brain. The auditory cortex is connected to the whole limbic system, the amygdala, and can modulate the thalamus. When we think about musical chills and interception in the insula, all these areas are connected to the auditory cortex. If we have this stable representation of sound, that’s going to influence all these other structures that change the way that we feel about music, in terms of interoception and also our emotional state.

It seems like every therapist, institution, and retreat center has their own playlist. Can your findings help clinicians pick the music that they should play for their tripping clients?

In our study, sound sensitivity varied over time. While the neurons may maintain their selectivity to sounds, they become less sensitive to those sounds. I think that’s something important for clinicians to consider. Maybe early on in the session, the auditory cortex might be more sensitive and respond more. You might not want to play sounds that have so much influence.

I have listened to some of these playlists. The Hopkins one is really biased towards classical music, although there’s some other stuff towards the end. And then the Imperial College has some ambient music—I saw Laraaji on there. From the science perspective, my data is showing that there is a heightened amount of intracortical functional connectivity in the auditory cortex, which means that it’s the endogenous aspects of experience that are dominating. I think that makes it important to consider the individual. Not everyone is going to have the same reaction to the same song. I think it’s probably important to consider the pacing, the predictability, and the tonality of the music, as opposed to focusing on a particular genre.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Happy Friday and welcome back to The Microdose, an independent journalism newsletter brought to you by the U.C. Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

Compass announces promising yet modest results from second Phase 3 trial

On Tuesday, Compass Pathways announced results from COMP006, its second Phase 3 trial using the company’s formulation of synthetic psilocybin, COMP360, for treatment-resistant depression. The results have not yet been peer-reviewed, but according to the company, participants who received two 25mg doses of COMP360 showed a “highly statistically significant and clinically meaningful reduction in symptom severity” compared to participants who received 1mg placebo doses of the drug. Participants’ depression symptoms were assessed using a standard clinical measure of depression called the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS). On average, participants who received the two 25mg doses of COMP360 showed a 3.8 point decrease in MADRS scores compared to the placebo group.

These results were nearly identical to those of COMP005, the company’s first Phase 3 trial, in which participants received just one dosing session. Those results were initially reported in June 2025, and in that trial the difference between the 25mg group versus a group that received an inert placebo was 3.6.

At the time, we noted that compared with the company’s Phase 2b results, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2022, COMP005’s outcomes were less impressive: in the earlier study, the difference in MADRS scores between the 25mg group and 1mg group was, on average, 6.6 points, nearly twice that of what the company reported for both of these Phase 3 trials.

In a post on X, UCSF researcher Balázs Szigeti noted that Compass had modified its definition of “clinically meaningful” in COMP006’s results compared to earlier studies. In this most recent announcement, Compass defined a meaningful response as a greater than 25% decrease in MADRS score, but the company has previously used 50% as their criteria in reporting data from pilot studies and its Phase 2B study results. “Virtually all studies measure the ‘response rate’ which is defined as a MADRS reduction of at least 50%, not 25%,” Szigeti wrote. Fellow UCSF researcher Robin Carhart-Harris noted the same thing in an X post: “Odd switch in definition of response criteria here,” he wrote, calling this trial’s response rate “quite underwhelming.” But, he noted, a “25+% drop is clinically meaningful, it’s just inconsistent with the standard criteria for response.”

Still, UCSF’s Szigeti wrote that in his view, the company’s two Phase 3 studies “should be enough for FDA approval.” Similarly, Jerry Rosenbaum, director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Neuroscience of Psychedelics, told STAT that the data “probably meets the bar for approval,” though “it doesn’t shout out to you that this is miraculous.”

Compass’s stock price has increased by some 30% since the company announced their results on Tuesday.

Missouri hearings on ibogaine and psilocybin bills, New Hampshire psilocybin bill advances

On Monday, the Missouri Emerging Issues committee held a hearing to discuss House Bill 2961, a bill that proposes the state’s Department of Health and Senior Services award grants to study ibogaine in the treatment of opioid use disorder, substance use disorder, or “any other neurological or mental health condition for which ibogaine demonstrates efficacy.” The bill states that money for this research could come from private sources as well as the federal government, and would be put in an “ibogaine study fund,” and the state would receive a stake in the intellectual property and commercial rights of any drug that comes out of the research.

At the hearing, all attendees who spoke did so in favor of the bill. Among them were first responders and veterans who talked ardently about how receiving ibogaine treatment in Mexico saved their lives or “cured” them of a range of issues, from PTSD and depression to back pain. Many of these testimonies were moving and tearful; though speakers were limited to two-minute speeches, the committee allowed one particularly passionate speaker to keep talking for more than 10 minutes.

Over a dozen people submitted written testimony ahead of time, including psychedelic non-profit VETS’s legislative director Logan Davidson (who lives in Texas and has worked on psychedelics legislation in the state), and members of the Modern Health Coalition, which one member described as “a Missouri-based organization dedicated to advancing legislative and regulatory policies that support responsible psychedelic research, education, and clinical trials.”

Just three people opposed the bill. Two were registered lobbyists with the Missouri State Medical Association; the other took issue with the bill’s dependence on federal approval for ibogaine to make the drug accessible at the state level, and raised questions about what happens if disputes arise over intellectual property interests.

This week, Missouri lawmakers also took up House Bill 1717, which would allow people with PTSD, major depressive disorder, substance use disorder, or a person receiving end-of-life care to take psilocybin under supervision of a licensed medical professional. Missouri’s Emerging Issues committee also heard testimony about the bill in their Monday session. The bill’s sponsors, Republican State Representative Matthew Overcast and Richard West, also introduced the ibogaine legislation above. “There’s nothing more American than the ability to choose which medication works for you,” Overcast said, after asserting that pharmaceutical companies had no incentive to cure mental illness.

Meanwhile in New Hampshire, the state house passed HB 1809, which proposes initiating a medical psilocybin program run by the state’s Department of Health and Human Services. Earlier this legislative session, representatives declined to advance HB 1796, a similar bill that went into much greater detail about the potential program’s parameters. The less specific HB 1809 now heads to the House Finance Committee for review; should that committee approve it, it will head to the full State Senate for a vote.

Want the latest psychedelics news? Subscribe! (It’s free!)

Subscribe now

Helus’s DMT formulation shows promise in treating depression

A new study published in Nature Medicine suggests that a formulation of the psychedelic compound DMT could help treat moderate to severe depression. In the Phase 2a study, a group of researchers primarily affiliated with Imperial College London and Small Pharma (a UK-based biotech company that has since been purchased by Helus, formerly known as Cybin) gave 34 adults with depression either a single dose of intravenous DMT — its proprietary formulation, which it calls SPL026 — or a placebo. The IV infusion took 10 minutes, and participants were accompanied by two therapists to provide what the authors characterize as “silent, attentive support.” Compared to other classic psychedelics such as psilocybin or LSD, DMT trips are generally fairly short; when injected, the drug’s effects can wear off within minutes. The researchers assessed participants’ depression symptoms before the DMT dose, then one and two weeks after the dosing session. After a week, participants who received DMT scored on average 10 points lower on the MADRS compared to those in the placebo group; after two weeks, that difference was 7 points.

At the two-week mark, participants were able to receive a second dose of DMT. This time, all participants knew that they were receiving the drug (researchers call this kind of study an open label design). The researchers again assessed participants’ depressive symptoms at 3, 4, 6, and 14 weeks. Those who were originally in the DMT group — meaning they’d received two doses of the drug — showed little additional change in their Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale score in the weeks immediately following their second dose, but those who were in the placebo group showed a significant decrease in MADRS score following their DMT dose. The authors interpreted these results to mean that just one dose is effective in decreasing depressive symptoms; the second dose didn’t further improve participants’ depressive symptoms.

The day after the paper was published, Helus’s share price jumped around 15%.

The company is no longer continuing to study intravenous DMT, it says in a press release, but these results will inform the company’s development of HLP004, an intramuscular formulation of DMT the company is studying as a potential treatment for generalized anxiety disorder.

Compass laying groundwork for COMP360 trigger law in Vermont

Tess Bettler, associate director of government affairs at UK-based pharmaceutical company Compass Pathways, presented to the Vermont Senate Committee on Health and Welfare on Wednesday morning. The hearing took place in a charmingly intimate room in the Vermont State House; Bettler was the last speaker in the meeting, and she explained that Compass’s synthetic formulation of psilocybin, COMP360, showed promise in treating depression and that the company would soon be seeking approval for the drug from the Food and Drug Administration. “We are asking for your help to ensure that patients have access to this innovative treatment, in the event it is FDA-approved and rescheduled by the Drug Enforcement Administration,” Bettler read from written testimony submitted ahead of the committee meeting. Bettler also explained that in order to prescribe the drug, Vermont would need to pass legislation to add it to the list of the state’s regulated drugs, and along with her testimony, Bettler submitted draft language for that state legislation.

That language specifically names “crystalline polymorph psilocybin,” which refers to Compass’s proprietary formulation called COMP360. Over the last year, Compass has introduced similar bills in at least ten states; Bettler herself testified in Kansas and Pennsylvania.

The committee seemed receptive to the idea of allowing psilocybin use; one lawmaker said she was “in favor of exploring alternative therapies under the watchful eye of a practitioner, of a therapist and a doctor.” None of the lawmakers indicated that they were aware that this draft language applies only to the company’s formulation of the drug.

• Canadian writer Sheila Heti sets out to try several forms of psychedelic therapy and reports back on the experience for Granta.

• In Q4 of 2025, psychedelic drug developers continued to invest in paying lobbyists, with Compass leading the bunch with $100,000 of spending, reports Psychedelic Alpha.

• MAPS just announced it will be holding the next Psychedelic Science conference in Denver again in May 2027.

• Oregon Health & Science University announced it received a five-year, $3.3 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to study the safety and effectiveness of Oregon’s state-regulated psilocybin program. Shereef Elnahal, who was formerly the under secretary for Veterans Affairs and has spoken openly about his enthusiasm for psychedelic drugs, is now OHSU’s president.

You’re all caught up! We’ll be back in your inbox on Monday with a new issue of 5 Questions.

If you know anyone who might like the latest on psychedelics in their inbox, feel free to forward this to them, or click below.

Subscribe now

Got tips? Email us at themicrodose@berkeley.edu.

Happy Friday and welcome back to The Microdose, an independent journalism newsletter brought to you by the U.C. Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

More ibogaine bills in Tennessee, Maryland and Vermont

Another three states are considering ibogaine bills this week. Ibogaine is a psychedelic substance made from a shrub native to Central Africa which researchers and advocates are interested in as a potential treatment for opioid use disorder, other substance use disorders, and other mental health conditions. So far, at least ten states have introduced ibogaine-related bills; many reference Americans for Ibogaine, a national consortium of ibogaine advocates co-founded by former Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry which helped secure $50 million for ibogaine research in Texas last year.

Last week, Tennessee State Senator Page Walley (R) introduced SB 2149, also known as “Helping Open Pathways to Effective (HOPE) Treatment Act,” which would create a state fund called the Tennessee Mental Health Innovation Fund by leveraging public-private partnerships to fund ibogaine research. In Maryland, Democratic State Senator Kevin M. Harris introduced SB 527, which would also establish funding for ibogaine research via $1.5 million from the state’s Opioid Restitution Fund, the $670 million the state will receive from prescription opioid-related legal settlements over the next decade or so. In Vermont, a group of six state representatives introduced H0859, which would establish a psychedelic advisory board. According to the bill, this board would be “a step toward Americans for Ibogaine’s goal of establishing ‘the medicalization of ibogaine in the United States — specifically, the successful completion of Phase 3 clinical trials, and ultimately, FDA approval.”

Colorado and New Mexico introduce psilocybin trigger laws

New Mexico lawmakers introduced HB 336, which would make synthetic psilocybin, or any drug containing it, state-legal should the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approve synthetic psilocybin. While roughly half of U.S. states already have laws on the books that would automatically update state law if the federal government reschedules a drug, many do not; last year, at least ten states considered similar trigger laws. Many of those bills were drafted by Compass Pathways, a British pharmaceutical company developing psychedelics as medicines,

and they contain language specifying “crystalline polymorph psilocybin,” the terms the company uses for its proprietary formulation of synthetic psilocybin. However, New Mexico’s law uses the broader term “synthetic psilocybin.”

Last year, Colorado was one of the states that passed a trigger law for “crystalline polymorph psilocybin,” and legislators have now introduced SB 26-031, a broader bill that changes state law if any Schedule I drug is approved for prescription use.

And more psychedelics legislative updates in Washington and Arizona

Last week, Washington’s Senate Committee on Health & Long-Term Care voted 9-1 to advance Senate Bill 5921, a bill drafted by the national group Coalition for Better Community Health, which proposes a medical psilocybin program overseen by the state’s Department of Health. It is now with the Senate Ways and Means Committee. Washington alternates between longer 105-day sessions during budget years, and short 60-day sessions during non-budget years; this is a non-budget year, so all bills must pass the chamber they originated in by February 17. If the Washington State Senate doesn’t vote to advance the bill by next week, it will effectively be dead.

Earlier this legislative session, Washington state lawmakers were also considering Senate Bill 5201 / House Bill 1433, a bill reintroduced from 2025 that proposed a state-regulated psychedelic services program similar to those in Oregon and Colorado and contained a detailed structure for how the program would operate. That bill was not advanced by a committee by a February 9 deadline, and is therefore dead.

Arizona’s SB 1752 prohibits people from knowingly harvesting, processing, or making mescaline for commercial use or research, but it allows use of the substance if used for “bona fide practice of a religious belief.” Mescaline is a compound found in cacti including peyote and San Pedro. The bill specifies that unpermitted mescaline use would be a class 4 felony, which could mean a prison sentence of between 1 and 4 years.

Want the latest psychedelics news? Subscribe! (It’s free!)

Subscribe now

A death and other troubles at ibogaine centers in Mexico

On January 21, Ambio, an ibogaine clinic with locations in Baja California and in the Republic of Malta, published a statement explaining that a patient died in Mexico while receiving ibogaine to treat addiction through a program Ambio calls its “Detoxification Program.” While the clinic’s post said the company would not discuss details of the incident publicly, its statement suggests the patient could have died due to complications from other drugs. The clinic mentions “the increasing number of dangerous, unknown, and ever-changing adulterants in the global supply of street fentanyl” as a major risk to ibogaine treatment, and mentions it will implement enhanced screening protocols and a minimum 21-day stay for “anyone consuming fentanyl prior to treatment.”

About a week later, Americans for Ibogaine posted a statement saying it was “aware of a serious incident reported by an ibogaine clinic in Mexico involving alleged misconduct by an individual practitioner.” Americans for Ibogaine did not name the clinic, but Transcend Clinic Cancún posted a statement on January 26 saying its staff “detected an irregular situation,” transferred a patient to the hospital, and that the clinic “maintains a zero-tolerance policy toward any form of misconduct.” No details have been made publicly available by the clinic about the nature of the situation or alleged misconduct.

MAPS releases policy guidebook

Last week, MAPS released a policy guide laying out the organization’s priorities and goals amidst a shifting landscape for psychedelics. Founded in 1986, the non-profit has seen — and pioneered — some of the field’s most radical changes. Traditionally, the group was known for its grassroots, anti-establishment approach, bootstrapping funding and researchers to run the world’s first-ever MDMA clinical trials, and supporting people working in the underground.

More recently, the group spun out a for-profit arm of the organization to seek federal approval for MDMA-assisted therapy. After the Food and Drug Administration rejected their New Drug Application in the summer of 2024, the non-profit laid off a third of its employees, and its for-profit arm Resilient (formerly Lykos) also laid off 75% of its employees. At MAPS’s Psychedelic Science conference last summer, the mood was more subdued than in 2023, and panelists and attendees asked: what’s next?

MAPS’s new guide shows the organization wants to take a big-tent approach. It takes care not to alienate psychedelic pharmaceutical companies and those in favor of the medicalization of psychedelics, though it also acknowledges the “practical and cultural limitations of the current healthcare system” and “the need to design, develop, and implement other regulatory approaches.” It notes protecting consumers as a core principle, highlighting the need to limit marketing of psychedelics, and to regulate claims about psychedelic use as “therapy.” “Over the last few years, a tension has emerged in the use of the word “therapy” as a catch-all for any facilitated use,” they write. “It is vital to watch out when lines blur between medical, therapeutic, or other (like adult-use, community or “recreational”) frameworks to ensure people know what they are getting into.”

The organization also weighs in on trigger laws, pointing out that even in states with existing drug rescheduling trigger laws, those laws often only apply to the FDA-approved version of the drug. This is called bifurcated scheduling; for instance, if Compass’s synthetic psilocybin formulation COMP360 were to be approved by the FDA, the DEA would move to reschedule COMP360, but that rescheduling will not apply to all forms of psilocybin, such as the psilocybin found in mushrooms. (For more on bifurcated scheduling, read our interview with regulatory attorney Kim Chew.)

The MAPS policy guide recommends using the broadest language possible in any trigger law — for instance, “any compound, mixture or preparation containing any Schedule I substance upon federal rescheduling or descheduling,” instead of a specific formulation. “By utilizing broad language, states can avoid favoring certain drug producers, as well as the need for additional substance-specific legislation,” they write.

• NFL players are trying psilocybin to recover from traumatic brain injuries, reports The New York Times.

• Psychedelic Alpha’s Josh Hardman interviews Michael Cola, the new CEO of Helus (formerly Cybin) about the regulatory environment for psychedelics and Helus’s priorities in the coming months.

• Harvard’s Psychedelics and Spirituality program lead Jeffrey Breau tells The Harvard Gazette that psychedelic chaplaincy is crucial to supporting people who try the substances. “Patients are having these experiences, and if there is no awareness and specific training on the part of the clinicians or others who are supporting them, then patient outcomes can be harmed,” he told the Gazette. Harvard’s program is studying how psychedelic facilitators are trained and leading workshops for facilitators and clinicians on “spiritually responsive care.”

• The government of Australia has just earmarked $739 million AUD (nearly $524 million USD) to fund well-being activities for veterans, including MDMA and psilocybin for PTSD, according to Australia’s ABC.

• Forbes profiles billionaire financial advisor Ron Carson, whose personal life “frayed” as his business grew. Carson says his psychedelic use (according to Forbes, “he won’t say which one”) helped him reshape his business and to feel more centered. “In 2022, after he hosted indigenous leaders from around the world at his remote hunting lodge–turned–healing ranch, a Lakota chief bestowed on him the name Ta Te Omani, meaning “walking into a stiff wind.” He legally changed his name. Ron would now go by Omani. He gave away all his neckties. He started taking psychedelics and fasting as part of what he describes as a broader effort to heal himself,” Forbes reports.

You’re all caught up! We’ll be back in your inbox on Monday with a new issue of 5 Questions.

If you know anyone who might like the latest on psychedelics in their inbox, feel free to forward this to them, or click below.

Share The Microdose

Got tips? Email us at themicrodose@berkeley.edu.

In the summer of 2022, a 57-year-old woman went to Stanford Health Care for breast cancer surgery, and was given anesthesia. She’d had several grueling years leading up to her diagnosis. Her 18-year old son died by suicide, and she had frequent nightmares of trying to save him from falling off a cliff or being kidnapped—and failing.

While under anesthesia, the woman had a different kind of dream. She re-experienced the joy of her son’s birth, and watched as he played with her dog that he had never gotten to meet. After the surgery was over, she tearfully thanked her anesthesiologist, Harrison Shong-Wen Chow, a clinical associate professor of anesthesiology at Stanford Medical School, for the experience. She stopped having nightmares, and months later no longer met criteria for PTSD.

Chow had seen his patients have dreams starting around 2007 when he was working in private practice. He is an expert in regional anesthesia techniques that use lighter doses of a drug, often propofol, which helps people wake up gradually, and have a faster recovery time. Patients liked that they didn’t feel groggy, and they also started telling Chow that they could remember having dreams. Some were related to traumatic incidents from their past, and after dreaming about them, they felt better. Chow and his colleagues reported such cases in 2022 and in 2024.

Since 2020, Chow has been tracking anesthesia dreams in people who come in for surgeries in collaboration with other researchers at Stanford. The Microdose talked to him about how dreaming might be reducing mental distress.

When you heard that your patients were dreaming, what were your first reactions?

At first it was a source of mirth, in the sense that both patients who were reporting dreaming and practitioners around them could all have a laugh about it. It seemed to make patients pretty happy, and that was the extent of it. There’s nothing better than a smiling patient being discharged, telling you about dreams.

During that time, a major publication came out in Anesthesiology by Kate Leslie from the Royal Melbourne Hospital. In about 350 patients under anesthesia, she reported about 22 percent of them had dreams. There were two things that were different from what I was seeing in practice. First was the dream rate. I was seeing dream rates of about 50 percent.

The second thing is that she was reporting that patients were having very mundane kinds of dreams, with no particular pattern. That was different from what we were seeing here. We were seeing patients reporting dreams that seemed related to their lives, and specifically to anxiety in their lives. It was to the point where you could—and not only myself but recovery nurses—pretty much identify what was on the patient’s mind in terms of what they were anxious about. A really typical dream was, “I was dreaming I was supposed to be at work,” or “I was dreaming that I was supposed to pick up my child.” And then, they successfully picked up the child, or had gone to work in the dream. We used to laugh about that, it was such an obvious pattern to us.

When did you first encounter someone who dreamed about something with more traumatic content, rather than everyday anxieties?

In 2009, a patient hadn’t had anesthesia with me, but a similar kind of anesthesia with a different anesthesiologist in our group. She reported that her PTSD symptoms were getting better after repeated foot surgeries. I told her we’re going to do similar anesthesia as the previous anesthesiologist did, and I’ll ask you about your dreams.

I was a little concerned, actually. This was getting a little bit over my skis as an anesthesiologist. I’m just trying to do surgical anesthesia. Her PTSD diagnosis was 30 years long, related to chronic sexual abuse as a child by her mother’s boyfriend. She suffered severe nightmares, and was afraid of being in the open; she suffered from severe agoraphobia too.

She reported a dream afterwards in which she escaped her attacker in her house, she went outside, and she was gardening. Just like before, symptoms got better—according to her. She was able to go outside and have Starbucks. She was able to open her windows again. Just like before, the symptoms eventually came back after several days. But she did get better for a couple days.

I went to some sleep conferences and anesthesia conferences to talk to people, and nobody had ever heard of this before. Everybody treated anesthesia dreams just like an observational wonder.

Do you think people get a therapeutic benefit from the anesthesia drug, or the experience of the dream?

We have a pretty educated guess on this. Before, I definitely thought it was the anesthesia medication. Over time I came to believe it was actually the dream content. There are multiple anesthetics that generate what we call this pre-emergent dream effect: propofol, dexmedetomidine, ketamine, sevoflurane, midazolam. There’s probably way more at this point.

What I’m suggesting is that in the right conditions, almost any anesthetic can generate a pre-emergent state of anesthesia that is associated with patients reporting dreaming, with a specific EEG frequency wave signature. The brain is very active. They’re not externally conscious, they won’t respond. But there’s some kind of thalamus, amygdala, and hippocampus activity—so emotional processing, fear resolution processing. And of course, the hippocampus is the storage of memories.

What is happening to the patient? We believe the patient is going through a processing of their fear based on memory. On a clinical level, they’re going through some kind of fear extinction. The memory no longer triggers them. It no longer provides a stress response. A psychiatrist would call this extinction rehearsal. In normal PTSD therapy, you slowly expose a patient over multiple sessions to their trauma, and eventually, slowly, there’s accommodation. The patient is replaying the trauma in their dream, but they’re doing it in a kind of rapid and profound fashion.

In 2020, you started to work with collaborators at Stanford. What are you doing there, and have you continued to observe dreams?

In 2020 I started, and by 2021 we were seeing lots of dreaming with Stanford patients. We’re doing a protocol very similar to what I was doing in private practice, where we are creating the conditions where patients can remain in the light anesthesia at the end of the surgery. We look at post-operative outcomes that include dream surveys, and look at whether they are aware under anesthesia. One of the biggest fears of anesthesiologists is that the anesthesia is too light. Fast forward to today, we’ve done light sedation to reduce postoperative nausea and faster recovery around 2,000 times, with 1200 reporting dreams. Thinking back to the 22%, we’re now at roughly 65%.

We are also using EEG, which is a pretty expensive machine that isn’t widely used in the community, especially not in surgery centers. We’re working on identifying the brain signatures for these dreams. When patients are in this pre-emergent state, we have a signature we associate with this dream consciousness.

We also now have an investigational dream emergence anesthesia lab. We’ve run through a number of volunteers, most of them psychology graduate students, who seem happy to sign up for dosing studies. We are underway with a PTSD trial using a propofol dream protocol, using EEG guidance very much like in surgery; these patients will obviously not be having surgery. They’re prospective PTSD patients with blinded controls. That’s underway and there will be around 55 patients.

Other drugs have been used for treating symptoms of PTSD, notably MDMA. Do you think anesthesia dreams are similar to a psychedelic experience?

Almost all of us who are involved don’t think this is really fitting a psychedelic picture. Psychedelics all have different effects, but in general, there’s a lot of distortion of reality. Things are bent, things are new, new images are created. The biggest difference is the psychedelics seem to create a third-person perspective, almost like a third-person shooter game. You’re coming from an above position, and seeing yourself below.

[Anesthesia dreams] are very different. This is new. They are really coming from a first-person perspective. There is some overlap, but by and large, people are having first-person experiences, and there’s no new data being created. In other words, everything is from memory. Nothing new that gets created. We really think this is some form of consciousness.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length