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.

What is an “embedded” brain?

Over the last decade or so, researchers have posited various theories about how psychedelics work in the brain. One dominant theory, first proposed by now UCSF researcher Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues, is the entropic brain theory: that psychedelics disrupt the typical connectivity patterns within certain brain regions and increase communication across brain areas. (Some researchers have interpreted this increased entropy to be a manifestation of the brain shaking off its usual patterns, and making way for healing.)

A new study published this week in Nature takes the entropic brain theory a step further, positing that this entropy is not random, but structured and organized according to its environment. For example, when participants under the influence of psilocybin watched a video, their fMRI and EEG data looked different from when they were meditating, resting, or listening to music.

The researchers reported that half of the 62 participants in the study — none of whom had previous experience with hallucinogens — said their psilocybin trip was among the most meaningful experiences of their life, and many reported feeling unity with the world. Those who reported feeling that unity also showed stronger patterns matching their brain activity to outside stimulus. To further operationalize this concept, the researchers call this feeling of unity “embeddedness,” which they define as “the subjective experience of being continuous with, rather than separate from, the environment” — and they argue that their data suggests that embeddedness is not just an experience, but a direct result of neural activity. Embeddedness, the authors write, “may thus reveal less about what psychedelics add to consciousness than about what ordinary neural dynamics keep apart.”

Johnson & Johnson to make major investment in “neuroplastogen” company Delix

On Tuesday, Psychedelic Alpha reported that pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson is expected to lead Delix Therapeutics’ $85 million Series C funding round. Delix is known for its development of what it calls “neuroplastogens” or drugs that are chemically similar to psychedelics but are engineered to remove common psychedelic effects including hallucinations. (For more on neuroplastogens, read our 5 Questions interview with Delix co-founder and UC Davis professor David Olson.)

It’s been a quiet few months for Delix; the last major news from the company came in October 2025, when it announced preliminary results from a Phase 1B study using a drug called zalsupindole, or DLX-001, to treat people with major depressive disorder. DLX-001 is an analog of 5-MeO-DMT. Those initial results found that participants showed a roughly 50% overall reduction in depression symptoms after the first week of the study and none experienced serious adverse events or any experiences of hallucinations or dissociation, suggesting the drug does not cause people to trip. In addition, Delix announced that the Food and Drug Administration signed off on the design of a Phase 2 clinical trial using DLX-001 in which participants would take the drug at home.

Psychedelic Alpha reports that the financing for the deal has not yet closed, but that terms would include a right of first negotiation after DLX-001’s Phase 2 data. It’s an interesting move from Johnson & Johnson, who also developed the esketamine nasal spray Spravato, especially as other large pharmaceutical companies have also recently purchased psychedelics companies (Eli Lilly acquired AtaiBeckley last month, while Otsuka bought Transcend Therapeutics in March and AbbVie acquired rights to Gilgamesh’s bretisilocin last year.)

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University of Miami gifts Trump Administration accelerated path to research ibogaine

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump published a note on his social media site Truth Social announcing that the University of Miami gave Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy “its original 1994 ibogaine Investigational New Drug application” or IND. In order to study experimental drugs like psychedelics, researchers need to apply for an IND from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration showing preclinical data with non-human animals suggesting the drug is safe to test in humans, and protocols for future studies. In 1993, Deborah Mash, a professor at University of Miami and now the CEO of noribogaine company DemeRx, received IND approval from the FDA for her early studies of ibogaine. Ibogaine is a psychoactive compound that comes from the Tabernanthe iboga shrub, which grows in central and west Africa.

Trump wrote that the gift will accelerate the development of ibogaine which researchers are interested in studying as a potential addiction and PTSD treatment. In theory, the transfer precludes the federal government from having to apply for another IND for ibogaine, allowing federal investigators to springboard off this 30-plus year old approval to conduct further ibogaine research. In a statement shared with The Microdose, MAPS co-executive director Ismail L. Ali called the university’s decision to gift the IND to the federal government rather than a private company “a welcome gesture towards open science.”

Trump began advocating for ibogaine research in April of this year, after podcaster Joe Rogan suggested he issue an executive order focused on accelerating the development of psychedelics. Soon after, he did just that.

Oregon psilocybin program “generally safe,” according to new study

Since Oregon’s psilocybin services program launched in 2023, over 20,000 people have undergone facilitated psilocybin sessions in the state. A new study led by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland tracked outcomes from over 300 psilocybin clients and concluded that psilocybin services are “generally safe,” and were correlated with improvements in clients’ mental health symptoms.

The results, published in JAMA Network Open, analyzed self-reported data from participants about their psilocybin experiences, including adverse reactions, benefits, safety events, and overall satisfaction with their session. Most participants — 97.5% — reported receiving high-quality services, and 92.2% said they benefited from their psilocybin session. Clients’ average depression symptoms also decreased in the one to three months after their sessions.

Adverse reactions were relatively rare: four clients, representing just 1.2% of the study pool, experienced serious adverse reactions in the weeks or months after their session, with another seven (2%) experiencing vomiting or nausea during their session. But the researchers also reported that some clients reported worsening depression — 14 people, or 4.5% of the study pool, reported this three months after their session — and at that 3-month mark, 6 people (1.9%) experienced new suicidal ideation. State mandates only require collecting safety information for events occurring three days after sessions, so as a result, the researchers recommend providing ongoing follow-ups to track and help clients experiencing difficulties and recommend that “states seeking to implement psychedelic services should assess longitudinal client safety and outcomes in the months following receipt of state-regulated services.”

New Mexico begins accepting psilocybin producer applications

On Monday, New Mexico’s Medical Psilocybin Program announced the opening of its online application portal for aspiring medical psilocybin producers. New Mexico is in the process of becoming the third state with a state-legal psilocybin program, but unlike its predecessors Oregon and Colorado, New Mexico’s program allows only for medical psilocybin.

Also unlike Colorado and Oregon, the state’s official psilocybin producer rules do not specify that cultivators and manufacturers can only use Psilocybe cubensis; instead, the rules only dictate that cultivators identify the species name and cultivars in each product. Otherwise, it seems the state has largely followed in the footsteps of the other two states, banning synthetic psilocybin and laying out many of the same standards for product testing, storage, and transportation.

In December 2025, the state announced it would cut its two-year launch timeline in half, aiming to start seeing patients in December 2026.

• Phoenix NPR affiliate KJZZ reports that Arizona’s health department has awarded a $5 million grant to the Barrow Neurological Institute and Arizona State University to study ibogaine in the treatment of PTSD and brain injury. The money came from a 2023 appropriations bill that earmarked the money for ibogaine research.

• Last week, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration announced that 39-year-old Deontae Alexander pled guilty to intent to distribute three kilograms of MDMA. The timing of the announcement points to the schism between the recreational and the medical view of these drugs from the federal government given that Resilient Pharmaceuticals (formerly Lykos) is reapplying to have MDMA become an FDA-approved drug at the same time that Alexander faces up to 20 years in federal prison and a fine of up to $1 million.

• In early August, Puerto Rico Governor Jennifer González-Colón signed an executive order promoting the development of clinical trials for emerging therapies, including psychedelics.

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As several psychedelics inch towards Food and Drug Administration approval, some advocates are doubling down on only their support of medical legalization, not broader access. “I am still anti-drugs, recreationally,” former Republican Governor of Texas Rick Perry clarified in a recent New Yorker article, while emphasizing his support for psychedelic mental health treatments. During the development of Oregon’s psilocybin services program, committees debated over whether access should be limited to therapeutic uses, or a wider category of use, that might include spiritual and self-improvement goals, or maybe even… fun?

It’s always been difficult to draw a hard line between so-called recreational and therapeutic psychedelic experiences. Some people have joyous, positive moments during psychedelic-assisted therapy, and others find taking psychedelics at a rave to be therapeutic in its own way. People have difficult experiences in psychedelic-assisted therapy and bad trips on hikes with their friends.

Harriet de Wit is an experimental psychologist at The University of Chicago who has been studying psychedelic drugs for more than 40 years. Her work has tried to uncover in laboratory experiments what effects psychedelic drugs have on people when context and expectations are stripped away.

For example, people often say that being touched feels better when they take MDMA recreationally. Is this because of the drug, or from the recreational setting they’re used in? In 2019, De Wit and her colleagues gave people blinded doses of MDMA, methamphetamine (another stimulant), and a placebo. To control for expectations, the results from those who got MDMA were compared to those who believed they took MDMA, but actually got methamphetamine. The study was able to conclude that only MDMA increased the pleasantness of being touched. It also heightened the attention toward happy faces, whereas meth did not.

Is that specific effect of MDMA recreational or therapeutic, or is it both? The Microdose talked to de Wit about her attempts to isolate what exactly psychedelic drugs do, no matter the circumstances.

People use some drugs recreationally, which we might define as using them to have fun, to party, to experience happiness with friends. But those same drugs, say MDMA or psilocybin, are also used to relieve or confront distress and other pathologies. Do you find this to be a contradiction?

I think it raises broader questions about psychedelic research, and what psychedelic drugs do in general. My laboratory studies try to look at really basic units of behavioral change.

What are the psychological constructs that these drugs are working on? If you take away all the contextual factors and expectancy, what cognitive measures or emotional measures remain?

When we get to that level, we find that there are very fundamental behavioral effects that could apply to both recreational settings, and also to therapeutic settings. It’s almost as though the same drug effects can have benefits in both situations.

An example of a behavior is when a drug makes people less sensitive to negative expressions in other people’s faces. That might help you in a recreational setting if you feel less judged and more free to interact. It might help in a therapeutic situation if you feel like the therapist is not judging you, and you’re freer to talk about difficult topics.

So, it’s not as if MDMA has effects A, B, and C; the recreational users are taking advantage of A and B, and then the therapeutic users are leaning into C?

I’m not going to have a clear answer on this. It depends. Of course, people go into recreational experiences or therapeutic experiences with very different expectations. And we know those expectations can very much alter the response to the drug.

You could say the person in the recreational setting goes into it to have fun. They prepare to experience the stimulant-like effects, the affective effects that go along with being more social. The people going into therapy are looking for something very different, they’re looking for relief from some symptoms.

So, the drug effects are malleable and they’re changeable depending on the environment and the expectations. It’s both things. I’m saying that the same fundamental processes are probably involved in both settings, but the settings, context, and expectations can influence people’s responses. I wish I could have a more black and white answer.

In the lab, you’re using a very controlled setting to try to isolate effects. Can you give an example of how you do that?

Early on we wanted to know whether very low doses of LSD would change either mood or behavior. When people microdose in a natural setting, they take these low doses every three or four days, and then they report improvements in all kinds of cognitive and affective and social experiences. It’s hard to know whether their expectancies influence their response, or whether the drug is really doing something.

When we give the drug under blinded conditions, we don’t even tell people what class of drug that they’re going to get. We tell them you might get a stimulant, a sedative, a hallucinogen, a placebo, or antihistamine. Then we gave them a low dose of LSD or placebo on four occasions, separated by three or four days, and measured their mood, cognition and their feelings of well-being.

What we found was that on the first day that people got LSD, they felt a little bit stimulated, and they felt more of a positive mood and energetic. But when they got the dose on the second and the third and the fourth days, that effect declined. There was a sort of tolerance to the effect.

I think when people take it in the natural situation, they mistake that original stimulant-like effect as influence on their subsequent responses. They think, “This is the feeling of well-being, and it’s going to continue,” but it doesn’t. By looking at it under controlled circumstances, we can kind of measure exactly what the drug does or doesn’t do.

Are there any aspects of these drug effects that are not susceptible to any context?

I would start with the physiological effects, like an increase in heart rate or blood pressure that would be less influenced by context than the psychological processes and mood.

Next to that I suppose could be visual and perceptual distortions. But they’re still influenced by the context and your understanding. I would hesitate to say that there’s anything that’s completely not affected—maybe something like pupil diameter.

Could changing context switch a drug experience from recreational to therapeutic?

You could say, “well, we know the context influences people’s responses. So can you use the context then?” If people want enlightenment, they might create a certain context to use the drug in. If they want to get therapeutic benefits, they might create a different kind of context by having a trusted therapist and all the preparation and integration afterwards.

To be honest, I think the interaction between environment and drugs is something we haven’t studied very well. We all recognize it, but we haven’t studied, you know, creating a positive social environment or a negative social environment or a therapeutic environment.

But this distinction between medical and recreational—there is something in-between that too that a lot of people are looking for. It may not be recreational in the sense that they’re taking a drug to have fun. They’re taking the drug for curiosity or looking for meaning or looking for insight. They’re not using it for a medical reason, there’s not something clearly wrong with them. They’re looking for enlightenment.

This in-between category—our regulatory system doesn’t really have room for it. We either regard something as a medication and treating a particular disorder, or we regard it as sort of abuse in a sense—using it for fun. In the case of psychedelics, it’s somewhere in between.

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. It’s been a minute, let’s get you caught up:

Veterans Affairs continues to drive federal psychedelic push

I got to ask U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins a few questions during his visit to Seattle’s VA Medical Center on August 7. He re-iterated that ibogaine would be the agency’s next emphasis. Ibogaine is a psychoactive compound that comes from the Tabernanthe iboga shrub, which grows in equatorial Central and West Africa. Researchers have also synthesized ibogaine in a laboratory. Collins acknowledged that federal sourcing for ibogaine is still a work in progress. “Ibogaine is not available in the United States until we get the protocols,” Collins said. “We’re actually hopeful to get some cooperation. You know, within the realms of discussion with those that are across the border.”

Collins also revealed his agency is collaborating with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to develop requirements, known as ‘Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies,’ to help address ibogaine’s cardiac risks. “It’s going to be safe when we do it with our veterans. That’s our key,” Collins said. “That’s why FDA is doing an accelerated study.”

Collins also highlighted a recently announced multi-site VA trial testing psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. News of the trial initially became public in November 2025, and recruitment is expected to begin soon at five VA locations across the country. Of note, Compass Pathways’ synthetic, proprietary formulation of psilocybin, called COMP360, will be used in the trial. Psychedelic Alpha’s analysts are speculating this choice may signal that federal agencies, including the VA, may eventually help companies like Compass by streamlining the drug’s expansion in psychiatry.

Other moves that are expected to drive the VA’s push into psychedelic research include a July Memorandum of Understanding among the agency, FDA, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). It lays out a framework for collaboration and information exchange to advance President Trump’s April Executive Order. Also in July, the U.S House of Representatives passed a bill containing psychedelics amendments that would direct the VA to submit progress reports on the executive order and designate an official to oversee work on “emerging therapeutic interventions.”

New FDA guidance on psychedelics

New guidance released by the Food and Drug Administration in July details the agency’s recommendations for clinical investigators studying psychedelics for medical conditions. It follows the agency’s first draft guidance that was released in 2023. Key parts of the guidance remain the same, but there are notable updates.

For example, the FDA provided more clarity on what regulators are looking for in trial populations, safety assessments, and long-term follow ups. In an ‘Abuse Potential Assessment’ section, the agency clarifies that experiences like euphoria and hallucinations should be documented as adverse events, even if trial participants don’t describe them as harmful. Regulators also updated recommendations for control groups and functional unblinding. Traditional placebos might be eliminated in favor of lower doses of the psychedelic or drugs that have psychoactive effects, the agency suggests. “In general, controls should be closely matched to the treatment group for clinically relevant variables and clinical care,” the guidance reads. The document also states the most informative trial would include a blinded 12-month follow up, which is a longer duration than many clinical trials.

In making recommendations around trial populations, regulators said trial cohorts should be “reasonably representative” of the population that will end up using the treatment. Also, investigators also shouldn’t exclude people based on their age or treatment history who could be prescribed the intervention post-approval. Regulators add that people who have used psychedelic drugs before “should not be overrepresented.”

The FDA and Health and Human Services are requesting public input on the final guidance. There’s a hearing scheduled for September 14, and people can submit written comments through October 5. Specifically, federal leaders want feedback on “(1) provider training and credentialing, (2) promotion of patient safety, (3) considerations for access, and (4) best practices for data collection and standardization.” Those interested in participating can register via the FDA website.

Resilient Pharmaceuticals tries again for FDA approval of MDMA

In a statement released August 10, the non-profit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) seemed to indicate the updated FDA guidelines will help advance MAPS’s decades of research on MDMA-assisted therapy. In 2024, the FDA declined the application for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD from Lykos Therapeutics, the psychedelic drug company that grew out of MAPS and later changed its name to Resilient Pharmaceuticals. According to Lykos’s press release after the agency’s rejection, the FDA requested a new Phase 3 trial, an endeavor that would have taken years to complete and that suggested regulators had real issues with the evidence submitted by Lykos.

MAPS’s statement confirmed that Resilient Pharmaceuticals recently resubmitted a new drug application (NDA) to the FDA for MDMA-assisted therapy. “Two years after FDA rejected the initial application for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, Resilient’s new NDA is being submitted without a new Phase 3 study,” said MAPS founder Rick Doblin in the August 10 statement. MAPS leaders added that the new FDA guidance aligns with what they’ve already been doing. “We knew the FDA wasn’t saying no, just not yet,” said Doblin.

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Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly makes a psychedelics acquisition

Last month, the Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Company, a pharmaceutical giant with the most prescription drug sales globally, acquired New York-based psychedelic biopharmaceutical company AtaiBeckley Inc. for $2.8 billion up front. The deal follows the Japanese pharmaceutical company Otsuka’s acquisition of Transcend Therapeutics, Inc in March and AbbVie’s acquisition of Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals’ psychedelic compound GM-2505, or bretisilocin, in 2025. Bretisilocin is chemically similar to DMT, but engineered to provide a roughly two-hour trip.

Lilly’s purchase of AtaiBeckley is one of many recent acquisitions by the company, amidst soaring sales of its GLP-1 weight loss treatments. With the purchase, the company gets Atai’s BPL-003, a synthetic nasal form of 5-MeO-DMT with FDA Breakthrough Therapy Designation, positioned to enter Phase 3 clinical trials. AtaiBeckley will also bring Lilly VLS-01, a form of DMT that dissolves in the cheek. Both BPL-003 and VLS-01 are being tested for treatment-resistant depression, and both are fast acting, with their psychedelic effects fitting into a two hour clinic session. “If both agents move through the clinic quickly, Lilly could pay an additional $1 billion to AtaiBeckley shareholders,” Nature reports, bringing the total purchase price up to $3.8 billion.

AtaiBeckley is also developing an MDMA drug candidate called EMP-01. MDMA is typically a “racemic mixture,” meaning it contains an equal proportion of two components, known as R-MDMA and S-MDMA, which are mirror images of each other. AtaiBeckley’s EMP-01 is a formulation of only R-MDMA. Previous research has suggested that S-MDMA is associated with strong visual effects and higher blood pressure. In February, AtaiBeckley announced preliminary results from a Phase 2a clinical trial using EMP-01 to treat social anxiety.

Needham and Company biotech analyst Ami Fadia told CNBC that companies like Eli Lilly are following in the footsteps of Johnson & Johnson’s Spravato esketamine nasal spray, which has served “as the market model” for pharmaceutical companies wanting to get into psychedelics. Forbes reports that Spravato annualized close to $2 billion in sales for depression treatments. “A few years ago, some investors would not want to touch [psychedelics], but now I rarely hear that,” Fadia told CNBC.

Eli Lilly buying AtaiBeckley marks a big move in the market but it doesn’t mean that other companies and other compounds will be left behind, Jefferies analyst Andrew Tsai told CNBC. “Big picture, I don’t think this is a winner-take-all market by any means. When you look at history, multiple SSRIs can become blockbusters, multiple antipsychotics can become blockbusters. So I do think multiple [psychedelics] players can win,” Tsai said. The Microdose reached out to Eli Lilly for comment but did not get a reply.

Ibogaine puts cardiovascular safety top of mind for researchers

Ibogaine’s profile has risen in recent months with state and federal attention, and researchers are trying to better understand the drug’s known cardiac risks. A recent study out of Brazil published by Trends in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy describes an ibogaine pilot trial testing the drug’s feasibility and safety in nine patients with alcohol use disorder. Of the five patients that completed the study, most reported reduced alcohol use. But the authors urge caution in future randomized, controlled trials that will be needed to validate ibogaine’s therapeutic potential. “Moderate doses of ibogaine showed a cardiotoxic potential that demands rigorous cardiovascular screening and continuous monitoring,” the researchers write.

Legal experts have also flagged ibogaine’s cardiac risks. On July 20, the American Bar Association published an article with recommendations for litigation-ready trial design. “For ibogaine, where cardiac risk is established in the literature, the failure to implement appropriate monitoring may constitute negligence regardless of whether a specific event was anticipated in an individual participant,” authors write.

A review published August 1 in the European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology assessed cardiovascular safety in psilocybin trials and studies posted through July 10. Psilocybin has a different, less severe cardiac risk profile than ibogaine but can also increase heart rate and blood pressure.

Meta-analyses within the review found a moderate, transient increase in blood pressure in psilocybin trials. While serious, acute cardiovascular events were uncommon in screened trial participants, “the evidence should not be generalized unchanged” to future sessions involving older adults, those with cardiovascular disease, and other drug interactions, the authors write. Overall, the authors suggest that current regulated, monitored trials in select populations are safe – and make recommendations to keep them that way. However, they stress, the evidence does not support “general cardiovascular reassurance across all products, exposure patterns, or psychiatric settings.”

• A coder in Sweden created a chatbot plug-in to make AI models seem high on weed, coke or ketamine, The World’s Gerry Hadden reports.

• Definium Therapeutics announced Wednesday promising results from a Phase 3 study testing its proprietary oral formulation of LSD, DT120, for generalized anxiety disorder.

• ‘Spiritual psychiatrist’ Samuel Lee is being charged with manslaughter following the death of one of his clients at a Miami retreat. According to court documents, the medical examiner’s office ruled the client’s cause of death was “hyponatremic dehydration due to confinement in a sauna, and use of Methylenedioxymethamphetamine [MDMA] and ketamine.” In a recent post, writer Jules Evans wonders if underground guides understand the legal risks of their profession.

• In a perspective published August 6 in npj Mental Health Research, psychedelic researchers call for well-being to be a trial endpoint, instead of simply using symptom reduction to define success.

• Scientific American highlighted clinics that are being stood up to treat harmful post-trip conditions that are rare but lasting.

• Writer and Ferriss-UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism fellow Michelle Lhooq asks “Are Psychedelics Right-Wing Now?” in the New Yorker.

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For anyone who joins a clinical trial for a mental health condition, the hope is that after the trial is over, they’ll feel better. And, that their improvement will linger past the end of the research, leading to long-lasting change.

The unfortunate truth, however, is that not all treatments will be successful for everyone, nor last forever—and psychedelic-assisted therapy is no exception to that rule. Despite showing promising outcomes in clinical trials so far, some people don’t respond to psychedelic interventions.

Rachel Ham, a doctoral candidate at Monash University in Australia, has been interviewing people in a large clinical trial on psilocybin and general anxiety disorder for her PhD project. She’s been learning about what the lived experience of being in a psychedelic trial is really like; she and her colleagues have been evaluating how people respond to therapeutic touch, and how they feel about having two therapists in the room.

In a forthcoming paper, she and her colleagues dedicated their attention to a group of low or non-responders: those who didn’t meet the threshold of a 50% reduction of their symptoms. It’s a small sample size, just seven people, but Ham thinks there’s important information to be gained from talking with them. “A motivation for us was feeling that we can learn just as much from the people who don’t have dramatic recoveries, as we can from those who do,” Ham said.

The Microdose talked to Ham about her research, and how studying limited responses can help future patients.

How do you define a psychedelic non-responder?

Psychedelic therapy has obviously shown a lot of promise, but we know that it doesn’t work for everyone. Non-response is normally defined as less than a 50% reduction in standard clinical symptom measures. We know that maybe around one-half to one-third of people meet that criteria.

For our study, we took a slightly different approach. We looked at people who did not meet that 50% symptom reduction, but we were also looking for people who had a more sustained, limited response across the whole course of their treatment.

The caveat here is when we’re dealing with real participant stories, we know that in psychedelic therapy, symptom reduction doesn’t necessarily capture everything that’s going on in this treatment. Sometimes there can be a whole host of other quality of life measures that actually improve substantially, so symptom reduction isn’t necessarily the whole picture.

And even though we often talk about “non-responders”, because this is a qualitative paper and it’s real participant stories, we’ve moved to calling them “limited responders” because it’s a little bit less pathologizing.

These limited responders go through the same therapy process as everybody else: preparation, dosing sessions, and integration. Do they just trip less? Or have less meaningful psychedelic trips? Or does their limited-response emerge later?

It’s seven participants, so we were not able to do statistical analysis, but we did look at a few acute experience measures. We looked at the challenging experiences questionnaire, the mystical experiences questionnaire, and the emotional breakthrough inventory. We compared, non-statistically, the averages between these limited responders and the broader sample. Broadly speaking, the scores are quite similar.

That’s an interesting finding out of this paper. It’s complex to make sense of, because a lot of these measures have been shown to correlate with improved therapeutic outcomes in the past. All that we can really take from that is perhaps these experiential factors don’t fully account for differences in outcomes.

Maybe there are some other pre- or post-session factors, like psychotherapeutic or relational support, that influence people meaningfully. A lot of mechanistic studies are working at a group level, so there are going to be trends. That’s very meaningful work and research. Our results caution against assuming that necessarily translates at the individual level.

How did people feel about being limited responders? Were they aware, and how did they respond?

Even within this sample, it is pretty heterogeneous. There can be quite a few different trajectories. We have three participants who show symptom scores that are increasing, which is to say that their anxiety is getting worse; we measured anxiety at three different times. And then we have four participants who actually do show reductions over time, but that did not meet the criteria for that 50% reduction.

Those are two possible trajectories of non-response. You also have another possible trajectory where someone, for example, shows a big improvement, but then has remission over time. Even within this study, we’re not necessarily capturing all of the different trajectories of limited response.

Something that we did as part of our qualitative analysis was utilize a framework that’s based around illness narratives, which explores different features of people’s storytelling in relation to their psychedelic experience and their treatment trajectory overall. A feature that we found within that was that there were some participants who tended to describe their trajectories in more sort of hopeful or future-oriented styles of narratives that kind of resembled a quest. There was something really hopeful and progress-oriented around those stories.

There were others, though, whose narratives were more marked by ambivalence and fragmentation and unresolved distress. That has been described as a chaos narrative.

These kinds of narratives might represent different stages of an ongoing therapeutic process, rather than stable endpoints.

Do you consider a limited response to be a kind of challenging psychedelic experience?

I would come back to the message that a limited response is quite heterogeneous. It’s not really a story about responders and non-responders. For a lot of people, healing is non-linear; it’s ongoing and it takes work, and that’s all deeply individual.

We did see some really challenging experiences. We had one participant that had a somatic re-experiencing of sexual assault. Another who had an emergence of a memory about childhood sexual abuse, alongside a sexuality related insight. Another witnessed violent imagery. We know that these challenging experiences have quite a lot of nuance, including what they mean in the context of psychedelic therapy and outcomes.

There’s some research by Max Wolff that looks at the acceptance process during psychedelics, and how that influences outcomes. We can start to imagine some of these mechanisms might contribute to whether a challenging experience translates into benefit or or harm. Our findings raise questions around how particular forms of challenge might indicate potential vulnerability. By trying to understand these more complex trajectories, we can build models of care that are safer, more reflexive, and therefore more ethical and more effective.

Something that I think was quite interesting is that all participants felt that they had benefited from their psychedelic experiences. I don’t want to say that too flippantly, because for a lot of people, that feeling of benefit was also accompanied by quite considerable distress. You might suggest that this treatment is not suitable for everybody coming to the end of this paper. But it is interesting that some people were still able to derive some kind of therapeutic benefit, even if they would have preferred to go about it in a slightly easier or smoother way.

Do you think that psychedelic treatment has had too high of expectations for the response rate?

It’s true that we can’t expect any given model of treatment to work perfectly for everyone.

In terms of what this is going to look like going forward, it’s difficult to know. Sometimes we think of psychedelic therapy as this like very homogenous treatment, but actually we’re still really experimenting with how much preparation is needed, and how much integration is needed, and how many doses, and so on.

I think that clinical non-response will always be with us, and how that looks when psychedelic therapy moves out of the lab and into clinical practice is yet to be seen. On the one hand, sometimes treatments that move out of clinical trials see a reduction in clinical response rates. On the other hand, psychedelic therapy in clinical trials is often constrained by clinical trial protocols that don’t give a lot of flexibility for things, like extended integration when someone really needs it.

Part of the big takeaway of this paper is that the field needs models of care that anticipate diversity. There needs to be realistic expectations, flexible integration, and ongoing support for people who have these more complex trajectories.

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

In 2014, the conservationist Robert Villa—soon to become the world’s foremost defender of psychedelic toads—paid a visit to the Yaqui, an Indigenous community in the Mexican state of Sonora. The tribe was facing an array of environmental threats, including the construction of an aqueduct that would drain the Rio Yaqui, historically one of the few perennial rivers in the region. Representatives had filed legal challenges and, when these were disregarded, began protests that included blockading the state’s main highway. The backlash was swift and violent: kidnappings, burned cars, homicides. Mexico was on its way to becoming the world’s most dangerous nation for environmental activists; in 2021, an activist was murdered every week, on average. Amid this spreading tumult, Villa learned on his visit, a new and unsettling economy had taken root in Yaqui territory: the large-scale collection of Sonoran Desert toads.

Toads, known in Yaqui language as boboc, feature prominently in the tribe’s mythology. In one story, Toad borrows the wings of a bat to fly up into the clouds, where he tricks the Rain King into ending a devastating drought; in another, he brings fire to the tribe after stealing it from the gods and carrying the flames in his mouth. The Yaqui would decorate Sonoran Desert toads with ribbons and parade them ceremonially, praying for rain. In a far cry from this exalted status, toads were now being caught en masse for the psychedelic market, where they were prized as a source of 5-MeO-DMT, a powerful and fast-acting compound also known as “the God molecule.” In one instance, or so the rumors went, a truck had been discovered carrying two tons of the animals.

Villa related this all to me the first time I called him, back in 2020, after several stories had quoted him raising the alarm about toad poaching. He introduced himself on the phone as a “freelance naturalist” and told me that he owned two Gila Monsters—a giant lizard with black and orange scales—in addition to a Sonoran desert tortoise named Virgil, whom a family member had given him at the age of five. He later acquired a pet gopher snake and took it along to catechism classes. He became especially fond of sea turtles. In middle school, on his first day of orchestra practice, both Villa and his teacher were wearing turtle T-shirts. She introduced him to some herpetologists, who became Villa’s earliest mentors.

Like the tortoise, Villa is now in his mid-thirties. He is small and puckish, with deeply tanned skin and a shock of black hair that he tidies into a topknot. He is a masterful violinist, even though he stopped taking lessons when his parents could no longer afford them. With his striking looks and eccentric interests, he is like a character dreamed up by Wes Anderson. In the summer of 2023, when I visited him during an Arizona heatwave, we went to an arthouse cinema to watch Anderson’s latest film, Asteroid City. At one point, a singing cowboy made a throwaway remark about a “toad swindle,” and Villa turned to me with an expression of delight.

A few years after his visit to Yaqui territory, Villa appeared in a VICE documentary about the toads, speaking about their natural history. Villa saw the flood of interest as deeply concerning—“a cognitive dissonance with the wellness motifs of the psychedelic renaissance,” as he later wrote. It was difficult enough to control demand for wildlife products with more tenuous therapeutic effects, like rhino horn. What hope could there be for an animal that delivered genuine states of transcendence?

Amphibians are the most imperiled group of vertebrates globally, with around forty percent of the approximately 8,000 known species threatened by extinction. The outlook is especially bleak in Mexico, where habitat loss, climate change, and diseases like the chytrid fungus have already caused devastating losses. Villa had heard of Sonoran Desert toads—which reach the size of small chickens—vanishing from certain areas. He worried that overexploitation would drive further declines without anybody paying attention. Not long after the VICE episode aired, he met a Tucson artist who wished to print a satirical Nike tee-shirt featuring a Sonoran Desert toad and the words, “Just Smoke It.” Villa urged him to publicize risks to the species instead. To raise awareness, he and the artist collaborated on a new design. “PROTECT THE SONORAN DESERT TOAD,” the shirt read. “PLEASE TRIP RESPONSIBLY.”

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Villa wasn’t the first to sound the alarm about Sonoran Desert toads. Albert Most himself—the first documented toad smoker in history—had shared a cautionary fable from Aesop: “A certain man had the good fortune to possess a goose that laid a golden egg every day. But dissatisfied with so slow an income, and thinking to seize the whole treasure at once, he killed the goose.” Shortly thereafter, toad smoking was described as “an ethically dubious trip” in The Entheogen Review, an underground newsletter about psychoactive substances. Its editor had kept four of the animals in a terrarium for a while but given up milking them. “In extracting the venom one creates a lot of fear and stress in a fellow creature,” he explained. But in 1994, the arrest of a California schoolteacher on toad smoking charges set off a media frenzy, bringing new attention to the species. “Alas! Alas!” the Entheogen’s editor lamented. “The distorted publicity has now made it a hip thing.” A reader from Arizona wrote in to express dismay about the “harm or decimation” that might result when “all the unhappy hordes pursue another way to ‘get off’ at the expense of the toad.”

Through the deep passage of evolutionary time, Sonoran Desert toads have proved extraordinarily resilient to change. Fossils of their skeletons have been discovered alongside anteaters, camels, mammoths, ground sloths, capybaras and other creatures that once roamed a lusher, greener region. Despite its ancient appearance, the Sonoran Desert is geologically young. As recently as 11,000 years ago—an eyeblink in Earth’s history—higher rainfall supported woodland trees and shrubs. Further back in time, tropical deciduous forests formed canopies during the wetter months. As conditions grew hotter and drier, many species died off or migrated, but the toads endured, burrowing underground.

Up to a point, the toads have also accommodated, and perhaps even prospered from, the rise of humans. Nearly 1,500 years ago, in what is now Arizona, Hohokam farmers created an expansive network of irrigation canals, excavating channels with perfectly sloping gradients. Hundreds of square miles of dry land flourished with corn and other crops, and the toads had abundant new waters to swim in. The Hohokam disappeared a few hundred years later—researchers believe their population grew too rapidly, outstripping the availability of resources. The channels remained behind, remnants of a lost civilization, and during monsoons the toads continued to breed in them.

In the 19^th century, settlers in Sonora began using steam engines to pump groundwater. Rain that fell in the desert sank quickly through its permeable sands, filtering into deep and inaccessible aquifers; now some of that water was returned to the surface. In the 1940s, technological advances enabled the drilling of even deeper wells, driving a massive expansion of cotton and wheat farming west of Hermosillo. This was a welcome development for the toads, who congregated around reservoirs, ditches and stock ponds. “With a few exceptions it is found only in the wet places around the cattle watering troughs of the ranches,” some herpetologists wrote in an early survey. Electric lights acted as magnets for flying insects, serving as all-night buffets for the toads. During the rainy season, when the toads emerged, Sonoran residents would switch off their outdoor lights to avoid being inundated.

Yet as adaptable as they were, Sonoran Desert toads were not prepared for the onslaught of psychedelic interest. Humans are nimbler than other predators, with far greater appetites. Whether the toads hopped, scrambled or froze, hoping to evade detection, their new pursuers could easily scoop them up and press on their glands. While toad smoking remained a fringe activity, this was a rare experience for the animals, and the rest went on with their lives—mating, feeding, hiding out from the sun. This fragile balance began to shift when the psychedelic practitioner Octavio Rettig was introduced to the medicine in 2006. With Dr. Gerry by his side, he set about milking thousands of toads each summer, amassing kilograms of dried secretion. “Octavio is simply unstoppable,” a practitioner who went out collecting with him in 2014 recalled, “even enthusiastically doing jumping jacks between toad milkings.”

The restricted habitat of the toad, an endemic species found nowhere else on earth, meant that the entire world’s supply had to be sourced from the Sonoran Desert. As demand for the medicine exploded, a new economy took shape to provide it. People could catch toads in Arizona, but the epicenter was in Sonora, which itself was in the midst of a violent transformation. In 2006, the Mexican government had deployed military troops to fight narcotraffickers, who smuggled cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine worth billions of dollars each year to the U.S. The cartels responded by professionalizing their security forces, acquiring AK-47s and mounted machine guns for shooting down helicopters. Mexico’s drug wars intensified, and the national homicide rate tripled over the next five years. Vast areas of Sonora became no-go zones, and people who visited risked their lives.

This landscape of excessive violence also harbored the toad, an animal in demand globally for spiritual experiences and inner healing—including from addiction to the very drugs being trafficked. A collision between these disparate worlds seemed all but inevitable. In 2016, Dean Jefferys, the founder of a Facebook group about toad smoking, spent several weeks in Mexico, shooting footage for a documentary. Jefferys is the epitome of a New Age elder, with salt-streaked hair and a white beard; he usually wears colorful unbuttoned shirts. One night, while driving around, searching for toads, he was pulled over by armed men. “The cartels have a whole network,” he recalled. “As soon as a strange car comes in, people are notified. I was staring down the barrel of a gun.” Just a few weeks earlier, he reported, an unsuspecting woman from the United States had been kidnapped while looking for toads and was held for several days. In a Facebook post, Jefferys warned that the desert “is definitely not a place where you can just go and find some toads.”

As Sonora became more dangerous, demand for the medicine only rose. Collecting toads had become perilous, creating an opportunity for local intermediaries who could move through toad habitats without arousing suspicion. One of the first to assume this role was a burly resident of Hermosillo named Carlos Barraza who, around 2014, began supplying buyers in Mexico and abroad. Barraza has a circular face and rounded shoulders, giving him a faintly toadlike appearance. According to his rivals, he has a ruthless disposition. He soon rose to become one of the world’s biggest toad medicine suppliers.

In the early days of this operation, Barraza began selling toad to Mario Garnier, a former TV producer from Mexico City. Garnier had been introduced to toad smoking a few years earlier and “left everything behind”—his job, a voiceover studio, a production school where he taught—to begin what he later described as a spiritual journey with the medicine. He began serving toad and sourcing medicine for people in his network; one of his friends, a former corporate lawyer, was soon hosting as many as a thousand sessions a year. Garnier went from buying ten grams a month from Barraza (enough for several hundred strong doses) to ten times as much. But when Garnier tried to negotiate the price down, Barraza refused, and their relationship soured.

In Garnier’s telling, Barraza was a “thug” who was seizing control of the toad market by force. “He was very violent,” Garnier said, without elaborating further. (Others described Barraza to me in similar ways.) Garnier himself acknowledges experiencing a kind of mania at the time, “wanting to save the world with toad medicine.” The God molecule had found another emissary. “I was in the Messiah state,” Garnier said.

In 2015, seeking new suppliers, he set off deeper into Sonora, where the toads were even more plentiful. He met people who had formerly caught toads for Octavio. “He paid them with bottles of liquor,” Garnier told me. “They were giving him the medicine without knowing what it was.” (Octavio denies this.) Garnier had formed relationships with practitioners in Europe and wanted to set them up with collectors in Sonora. Large orders started coming in—from Spain, the Netherlands, Germany. “I built the medicine bridge,” Garnier said. “Then people became greedy.” Later, in a text message, he seemed to acknowledge his own complicity. “The molecule is like the ring of Tolkien,” he wrote, using a metaphor I’d already heard from others. “Creates greediness. Thirst of power.”

Kimon de Greef has written for The New Yorker, New York, The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications. His first book, co-authored with Shuhood Abader, is Poacher: Confessions from the Abalone Underworld. He lives in Cape Town.

From THE EGO TRIP: Psychedelic Toads, A Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2026 by Kimon de Greef.

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(Editor’s note: Today we are rerunning this interview with Rhana Hashemi which was originally posted in December 2022. The topics covered here are still very much relevant and many of you were not subscribers in 2022. Plus, the end of July means a new school year is on the near horizon.)

As a 13-year-old, Rhana Hashemi got curious about mind-altering substances. She’d read about them in books like Go Ask Alice, and by the time she was in high school, she knew upperclassmen who were drinking and doing drugs. At school, adults taught students that drugs were bad, that they scrambled people’s brains. Hashemi wondered why her peers kept doing drugs if they were really so awful. “I came to the conclusion that adults were lying to me,” she says. She began experimenting with alcohol and cannabis, then tried other drugs like Xanax and ecstasy. Several classmates had started abusing opioids, and eventually overdosed.

Hashemi went off to college, and in her junior year, she transferred to U.C. Berkeley. The first Friday night of her first semester there, she noticed multiple ambulances outside of her dorm, and learned they were there to treat students with alcohol poisoning. In that moment, Hashemi says, a realization hit her: she and other young people had been systematically denied information about drugs, and her friends and classmates were dying as a result. 

Later that year, Hashemi founded the U.C. Berkeley chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, and began researching drug education. After graduating with a degree in social welfare, Hashemi helped the Oakland Unified School District launch a new drug education program, and earned a master’s in community health prevention from Stanford. Hashemi then founded Know Drugs, an organization that helps schools implement harm reduction education programs, and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in social psychology at Stanford. The Microdose spoke with Hashemi about her approach to drug education and what students want to know about psychedelics.

At its height in the nineties, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) curriculum was taught in 75% of U.S. school districts, but its popularity has waned. Is there currently a standard curriculum for teaching students about drugs?

After study after study showed that programs like DARE didn’t work, funding dried up for prevention education. We’ve moved on from “just say no” to just say nothing. 

There’s a mandate that schools must do something about drug and alcohol abuse, but many schools go with the most cost-effective way of addressing that, which is having a zero tolerance policy. There’s very little political will to do anything else; it’s up to schools and districts to apply for grant funding. So what’s being taught right now is all over the place. If schools have a progressive educators, they might download Safety First, which is the nation’s first harm reduction-based drug education program created by the Drug Policy Alliance. Others might create their own content by gathering materials from harm reduction organizations. But a lot of the time students are hearing the traditional message: “drugs are bad, don’t do them.” 

You’ve worked closely with schools and students to implement harm reduction-based drug education programs. What do young people typically want to know? 

The main questions I get are: how do we help our friends? How do we support our friends who are using drugs? Some are struggling with where the line is between experimentation or recreational use and problematic use. We brainstorm together: what are signs of recreational use or social use, versus what are signs of problematic use and misuse? I make it really clear to them that there are some things that are in your control and things that are not, so it’s important to ask for help. I also teach them to figure out what they're using the drugs for, and then help build healthier skills that are non-drug related means of doing that. 

I also get questions like, If I did want to use this drug, how can I be responsible about it? Again, I make this a discussion where I go back to them. We have a conversation about what responsible use looks like. What elements would make an experience lower risk or higher risk? We incorporate what we learned from the Safety First curriculum about drug set and setting. When you are in an anxious mood or you’re with people you don't know, or you're getting behind the wheel of a car, these will all push you into the higher risk category. 

More than anything, I'm not trying to be prescriptive; I'm not providing advice. I teach them how to think about drugs. The goal for me is to not scare them out of drugs, but I want them to respect drugs, and to help them see that these are really powerful substances.

How are you approaching questions about psychedelics specifically? 

I lead with the history: the use of these substances as sacraments, as powerful objects used for ritual and for healing. I explain that the advent of recreational drug use is very recent — within the last hundred years. The fifties were the first time we saw teenagers recreationally using drugs. Now, we're seeing a resurgence of psychedelics being used by younger people, more than ever before. 

If we look at how Indigenous cultures relate to these powerful substances, we see that they were always in containers of ritual. There was a lot of reverence, a lot of preparation. These substances were typically associated with rites of passage, and there was always an elder presiding, because they recognized the harms and the risks of these substances, and they created safeguards around them. Today, unfortunately, we don't have that. Most of us don't have elders that we can be learning about drugs with. A lot of these drugs are criminalized. Young people need to realize that the context of using these substances is really different. And with that change of context, what can we learn from history about how people had relationships with these substances? 

Have you gotten any questions from students that surprised you?

What’s surprised me is the increasing prevalence of ketamine among young people. That’s been a hard one for me; I wasn’t ready for it. It’s been hard to keep up with the media coverage of psychedelics, but that’s had downstream effects for us as educators in the classroom. Several of my students have shown me targeted advertisements they’ve gotten for ketamine. They’re 14 years old. 

What societal changes could facilitate better drug education?

First, I think the conversation around discussing psychedelics is going to require a lot of voices — and I wish there were more initiatives to have those conversations now, while we’re seeing big cultural changes. The same thing happened with cannabis legalization: we changed policy before we changed education, and that left us trying to catch up. 

We also need a lot of adult education and deconditioning from DARE, and the War on Drugs, so we can empathetically connect with young people and their curiosities. We need to be able to just have really casual conversations about this. It doesn't need to be a big deal. When I talk to parents, I tell them to have 60 one-minute conversations rather than one 60-minute conversation. Drugs are already a part of our lives; acknowledge it. That includes substances like caffeine and sugar, too. These conversations need to happen around the dinner table, not just in the classroom. 

In the classrooms, I have this vision that every kid will receive comprehensive drug education in schools. That’s going to require a lot of facilitator training, and we already have a facilitator shortage; there are not many drug educators that can talk about the science of drugs and harm reduction. But my hope is that even if students don’t participate in a formal drug education course, every school has a drug lady: a person that a young person can talk about drugs with, without fear of punishment. 

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

In 2022, a 12-page manuscript with neat script on yellowing paper appeared at an auction in Bogotá, Colombia titled, “Don Juan de Salcedo´s opinion on Peyote: In consultation with Your Excellency, it was confirmed regarding the root of peyote; the effect it causes and its action on those who take and drink it, both Indians and Spaniards and Blacks.” Peyote is a small, spineless cactus native to northern and central modern day Mexico that contains the hallucinogenic compound mescaline.

Dated from 1619, the document was an internal report written by Juan de Salcedo, a rector of the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico, a school originally founded by Charles I, King of Spain. Salcedo was also a consultant to the Tribunal of the Holy Office, founded by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain to spread and maintain Catholicism in the countries that Spain was colonizing.

The Spanish, led by Hernán Cortés, waged war for years against the Aztec empire in what is now Mexico. In 1521, the Spanish captured and killed the Aztec emperor in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. They renamed the territory New Spain, and established the new capital, Mexico City, on the site of Tenochtitlan. The manuscript relays information on how local Indigenous people used peyote in New Spain. The 1619 document appears to be the precursor to a peyote prohibition edict published around a year later, when the church banned peyote internationally—even in places it didn’t grow.

In the manuscript, previously unknown meetings of religious leaders are described. Salcedo mentioned that clergymen were afraid that peyote would prevent religious leaders from converting Indigenous people. For example some ministers warned that “the use of this root was superstitious and served to keep them captive to the devil in manifest violation of our Holy Catholic Faith, and this root manifested impediments to its spiritual use,” Salcedo wrote.

Osiris Sinuhé González Romero, a research fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies Philosophizing in a Global World at Hildesheim University in Germany, saw the manuscript at The University of Madison-Wisconsin, which purchased the text from the auction. Romero has been working to translate it from Spanish, and analyze how the peyote prohibition changed Indigenous and Mestizo behaviors in the region, and how those populations attempted to shield themselves from authorities. He has an academic paper forthcoming on his findings. The Microdose talked to Romero about what the historical document can tell us about what Catholic figures thought about peyote in the 17^th century.

When did you first come across this manuscript?

The manuscript appeared in an auction in Bogotá in 2022. The University of Wisconsin in Madison purchased the document through the official channels available.

Regarding this document, the first question is, how does this document appear in Bogotá and not in Mexico? The manuscript bears no readily identifiable stamps or marks of prior ownership—private, or institutional. According to the official information, it was part of a private collection of a Colombian intellectual, a man who loved books and manuscripts.

Now, the manuscript is in the special collections of the Memorial Library. It was on public display for an academic event in the University of Wisconsin-Madison at the end of 2023 during a symposium on psychedelics.

The manuscript was displayed in public, and I was there. I took photographs of the manuscript because it was available for everyone. I come from Mexico, and peyote is part of my research interest.

I started working on the manuscript, and the university collaborated with me. We have started to perform the academic study of the manuscript with paleography, with translation, and with historical study. It’s in Spanish and Latin, and it’s dated April 28 of 1619. It’s a request by the Inquisition to a top scholar called Juan De Salcedo, who was at Pontifical University in Mexico at that time.

What else happened around the time it was written that makes this document important?

One year later, in 1620, the Catholic Church passed an edict for peyote prohibition with an international scope. That included Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, even the Philippines— territories where the cacti does not grow.

It’s strange, but it’s not that strange, because these were legal jurisdictions of New Spain at that time. But it was the first prohibition policy with an international scope. The manuscript provides valuable historical information regarding how the prohibition policies were developing.

It also includes important information regarding history. For example, in the manuscript, there are some indirect references of the stigmatization of peyote from the first apostolic meeting, [when a group of twelve Franciscan missionaries arrived in New Spain] in 1524.

Does the manuscript offer clues as to why Catholic groups and leaders were against peyote?

The manuscript does shed light on this issue. In the beginning of the first apostolic meeting, [the friars] address different topics regarding customary laws, marriage, cultural features, and so on. It’s interesting to note that peyote has been a topic since the beginning of their evangelical enterprise.

According to the manuscript, the bishops argued that peyote represented an obstacle for the spiritual development of Indigenous people. Before now, the official acts of this first apostolic meeting were lost; we didn’t have the proceedings.

For the Catholic Church the peyote represented a reminiscence of the ancient religious practices, and due to this they decided to create a stigma—to consider it a “diabolical root” and use a colonial framework to describe it, despite the fact that they recognize the therapeutic property. Because peyote resembles ancient religious practices, it was stigmatized and subsequently prohibited.

The peyote banning represented the first attempt to ban globally a plant deeply rooted within Indigenous traditions. Because paradoxically, for some Catholic authorities it represented an obstacle for spiritual development. We can consider this peyote prohibition as a direct antecedent of the current prohibitionist policies

Did Indigenous use of peyote end after prohibition?

It depends on the region. During the 16th and 17th century there were a lot of Inquisition trials on peyote, mainly in central Mexico or in colonial cities. In North Mexico, the evangelizing enterprise was not very homogeneous. The territory was not easy, some places were not easily accessible, and this allowed people to maintain their practices.

It’s interesting to highlight that peyote had a wide circulation, not only in the north— because it grows in the north—but also in central Mexico, among other Indigenous peoples, like the Nahuas, also among the Mestizo population, and even Spaniards and Afro-Mexicans too.

You’ve written that in response to prohibition, some Catholic terminology was incorporated into Indigenous practices. Like, for example, the cactus was associated with the Holy Trinity, instead of the three-part, pre-colonial deity of “maize-deer-peyote.” Under Catholicism people started calling the cactus Baby Jesus and Santa María. And even contemporary Indigenous peoples sometimes call psilocybin mushrooms San Isidro, or refer to Morning Glory as Seeds of the Virgin. Why do you think this occurs?

This is an interesting phenomena, and we can develop two ways of understanding it.

First of all, it is a strategy of survival. Peyote is no exception. It is possible, for example, to find names for peyote such as Santa Rosa, Santa Maria, or even Saint Nicholas. Within the Catholic framework, it is a strategy of survival on the one hand, and on the other hand, it’s an example of spiritual synergy and cultural hybridization.

In some cases, not all, this strategy was successful as it allowed the survival of ancient rituals. Of course, the culture was also evolving, and during history there were different cultural uses of peyote. But thanks to this strategy, it was possible to preserve this past cultural heritage, especially by Indigenous peoples.

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

When people drink ayahuasca, the psychedelic brew that originates from the Amazon rainforest, they sometimes have visual hallucinations. They might see geometric patterns and fractals, or visions of animals and human-like beings. Often, when talking about psychedelic experiences, people are quick to relate what visual phenomena they saw, but they leave out what they might have heard, said David Dupuis, a research fellow at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris.

As an anthropologist, Dupuis has done field work on shamanic tourism, studying people who go from Europe to the Peruvian Amazon to participate in ayahuasca ceremonies. “I began to observe that voices were quite important,” he said. Dupuis wondered why he rarely read about them in the literature which was “all about visions.”

In forthcoming published papers, Dupuis and colleagues surveyed people who have taken ayahuasca—some just a few times, and others more than 100 times. Nearly 80 percent said that they had experienced voice-hearing, and some continued to hear voices after the effects of the plant had worn off.

These hallucinated voices were important to Dupuis’ subjects— they conversed with the voices, took advice from them, and saw them as having separate identities and personalities. The Microdose talked to Dupuis about why hallucinated voices, and not just visions, demand more attention.

I often hear about dramatic visual encounters or hallucinations that people have when they take psychedelics. Is it actually typical to have visual hallucinations?

I followed around 100 participants— international travelers going to take ayahuasca. My database has been mainly built on doing interviews and observing those people, and also working with local leaders. In those testimonies, clearly visions were super important, but surprisingly it was not so common.

I had the idea that ayahuasca was a visionary plant, it’s a visionary experience. And I was surprised because for some people, the visions were very fragmented, and there was a learning process—people were having more clear visions only with more time.

The most common visions that I heard about in the interviews were psychological visions and autobiographical visions. People will see memories of a very precise sequence of one’s biography. Usually those visions are connected with strong emotions.

Of course there are the geometrical patterns; that was a very common testimony. And we know that those geometric patterns are very common. It seems that it’s more dependent on brain activity and some biological processes; those geometries were described by everybody. It didn’t seem to be depending on the social context of the use of ayahuasca. The local leaders were talking to me about them, the people who were international travelers, and also people from Argentina, Brazil, Peru, even Mexico, and so on.

Then, there is another stage of the visionary process: you can have more figurative images that are beginning to emerge: landscapes, architectures, city-like structures, and beings or agents. Those agents can be very diverse. For some people it can be passed-away people, ancestors, or just humanoid beings. Also more chimerical beings—mixing humans, plants, animals, or insects. Finally, more culturally-grounded beings, like angels and demons.

How often did you find voice hearing in these ayahuasca experiences? Do people just listen to the voices, or do they interact with them?

As a postdoc, I joined the Hearing the Voice project at Durham University, which is an interdisciplinary voice hearing research group. We are exploring voice-hearing experiences in different contexts. People hear voices in psychosis, but also there is non-clinical voice hearing, for instance, among spiritualists in the northeast of England.

I was responsible for the group of ayahuasca users, so I did a questionnaire with them, and then very deep interviews to explore the frequency and the phenomenology of the voice hearing experience. Then I compared it with groups like psychosis and spiritualist ones. The idea was to check in a quantitative way what I observed qualitatively on ethnographic fieldwork. What I observed is that voice hearing was super frequent; nearly 80% of ayahuasca users were hearing voices during the ayahuasca, and then also after ayahuasca.

There was a learning aspect to it too. It seemed that after 20 ceremonies, people developed the ability to distinguish voices, to engage with voices, and to limit or erase disturbing voices. They learned how to focus and cultivate the supportive teaching healing voices. It’s not just pharmacological automatism, based on the psychopharmacological property of ayahuasca. There is something like social learning around the voices based on ritual.

Are the auditory hallucinations connected to the visual, as the soundtrack of the visions? Or are they distinct?

Let’s say a complete visual experience you might have would be seeing a being, a mixed vegetal insect human being. That being begins to speak to you, asking questions. Usually it’s not fully auditory. It’s perceived and described as a kind of telepathy—a dialogue that doesn’t need sounds. Stuff speaks to you, but you don’t necessarily see a mouth moving, or you don’t necessarily hear a sound, but there is that voice-like experience, which is a bit like inner dialogue. You have the clear meta-cognitive feeling that this voice is external.

Sometimes you have those beings speaking directly to you, but you can also hear only voices, while having at the same time very fragmented or confused visions, It can be de-correlated.

Many people are auditory only. A lot of people were telling me, “Ayahuasca told me this, and ayahuasca told me that.” Before having my own experiences, I thought it was a metaphorical way to talk about insights that were popping up during ayahuasca sessions. Then, when I had my own experiences, I realized, “Wow, sometimes it is the feeling of clearly chatting with something.” An interesting aspect of those chats is, again, that quite clear feeling that it’s external, it’s not yourself speaking to yourself.

When I was interviewing other ayahuasca ceremony participants, I was listening to them, wondering, “Okay, but how do you know that it’s not your own voice? Your own thoughts?” And a lot of them were saying, ‘Well, it’s way smarter than me. I couldn’t have those ideas by myself.” Also, there is frequently the fact that this voice is way more empathetic and encompassing to you than you could be with yourself. A lot of people talked to me about being surprised by the content of the voice, and that there were jokes. This was something that came up very frequently among participants—the idea that ayahuasca is a joker.

What about distressing voices— did you come across any of those in your interviews?

There are distressing voices, just as you have distressing visions. Some people, they can hear very critical voices, voices pushing them to feel guilt, or make them feel disempowered in the face of their daily life situations. Some voices inspire despair, and usually those voices are combined by disturbing visions, like rats or demons.

What I observed is that there is a group focused on speech following ayahuasca ceremonies. During the speech group, the leaders were inviting every participant to share their experience of the former ceremony, and leaders would sometimes say, “Okay, this voice, it’s not good. It’s a demon. This voice is good, it’s the voice of ayahuasca.”

For instance, if a voice is inspiring fear or guilt in you, it’s not coming from the good side, and you don’t have to listen to that voice. On the other hand, if a voice is inspiring you, giving you solutions, insight, support, joy, hope— it’s good. What I also observed is that people seem to be able to learn to avoid and to limit the depressing voices.

Why do you think voice hearing has received so much less attention than visual experiences when people describe their psychedelic experiences?

These are different aspects of the experience. If you look at the discourse of Mestizo leaders in the Peruvian Amazon, where I work, they will evaluate mainly the purgative properties of ayahuasca. So it’s a lot about purging, vomiting, and at the end of the set of a ceremony, they would ask you, “Did you throw up? No? You will have to take ayahuasca again.”

There are also the emotional properties of ayahuasca. We know that some Indigenous groups of Peru use ayahuasca to produce fear, and to train themselves to confront fear.

They will train the young men to stay strong for the future when they might be confronted with real fear, in case of hunting or war.

In Europe, in the West, and the global north, it’s all about agency. I think this is underlying the importance of vision. Vision is probably the most important sense for our societies. Also visions are more spectacular, like when people describe seeing jaguars, serpents, luminous beings, and so on. It’s so striking that people memorize it, they write about it, it’s exciting.

Voices are more subtle. It can be a sentence, a conversation, or just the feeling of being addressed. Unless you ask specifically about them, even my own investigations, they tended to remain a bit in the background of the interview. Most questionnaires on the phenomenological include many questions about the visual experiences, but almost none about voices.

Maybe voices are a more challenging theoretical question than visions, because a vision can be interpreted as a symbolic image, it’s intuitive and easy. But a voice immediately implies communication, external agency. Who is speaking? It shifts from a perception to a relationship, and that is more complicated to deal with.

Some ayahuasca expert users develop the ability to keep hearing voices even without taking ayahuasca. People in our group talked about being able to keep that relationship alive, and that’s a very interesting aspect. One could think, okay, that’s too many hallucinogenic substances, the person just had a kind of psychotic breakdown.

But the phenomenology is not the same as voice hearing in psychosis; the voices are very supportive. We have begun to document those cultivation techniques that people use to keep that relationship alive, which by the way, is in line with a lot of ethnographies of traditional indigenous shamanism.

In those indigenous contexts, shamans will use substances during their shamanic training, and then they stop, and use tobacco to feed the spirits, and to cultivate the relationship with spirit. There is probably something like the frequent use of psychedelics plus social learning that can lead you to have a relationship with those perceived beings for a long time, even without needing to take psychedelics again.

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

(Editor’s note: We are taking a summer break and won’t be back with a new This Week in Psychedelics Friday post until August. We will continue publishing on Mondays with 5 Questions and keep an eye out for a fascinating new book excerpt too.)

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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.

An industry in flux as Oregon plans to merge its psilocybin services with the state’s medical marijuana program amidst budget shortfalls

On July 1, Oregon’s public health department announced that the state’s psilocybin services program would merge with its medical marijuana program. The transition into a new single unit, which will be called the Oregon Psilocybin and Medical Cannabis Section, is anticipated to be completed by September 1, 2026.

Amidst budget shortfalls, Oregon’s public health department has had to take measures to reduce expenses by letting vacant positions remain unfilled and cutting non-personnel costs. The aims of merging the psilocybin and marijuana programs are to increase efficiency and reduce costs. The state’s public health department has also proposed doubling certain psilocybin industry fees. Because the psilocybin program is supported by fees, it must raise fees to keep up with rising costs, said Oregon Health Authority spokesperson Erica Heartquist in an email, according to Oregon Capital Chronicle.

With the proposed fees, psilocybin service centers and manufacturers would incur annual fees of $20,000, up from $10,000. Facilitators who oversee psilocybin trips would pay an annual fee of $4,000, up from $2,000. Reductions in fees for nonprofits, veterans, and low-income people have also been targeted for elimination.

Industry leaders have decried these proposed fee hikes, pointing to ongoing issues with psilocybin service center closures and declining business. The state has thus far issued licenses to 39 psilocybin service centers, and state figures show that half of those licenses have either expired or been surrendered. In January, the New York Times reported that one third of Oregon’s psilocybin service centers have closed.

Dr. Eric Lee, who runs Space Psychedelic Clinic, told the Oregon Capital Chronicle that costs of psilocybin sessions, which typically range from $850 to $3,000, have limited access for many people. “There is a vast segment of the population that will just never be able to use legal psychedelics, because of the price point,” Lee said. “I think it’s a huge part of why the business is failing.”

New bill seeks to turn Trump’s psychedelics executive order into permanent law

Federal lawmakers are rushing to get psychedelics legislation introduced to ensure that President Donald Trump’s April executive order aimed at expediting approvals and access to psychedelic-assisted therapies is codified into law. Without a law enacted by Congress, any executive order can be rescinded by the next sitting president.

On June 30, members of Congress led by Morgan Luttrell (R-TX), along with Lou Correa (D-CA), Jack Bergman (R-MI), and Michael McCaul (R-TX), introduced the Initiating Biomedical Outcomes to Garner Advancements into Innovative Neuroplastogen Efficacy (IBOGAINE) Act.

The IBOGAINE Act contains key parts of Trump’s executive order, with additions to ensure veteran care, including mandated progress reports developed by the Under Secretary for Health of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Reports would be due to congressional veterans affairs committees 60 days after the law is enacted and biannually thereafter, and they would need to include updates on clinical trial activities and outcomes, the number of veterans enrolled in treatment programs and clinical trials, and recommendations for improvements for veteran access. The Under Secretary for Health of the Department of Veterans Affairs would also need to create a workforce readiness plan to assess training and clinical capacity and to ensure that treatments are accessible to all veterans.

Also on June 30, Representative Abe Hamadeh (R-AZ) introduced the Veterans and Service Members PTSD Emerging Treatment Review Act (HR 9547) with co-sponsors Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA). The bill would direct the Pentagon to provide Congress with comprehensive data on clinical research and service-related treatments for PTSD to aid decisionmaking on military readiness, health, and veteran care.

While HR 9547 was referred to the House Committee on Armed Services, the IBOGAINE Act was referred to three committees — Energy and Commerce, Judiciary, and Veterans’ Affairs. A bill under review by multiple committees enables members with diverse expertise to weigh in, but these complex bills often take longer to get through the legislative process.

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Compass Pathways announces results of ongoing second psilocybin Phase 3 trial, strengthening case for FDA approval

On July 7, UK-based psychedelics company Compass Pathways announced new results for its second ongoing Phase 3 COMP006 clinical trial using the company’s formulation of synthetic psilocybin, called COMP360, for treatment-resistent depression. The study participants, of which there are nearly 600, have experienced depressive episodes lasting, on average, more than three years, prior to enrolling in the study. Participants’ depression symptoms were assessed using a standard clinical measure of depression called the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS).

While the study results have not been peer reviewed, in a press release the company stated that 39% of participants who received two 25 mg doses achieved a clinically meaningful reduction in MADRS scores of more than or equal to 25% by week 6, following two fixed doses of COMP360. The new results appear to be better than the results of the first Phase 3 trial that the company released in February, in which just 25% of participants who were given one 25 mg dose experienced a clinically meaningful reduction in MADRS scores.

In April, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted Compass a New Drug Application rolling review request, which allows drug companies to incrementally submit data for agency evaluation. The FDA also awarded Compass’s proprietary synthetic psilocybin COMP360 a Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher. Both initiatives are designed to get drugs to market faster.

With its rolling data submission allowance and initial FDA review underway, Compass says it’s on track to complete its final submission before the end of the year. Subject to FDA approval and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) rescheduling of the drug, Compass anticipates launching its new treatment in the first half of 2027.

Dismissed lawsuit buoys Definium amidst positive LSD Phase 3 results — but clinicians question psychedelic therapy implementation

On July 1, federal judge Gregory Williams dismissed a lawsuit against New York City-based Definium Therapeutics, which is developing a formulation of LSD to treat anxiety and depression. The lawsuit was filed by Signant Health Holding Corp, which alleged that LSD company Definium Therapeutics shared trade secrets with competitor EMA Wellness. Judge Williams said Signant failed to “meaningfully distinguish the alleged protected information from general business information.” According to Reuters, a Signant spokesperson said that the company will refile its lawsuit, adding requested details.

Definium, formerly known as MindMed, had contracted Signant in 2021 to help run its Phase 2 clinical trial using its LSD formulation MM120 (now called DT120) to treat anxiety and depression. Definium switched contractors in 2024, hiring EMA Wellness to help run its Phase 3 clinical trials.

News of the dismissed lawsuit came shortly after Definium released positive Phase 3 results for DT120 in the treatment of major depressive disorder. Participants’ depression symptoms were assessed using a standard clinical measure of depression called the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS). The results showed a significant improvement in depression symptoms, with MADRS scores for study participants falling on average by 13 points. A decrease of 6 points is considered a clinically significant reduction in depression symptoms.

While these results are promising, obstacles lie ahead for Definium and other companies with psychedelic compounds in the drug approval pipeline. “Definium’s MADRS numbers are real,” writes Moe Alsumidaie, reporting for The Clinical Trial Vanguard. Still, Alsumidaie went on to describe some clinicians’ concerns. “What is in dispute is whether those numbers, generated in a controlled clinical trial with therapy protocols, will replicate in the licensed clinic down the road where the psychiatrist has thirty minutes, the integration therapist is not reimbursed, and the patient spent the session alone on a recliner with noise-canceling headphones.”

• On Wednesday night, the Massachusetts House passed a $561 million economic development bill that includes a five-year pilot program that would allow licensed mental health care clinics to offer on-site psychedelic treatments, reports the Boston Globe. The bill now goes to the state Senate.

• A 203-page Ibogaine Investigator’s Brochure was published by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). In a press release the non-profit group said that the brochure serves as an open-access, comprehensive resource guide of scientific and regulatory information “to ensure that ibogaine research isn’t limited to pharmaceutical companies alone, and to bring the public along as the field advances.”

• Yale’s state-funded psilocybin and MDMA pilot program expanded to more patients after a Connecticut law took effect July 1. The pilot program, enacted in 2022, was initially limited to retired first responders, veterans, individuals from a historically underserved community and health care workers with serious or life-threatening mental or behavioral health conditions. Now, patients who are at least 18 years old and meet eligibility criteria can apply.

• Mongabay’s Jenny Gonzalez reports on a “secret Amazon species” that may be key to creating a sustainable supply of ibogaine. Brazilian researcher Ricardo Marques discovered the plant and is guarding its identity for what he declares are commercial and ecological reasons. Marques says the plant contains a chemical precursor that can be extracted and transformed into ibogaine, using methods that enable the plant to regenerate. As global demand for ibogaine increases, the discovery may help protect Tabernanthe iboga (iboga), a slow-growing shrub.

• In a Q&A with Drug Discovery & Development, Jonathan Bound, who has underwritten companies in the psychedelics sector, breaks down insurance issues related to psychedelic treatments.

• “My spouse’s collapse is not an anomaly. It’s a warning,” writes Laura Zam in the Los Angeles Times. Her husband Kurt suffered a nervous breakdown after participating in an MDMA therapy clinical trial. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and sought MDMA therapy to process his fear of recurrence and long-term anxiety. Three years after his breakdown, and after hospitalizations, Kurt is now recovering. Zam, who also enrolled in an MDMA trial, says psychedelic medicine was transformative for her, but cautions the field, after witnessing “what happens when promise outpaces support systems.”

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Deep in the forests of Yunnan Province in southwest China, wild mushrooms push up through the soil each rainy season, and local families climb steep, pathless mountains to find them. Among them is a mushroom called Jian Shou Qing, a type of bolete that can be psychoactive and is known to provoke visions of little people. For generations, this foraging culture has shaped how communities in the region eat, earn, and gather. April Fan, a filmmaker and recent MFA graduate from Duke University’s Experimental and Documentary Arts program, returned to her mother’s hometown in Yunnan to film Mushroom Mountain, an ongoing observational and experimental documentary that brings together anthropology, political economy, and sensory experience to examine life on the mountain. Her project received a 2025 Mycoskie-UC Berkeley Psychedelic Documentary Fellowship.

The Microdose spoke with her about fungi, foraging, and the story that called her back to her mother’s home.

Can you tell me a bit about your film, Mushroom Mountain?

This film is about my mom’s hometown in southwest China, Yunnan Province. It’s a very remote mountain area. She left Yunnan when she was in her early twenties, but she always dreamed about returning. She had a very tragic childhood, but every time you see her, she’s smiling, talkative, open and honest. She can go through every tough time because there’s always strength in her soul. I always wanted to know where that strength came from, and I thought I could find the answer in her hometown.

Then when I came to the U.S. to pursue my MFA, I heard that psychedelic mushrooms were such a hot topic here. It reminded me that there are magic mushrooms in Yunnan. I had never paid attention to them before, but I thought, this is a good reason to go back. And I think deep in my heart, there was something calling me back anyway.

The mushroom is just an entry point in Mushroom Mountain. I want to challenge the Western psychedelic narrative and tell a mushroom story from the eastern world. This journey really opened my horizon. Before, I just cared about my family history, but this time, because of the mushroom, I followed three local families foraging in the forest. They are to some extent my relatives, because after my mom became an orphan the whole village raised her. When you go into this story, you find it’s a touching story about return, about home and about love.

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What was it like to film in the mountains of Yunnan?

At the very beginning, the foragers didn’t allow me to follow them into the mountain because it could be dangerous and they knew it would be hard for me. They worried about me and didn’t think I could do it. So I stayed and worked around the village for two weeks. They realized how determined I was, and let me try to go with them to the mountain.

The first day I followed them, it was really hard. There’s no road, so they just climbed the mountain. It was so high, basically vertical. In the forest, it’s so wet and so hot, and there’s all kinds of mosquitos, snakes and bugs around you. They walk so fast because they want to find as many mushrooms as they can, otherwise the mushrooms will be picked by other people. It’s almost like a competition. I can’t walk so fast because of physical weakness, and at the same time I have to hold my camera, observe the whole environment, and make judgments in my mind about how to tell the story. I tried my best and the local people helped me a lot.

What types of mushrooms do the local people forage?

The most popular type is called the Honggu, a red mushroom also called Red Russula. They also pick psychoactive mushrooms called Jian Shou Qing. The types of mushrooms found depends on the local area, environment, and climate. There are lots of factors to decide if you can pick them. The foragers pick the mushrooms to sell them and earn money to improve their lives, but they also eat them. In recent years, because mushroom prices are so high, they’ll just eat a very small amount of the not very good looking mushrooms, and sell the very high quality mushrooms.

As you mentioned, one of the mushrooms foragers look for is the Jian Shou Qing. This bolete is known to produce what researchers call Lilliputian hallucinations. Tell me about how you visually depicted altered states of consciousness in your film?

I looked at lots of Western psychedelic documentaries and videos and did lots of scientific research to understand how the psychedelic process affects people’s perception. Initially, I added a lot of effects, like twisting the visuals and enhancing the colors, but I gradually realized it wasn’t quite right. I did a lot of oral history with the local people. I asked them what their experience was like when they were hallucinating, and they told me very magical things. They told me they would see little people or some weird things. It’s very different from the Western psychedelic narrative. So I wanted to create something from another world.

My visual style came out of my perception when I was filming on the mountain. I found that the rain wasn’t just something that suddenly happened. Before the rain, the temperature and humidity changed, the light changed, and the feeling in my body changed. So in my film, I don’t just enter the hallucination suddenly. Instead, I describe how the mist gradually moves on the mountain, how the light becomes darker, how you can hear the birds singing. It’s very sensitive. You can see perspective from the plants, the insects, the environment, and through that, you realize that something is changing, and that you’ve entered a different world. It’s just like the process of rain. At one point, you will know it’s happened, but before that, you already have a feeling it will happen.

What did you learn from the mushroom foragers?

I learned a lot about the local knowledge system. I’d always ask them, “How do you know where you can find the mushrooms?” And they would tell me, “You can only remember by your feet.” They said you have to walk the mountain again and again, and then you will know where they are. Some people knew where to find the mushrooms from childhood, they would follow their parents into the mountain. It’s a knowledge passed down from generation to generation.

Before picking the mushroom, they would gently tap the top of it first. I asked why they do this. They said, “To leave the spores in the land, so next year it will grow in the same place. If every time you pick the mushroom you exploit the resources, then the resources will run out. But if you know the balance, if you leave the spores, they protect the land and the whole ecosystem and then next year they will still grow.”

Will you try to show this film in China when you go home?

When I showed excerpts of the film over video call to the locals, the first thing they said was “It’s so real, April.” I asked them how they felt, and they said at the very beginning they were a little shy and embarrassed, but then they said it’s our real life, it’s the real me. They were excited and curious to see how their story was told and how they are seen in the film. So I will take my film to the local community and do a community screening. I think my journey is not only about making a film. I also want to really return to this community. I’m always thinking, what can I do for them? I want them to know their stories deserve to be seen and heard.

As an international artist and filmmaker, I’m also developing an international language to tell this story. I’m not only an outsider observing something from that area, but I’m not only an insider from that place either. My identity is complex, and I think that means I can provide a very special perspective on this mushroom culture in Yunnan.

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In the best-selling 2025 memoir, The Tell, Amy Griffin, a billionaire venture capitalist, wrote that after MDMA-assisted therapy, she recovered memories of rape by her middle school teacher. “I knew that these memories were real,” she wrote. “My body knew what had happened to me.”

After praise from celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Gwenyth Paltrow, the New York Times published a story raising doubts about the memories that emerged during Griffin’s therapy. The Times interviewed one of Griffin’s classmates who said that she was the victim of abuse that sounded oddly similar to Griffin’s. The classmate went to sue Griffin for allegedly appropriating experiences from her own life for the book. This month, Griffin countersued her classmate for defamation, denying the claim.

At the heart of this controversy is a question about memory that has come up in psychology in decades past: can a traumatic incident be completely repressed, and then recovered again? During the so-called “memory wars,” in the 1980s and 1990s, some high-profile patients initially said they had retrieved memories, but then later recanted, such as a woman with “multiple personality disorder” known as Sybil, who remembered sexual abuse and torture by her mother, but was later found to have had false memories encouraged by a therapist. Researchers including the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus showed in experiments how it was possible to induce such false memories. The high profile and litigious story of Amy Griffin’s The Tell brought the memory wars to psychedelics-assisted therapy, and prompted people to ask how and if psychedelics might play a role in memory retrieval, both real and imagined.

Samuli Kangaslampi, a clinical psychologist and university lecturer in clinical psychology at Tampere University in Finland, became interested in psychedelics and memory while reading about LSD-assisted therapy from the 1950s. “It continuously caught my attention, how much memory experiences and recalling your past, especially your childhood and traumatic events, featured in all those papers,” he told me. He wondered how common recovered memories were in psychedelic-assisted therapy today, and how clinicians should regard those memories.

Kangaslampi recently received roughly $800,000 in funding from the Research Council of Finland to study just that: Can psychedelics bring back memories, and if so, can those memories be false? The Microdose talked to Kangaslampi about how to test what psychedelics do to memory, and why we should care about whether memories are “real.”

Why do you think the discussion of false memories and psychedelics hasn’t been at the forefront during the resurgence of psychedelic research?

One of the big reasons why I got interested in this is I was reading all this LSD research from the 1950s and 60s. It was considered one of the main effects of LSD— that it makes it possible to recall events, and that was one of the major categories of experiences that people have. There was a whole section of the clinical work that focused on the question of how does LSD make it possible to remember repressed memories, and how do people get therapeutic benefits out of that catharsis.

In contrast to that, people talk very little about effects on memory or memory experience in modern research. There’s the idea that these more personal experiences, autobiographical experiences, are an initial step that you go through in order to get to the really therapeutic and important part: transcendental or mystical experiences.

My interest initially was the therapeutic potential of these memory experiences, when people recall their life and process those memories. But the more and more I looked at it, the more I also realized the potential problems. It started to remind me of the memory wars of the past, and all this discussion in the trauma field about whether people can recover memories of abuse, and if they do, whether they’re false memories or not.

The “memory wars” are an important context here, can you explain what those were?

People who get more scientifically trained in the topic of trauma and trauma-focused treatment will generally be taught that the memory wars were settled, and we have all come to the conclusion that repression is not a valid scientific concept or a process that we should worry about. If people come up with memories that they didn’t have before, we should be very careful about that. We should definitely not try to actively get people to recover memories that they don’t currently have. But in reality, these memory wars are not over.

Clearly it happens that people have the experience that they now recall some important event of their past. In this context, it’s typically a traumatic event, and most commonly memories of childhood abuse. It happens spontaneously, but especially happens in therapy. The debate was: are these memories real, and if they are, what was the status of these memories before? Were they somehow repressed or dissociated? Was this person truly incapable of ever remembering this, and now suddenly they can? Or are these memories likely to be false, inaccurate?

Recovered memory cases are topics of scientific debate, they can be personally important to people, and they can also be legally important. Experts acted as witnesses in court cases, and their positions got polarized and sort of simplified. There was this perception that some people believe that all recovered memories are always true, and we should always trust them, others think that they’re always false, and it’s impossible to recover memories. Maybe some experts did hold these extreme views. Maybe it was a bit more nuanced, but that’s how it was represented in the court system.

Coming back to today, there’s the perception that this issue is settled, but when people do survey work, they realize that there’s actually still a very big chasm between practicing clinicians, especially in some areas of trauma therapy and memory researchers. A lot of clinicians who practice different types of trauma therapy still believe in this idea of repressed memories and the ability to recover those memories, whereas most memory researchers don’t.

Some psychedelic-therapists, including the Czech-born psychiatrist Stanislov Grof, explicitly mentioned recovered memories. In fact, Grof talks about re-living your birth. Other modalities that psychedelic therapists use, such as the form of therapy called Internal Family Systems, can refer to parts of childhood becoming uncovered or newly recognized. Given that, what exactly are you going to be tracking when it comes to memory and psychedelics?

There are two lines of inquiry that I’m concentrating on. First, how much does this even happen? Is it even a major problem? We don’t have basic numbers on this. There are a lot of anecdotes, and it seems to be going on more in certain circles—maybe outside the strict clinical context—but we don’t really know.

I would like to find out how many people have these kinds of experiences, and what do they think about them afterwards? Are they really convinced by these memories, and do they really struggle with whether they’re real or not?

And to get the clinician perspective, as you said, many people working with psychedelics may be working with therapeutic frameworks where they are more open or accepting of the possibility of recovering memories. They may explicitly endorse that as a part of their therapy. I’d be interested to see what clinicians and people running clinical trials think of the phenomenon? How do they deal with it?

The other side is: do psychedelics have some characteristics or qualities that make it more likely that people might have false memories, or that they might believe a memory like experience is true regardless of whether it is or not?

There are a lot of indirect reasons to suspect that that might be the case, but we don’t have any good research on whether that happens or not—whether susceptibility to false memories is increased or not in a person on a psychedelic. But especially as psychedelics increase or seem to increase suggestibility, and the feeling of realness or truth, we could imagine that this could lead to increased susceptibility to false memories.

Experimentally, how do you test these questions? It seems hard to test if a memory is true or not.

There are false memory paradigms that use word lists or pictures; you can show people pictures, and then see whether they develop a memory of having seen a picture that they actually did not. If they not only think that they saw it, but they feel like they remember seeing it, then you can think of that as a false memory.

Of course, paradigms like that are fairly far removed from our real lives and our autobiographical memory, which is specifically about important memories that happen to us, experienced from the first person. When we study autobiographical memory, the problem usually is that we can’t verify whether it’s real or not. If they feel like it happened, then how do we verify that?

One approach that has been used with other psychoactive substances, but not yet with psychedelics, are virtual reality scenarios. A person can have a first-person experience of a scenario, see something happen and interact with their surroundings, and then later on we interview them about that event. Then we can see whether they formed false memories. Because it’s a virtual reality scenario, we know exactly what happened.

Another option I hope to be using, which is a little bit more complicated, would be a diary-based method— having people record events of their lives, true and false, and then months later, seeing whether they feel like they remember some of the events that were not true. We would know from those diary entries whether they were actually true or false.

Why does it matter if a recovered memory is true or false?

You could say from a therapeutic perspective, that if a person has this experience of remembering something and it’s therapeutic for them, they feel better afterwards, they feel like they’ve dealt with something, then does it matter whether that memory was veridical, whether the event actually happened or not? From the perspective of “this person is feeling better,” maybe it doesn’t. A lot of the time, if a recovered memory is not about something as important and painful as abuse, then maybe it doesn’t matter.

But if it is about something very important that could have happened to that person, and even more so if there’s a perpetrator in that memory who did something, I think there are very large personal and even legal repercussions. So we do need to care, and we do need to be careful.

There’s also a question of whether it’s ethical to get someone to believe something that’s not true. In the context of psychedelics, we’ve often talked about this in relation to introducing metaphysical beliefs or spiritual beliefs. Is that an ethical problem? I think it is, and similarly, if psychedelic treatment gets someone to believe something about their life that’s not true, that did not happen, I think that is a pretty big ethical problem as well.

A lot of time, the person themselves can end up struggling with wanting to find out whether it’s true or not, and that seems to be a big part of their suffering. They are not able to accept that they don’t know, and become fixated on that.

There is clearly a very strong sort of cultural belief that we’ve developed, that there must be a source of my suffering, and it probably has to be located in my past. Something that’s happened. In my opinion, this is not often the case. Maybe there were some things that happened, or several things, but that’s not the only thing to figure out in most people’s cases—nice as it would be, in some sense, to find it. But if you go searching for it, you can find something. People sometimes joke that in therapy it’s never too late to have a happy childhood, but similarly, perhaps it’s never too late to have a traumatic childhood if you really go looking for 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.

Definium releases LSD for depression Phase 3 results

On Monday, New York-based psychedelics company Definium announced topline results from its Phase 3 study using a single dose of DT120, the company’s formulation of LSD, in the treatment of major depressive disorder.

In the study, 149 participants received a 100 microgram oral LSD dose or an inert placebo. Researchers tracked changes in participants’ scores on the MADRS, a standard depression assessment, from before the study to six weeks after. Participants who received LSD showed a significant improvement in depression symptoms; on average, they scored 13 points lower on the MADRS at six weeks after dosing. (Higher scores represent more severe symptoms, and a decrease of 6 points is often considered a clinically significant reduction in symptoms.) Those in the placebo group also saw improvement, but less so; on average, people who received placebo scored 5.2 points lower on the MADRS at the six-week point.

Compared to previous Phase 2 and 3 psilocybin and 5-MeO-DMT clinical trials, Definium’s reported results show some of the largest decreases in depression scores. Beckley’s BPL-003 (5-MeO-DMT) Phase 2 trial found that participants who received the largest dose of the drug showed, on average, an 11-point reduction in MADRS score four weeks after dosing, while those in the placebo group showed only a 6-point reduction. Clinical trials for psilocybin have been more mixed; while the non-profit Usona Institute’s Phase 2 psilocybin trial decreased MADRS scores by a whopping 20 points, psychedelic company Compass Pathways’ clinical trials with COMP360, their formulation of psilocybin, were less splashy: a Phase 2b study found that psilocybin decreased participants’ MADRS scores by an average of 12 points, while their more recent Phase 3 results found that psilocybin decreased MADRS scores by a modest 3.8 points compared to a placebo. (The difference between placebo and LSD in Definium’s trial was around 8 points.)

Topline results are, by definition, the highlights put forth by a company. More details about Definium’s study will be available once it is peer-reviewed by an academic journal.

The results appeared to excite investors. Definium’s stock price was up 46% the day of the announcement, and 83% over the week (as of Thursday afternoon).

Definium rebranded from MindMed at the beginning of the year, and it appeared to be a contender for one of the Trump administration’s priority vouchers for psychedelics. In the days after the president signed an executive order authorizing the release of new vouchers for psychedelics, the FDA initially posted — and then deleted — on X announcing that one of the vouchers would support research for “LSD for GAD” (generalized anxiety disorder). Definium ultimately did not receive a voucher.

Survey suggests most veterans support VA-funded psychedelic-assisted therapy

According to a new report by the thinktank RAND Corporation, about half of veterans supported the Department of Veterans Affairs providing or paying for psilocybin-assisted therapy. The report surveyed more than 1300 veterans about their attitudes and use of psychedelics. From those responses, the researchers estimated that roughly one in four US veterans — around 4.8 million — have tried psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, or MDMA in their lifetime, and that they were more likely than nonveterans to have used LSD or mescaline.

Given the federal government — and specifically, the VA’s — recent moves to bolster support for psychedelic research, RAND’s report provides perspectives from a key group that those initiatives intend to support. And yet, veterans surveyed by RAND were largely unsure whether asking VA doctors about psychedelics was sanctioned. When asked if they thought a veteran would be at risk of losing VA benefits if they spoke with a VA provider about their use of MDMA or psilocybin, around 50% of respondents said they were not sure, while between 15 to 20% of respondents said they believed they would lose benefits for bringing up psychedelic use. RAND also asked veterans if they thought the VA should provide psilocybin- or MDMA-assisted therapy to veterans, if it were approved by the Food and Drug Administration. While the most common answer was “I’m not sure,” 54% of respondents thought the VA should pay for psilocybin and 45% for MDMA, either via VA providers or community providers.

In the last couple of years, veteran-centered psychedelic advocacy groups and allied politicians have become increasingly enthusiastic about ibogaine, a once obscure psychedelic that comes from plants such as the iboga bush. (In 2023, just 12% of Americans reported having heard of the substance.) In RAND’s survey, just 0.3% of veteran respondents said they’d used the substance; for comparison, the most commonly used drugs were psilocybin (18.6%) and LSD (19.6%).

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Colorado activists fight recent bill’s amendments to sharing psychedelics

Recently, Colorado lawmakers passed House Bill 1325, which lays the groundwork for an ibogaine research program in the state. But the bill also amended the state’s policy on the personal use of psychedelics, which was established in 2022 after Colorado voters passed a ballot initiative creating the state’s “Natural Medicine” program. The measure decriminalized “natural medicines” like psilocybin, and included the right to gift them to others. Last year, journalist Chris Walker described the “burgeoning grey market” growing around Colorado’s psilocybin gifting economy — and HB 1325 is an attempt to crack down on that grey market, as well as on unlicensed growing, manufacturing, and administration of psychedelic substances.

Some Colorado psychedelic activists are pushing back against those changes by signature-gathering for a referendum to challenge that aspect of the newly-passed bill. The group, which calls itself Coloradans for Natural Medicine Rights, wishes to leave the rest of the bill untouched, they write on their campaign website, but wish to reverse recent changes that “narrowed what ‘share’ means.”

Given the high costs of natural medicine via the state’s regulated program — the average session can cost upwards of $3500 — those leading the referendum are concerned that psilocybin mushrooms will no longer be accessible via sharing and gifting. Jacob Marlega, an organizer behind the referendum, is a mushroom grower and runs a harm reduction and education services program.

Psychedelic research funding bills and a move towards psilocybin legalization in Canada

In May, North Carolina senators Sophia Chitlik (D) and Bob Brinson (R) introduced Senate Bill 1018, which would earmark up to five $1 million psychedelic research grants to be given out through the state’s general fund. (North Carolina’s legislative session began in April, as many other states’ sessions were wrapping up; it runs through August.) According to the North Carolina Newsline, another legislator tried to pass similar legislation in 2023, but it stalled in committee.

In late 2023, then-President Joe Biden signed a bill called the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which established appropriations for the Department of Defense. That bill included $10 million for funding psychedelic clinical trials, and last week, members of U.S. Congress — including Lou Correa (D) and Jack Bergman (R), co-chairs of the Congressional Psychedelics Advancing Therapies (PATH) Caucus — filed an amendment to the 2027 version of the bill, which would extend that funding through 2033.

Corey Tochor, a conservative member of Canadian parliament, introduced a bill last week that would allow physicians to prescribe psilocybin and psilocin, the active metabolite of psilocybin. The country has a psilocybin access program through Health Canada, its health authority, but doctors must apply on behalf of patients, and the process can take months. A Health Canada spokesperson told CBC that the agency had authorized 354 participants since its Special Access Program launched in 2022.

• New York State Police announced the arrest of a 30-year-old Brooklynite who was charged with possession of psilocybin mushrooms after he and his friends got lost on a hike in Harriman State Park, near the town of Tuxedo. The man allegedly got into a fight with his friends, then “became overwhelmed and ran through the woods” — he called for help and police say he was found with 45 grams of psilocybin mushrooms.

• Harm reduction organization DanceSafe is teaming up with The Shulgin Foundation to sell pieces of art using broken glassware from the famed psychonaut Sasha Shulgin’s lab. The proceeds from the sales will be split evenly between the two organizations.

• CBC released a new documentary called Prophet of Ecstasy, which follows longtime MDMA dealer Michael Clegg’s journey from “Ecstasy Kingpin” to prison and the spiritual awakening that he experienced behind bars.

• According to ABC, venture capitalist and author Amy Griffin is now suing her classmate for defamation over the classmate’s allegations, detailed in a New York Times piece, that Griffin used the classmate’s experiences of sexual abuse as her own in her 2025 memoir The Tell. In the memoir, Griffin says her memories of sexual assault were awakened by MDMA-assisted therapy. The Times piece also mentions Griffin’s close ties to powerful psychedelics organizations: her husband, hedge fund founder John Griffin, has donated $1 million to MAPS, and the couple holds a 15 percent stake in Resilient Pharmaceuticals (formerly known as Lykos Therapeutics). Griffin was introduced to her MDMA therapists by MAPS founder Rick Doblin.

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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.

Is the boom in toad-derived 5-MeO-DMT built on a false history?

In a paper published in Psychedelics, researchers reference historical scholarship and contemporary accounts to argue that current claims stating that 5-MeO-DMT is an “ancestral toad medicine” are in fact fabricated. The researchers call this a case of “fabricated ancestrality.”

5-MeO-DMT is a powerful psychedelic, known for its rapid onset and short duration. Synthetic versions of 5-MeO-DMT are made in a laboratory but 5-MeO-DMT also exists in nature and can be extracted from certain plant species and the glandular secretions of the Incilius alvarius toad (formerly known by the scientific name Bufo alvarius).

Plant derived 5-MeO-DMT is well-documented, including in preparations made from Anadenanthera peregrina, also known as the yopo tree. The authors point to historical uses dating back to the 15th century, including by Indigenous Caribbean and South American communities, some who used long bamboo or hollow bird bones to administer snuff. But early evidence regarding the use of toad-derived 5-MeO-DMT is missing, and the authors argue that the narrative of toad medicine as an “ancient tradition” has been fabricated to establish cultural legitimacy motivated by monetization. The rising demand for toad-derived 5-MeO-DMT, the authors say, has put pressure on a vulnerable toad species.

“If ancestralization confers legitimacy, then ethical reflection must confer restraint,” the authors write. “The future of 5-MeO-DMT need not depend on the continued extraction of a wild species. Whether the psychedelic field aligns itself with conservation or continues practices that contribute to depletion will shape not only the fate of Incilius alvarius, but the moral coherence of the psychedelic field itself.”

Colorado’s new law lays groundwork for ibogaine access

Colorado’s Natural Medicine Act (HB 26-1325) was signed into law this month by Governor Jared Polis. The law establishes an ibogaine pilot program under the state’s Behavioral Health Administration (BHA) and lays the groundwork for ibogaine to be included in the Natural Medicine Health Act that Colorado voters passed in 2022.

Colorado is now facing a $1.5 billion budget shortfall. Rather than allocate public state dollars, HB 26-1325 created a path for agencies to obtain funding, such as grants, opioid settlement dollars, federal research funding, and private philanthropy. If the state can raise at least $150,000 by January 1, 2028, the pilot program could move forward to raise the additional required funds and the health agency could select up to five pilot sites to conduct research or offer ibogaine treatments under the Right to Try law. The pilot sites would need to operate with federal approval, and they could collaborate with other states that have already committed public funding for ibogaine research and drug development.

The law differs from ibogaine legislation in other states such as Texas and Arizona by creating a pathway for ibogaine to be administered in Colorado’s healing centers with licensed facilitators. That means people in Colorado could potentially access state-legal ibogaine long before the drug could make its way through the Food and Drug Administration approval process, according to Joshua Kappel, an attorney and co-author of the ballot measure that created the psychedelics access program and decriminalized certain psychedelic drugs in the state.

Due to ibogaine’s serious health risks, including cardiotoxicity, regulators would have authority to require more rigorous medical screenings beyond what is required for psilocybin. If ibogaine is included in the regulated program, the definition of natural medicine would change to enable laboratory produced forms of “semi-synthetic” ibogaine derived from the iboga shrub. Currently, no synthetic forms of psychedelic substances are allowed in Colorado’s state program. Under the new law, providers would have to consult with Indigenous communities traditionally connected to ibogaine or iboga, and commit to a benefit-sharing plan.

Colorado’s new law also adds civil malpractice liability to shield practitioners from having to pay for damages related to potential psychological or physical injuries that might occur while administering ibogaine, excluding intentional misconduct and gross negligence. “The idea is not to protect bad actors,” explained attorney Barine Majewska during a webinar about the new law. “The hope here is that if we have this kind of protection, it will attract more qualified practitioners to provide these services.”

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Study finds personality traits may shape the intensity of psychedelic sensory experiences

In a study published June 10 in Drug and Alcohol Review, researchers surveyed 426 psychedelics users in New Zealand to learn how personality traits may influence the intensity of sensory effects (i.e., hallucinations and distortions) experienced during altered states of consciousness.

Researchers at the University of Otago used an online survey to examine the “Big Five” personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness) and 20 sensory effects, such as visual trails, objects ‘breathing’, out‐of‐body experiences, field of vision changes, experiences of other dimensions or worlds, and synesthesia, a type of sensory crossover, such as feeling sounds or tasting colors.

The survey participants were adults who had previously taken DMT, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, Salvia divinorum or synthetic drugs that are structurally similar to mescaline. Participants shared demographic data and information about their drug-use, such as where they used psychedelics. They also rated their association with the Big Five personality traits and responded to true/false questions about the personality trait the researchers call absorption – or how deeply they were immersed in aesthetics and vivid mental imagery during their psychedelic experiences.

The study’s key takeaway is that absorption is associated with increased sensitivity to sensory effects, which, according to the study authors, is consistent with previous research. Absorption was associated with 18 of the 20 sensory effects — and of those associations, four were at least moderate in strength.

The study authors said there were several unexpected findings, including that the personality trait of openness lacked significant associations with heightened sensory effects, which is inconsistent with previous research. The personality trait of conscientiousness was negatively correlated with the intensity of disgusting visual experiences. “Here, it may be that conscientious individuals are more likely to engage in harm reduction behaviors that facilitate a positive psychedelic experience and thus are less likely to experience negative sensory features such as disgusting visuals,” speculated the study authors.

Overall, the study shows evidence of significant associations between personality traits and the intensity of sensory effects of psychedelics, but the study authors said the correlation is likely weak compared to other factors, such as set, setting and dosage. Nevertheless, the authors suggest that personality traits that are relatively easy to measure, particularly absorption, could be incorporated in tools used to predict acute reactions to psychedelics that might help improve therapeutic outcomes.

• Residents of Philomath, Oregon (population 5,838) voted to allow psychedelic mushroom businesses to operate in town by 16 votes. In 2020, Oregon voters passed a ballot measure to establish the nation’s first regulatory framework for the legal manufacturing and therapeutic use of psilocybin. Some municipalities opted out of the program, including residents of Philomath. Now they’re opting back in after a continuation of the ban failed to pass by a tiny margin.

• What will President Trump’s new acting attorney general Todd Blanche mean for psychedelics and marijuana? In the National Law Review, attorney Whitt Steineker, who represents cannabis industry clients, weighed in.

• In a podcast episode with The Jerusalem Post, Anna Harwood-Gross, a researcher at Israel’s Ariel University, spoke about her team’s MDMA trial with Israeli soldiers that was put on hold when the war broke out in 2023. At the time, she questioned the ethics of testing psychedelics on traumatized soldiers during an active conflict, but as PTSD cases surged, she and her team changed their minds and proceeded with the study.

• In The Atlantic, journalist Ross Andersen shares ways that researchers are “looking for ways to engineer better mind-altering therapeutic experiences” with shorter, less intense trips, to remove cardiovascular risks, and to enhance sensory perceptions. Andersen himself wonders whether engineering the “perfect trip” is possible — or could even be measured — considering the diversity of human consciousness.

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But when P. cubensis, or cubensis for short, first entered the canon of Western science with an official name and description, the person who found it would never have imagined that the little brown mushroom he scooped up would one day be a global sensation.

The mushroom was collected and first given a scientific Latin name in Cuba in 1906, the same year the U.S. government began occupying the island following a contested presidential election. The man who found and named it was U.S. citizen Franklin Sumner Earle, who had moved to the island nation two years prior to direct Cuba’s Agronomical Station. Earle’s interest in fungi was the “distinctive feature of his early life,” according to his colleague Carlos E. Chardón, a trailblazing Puerto Rican mycologist. But at the turn of the 20th century, fungi were poorly understood and often studied only when they showed up as a risk to human health or crop yields, so Earle did what any fungi-lover trying to make a living would do: he levied his mycological interest into a job as a plant pathologist. His career included stints working in that capacity for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as well as serving as a biology professor at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, and overseeing the mycological collections at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG).

It was while at NYBG that he received the offer to begin directing the Agronomical Station in Cuba, and though he left his post in New York to begin a new life in Santiago de las Vegas, he maintained a relationship with his old colleagues. Once on the ground in his new home, he continued to send interesting letters and specimens back to the Garden in New York, where his findings were added to the ever-growing herbarium. Among them was a collection of two tawny brown mushrooms that Earle dubbed “Stropharia cubensis.” The genus Stropharia would later be swapped for Psilocybe by the mycologist Rolf Singer, but Earle’s moniker “cubensis” — named for the fact that the specimen was found in Cuba — has stuck ever since.

I found myself wondering if Earle had any idea that this mushroom was special; so special, in fact, that it’s the reason we’re still talking about him a century later. So one sunny day in April, I hopped on the train from Brooklyn and headed toward the Bronx, where Earle’s letters were filed away in the library archives at the New York Botanic Garden.

Thumbing through his hundred-year-old correspondences with colleagues, I came across staffing and interpersonal queries, and evidence of Earle’s salary (in 1904, before he took the position in Cuba, he had been making $1800 a year at the Botanic Garden, equivalent to about $67,352 in 2026 dollars; he wrote later that year asking for a raise to $2500, or the equivalent of about $93,545 today, before accepting the job in Cuba). Once in Cuba, the letters document a shift in his relationship with Cuban authorities — from “my relations with the government continue to be eminently satisfactory” in 1904, shortly after he arrived, to a proclamation that he’d lost a “long drawn out fight” with the Cuban Secretary of Agriculture by 1906. Later that year, he would resign from his post, though he stayed in Cuba and continued to work on agricultural issues.

But nowhere in his letters are there any mentions of cubensis, or any hint that Earle knew what powers it might possess.

Was it possible that these mushrooms were culturally significant, and Earle had missed that significance entirely? He was, after all, a U.S. scientist focused on pathogenic threats to sugar cane. Or was it that Cubans at the turn of the century weren’t seeking altered states of consciousness via these mushrooms? Were they even doing so now? I reached out to some Cuban mycologists to find out.

According to Lázaro Castro Hernández, a Cuban doctoral candidate in ecology in Chile, Earle’s oversight is not surprising, because Cubans themselves didn’t know about the mushroom’s psychedelic properties. Most still don’t. “Although this species is present in Cuba, the majority of the population is unaware of its potential as a psychedelic mushroom,” Hernández told me via email. “Consequently, it is not integrated into Cuban traditions or medicine.”

To Milay Cabarroi Hernández, a Cuban mycologist who worked for more than a decade at the National Botanical Garden of Cuba and at the University of Havana before moving to the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, where she now works, that resonates. “There is no strong evidence of an Indigenous Cuban mushroom tradition,” she noted. Hernández was never exposed to fungi until university, where she fell in love with them on her very first day of class. But when she told friends and family that she intended to study mushrooms, they told her she was “crazy.”

“Cuba is generally considered a mycophobic country,” she explained. “Mushrooms are not widely consumed, nor are they well known among the general population.” In college, she met a few students who experimented some with psychedelics, but most of it stayed underground and infrequently documented due to Cuba’s strict drug laws.

The Cuban government restricts not just the possession and use of psychedelics, but information about them as well. When Hernández was serving as advisor for a student investigating fungi that grow on manure, a category that includes psilocybin-containing mushrooms like P. cubensis, they decided not to publish that research because of what Hernández described as “possible legal implications.” The fear was that the report might make known the growing locations of P. cubensis when the Cuban government considered it a harmful drug. “Research involving psychedelics in Cuba is a complicated subject,” she told me.

If there is current academic interest in P. cubensis within Cuba, I couldn’t find it. When Hernández tried to facilitate interviews for this story with her mycology colleagues still in Cuba, she was told that there would be prohibitively cumbersome paperwork required for any of them if they wanted to give an interview to a foreign journalist, “especially someone from the U.S.” Even if they had been able to get the permissions required, it’s understandable they might have had other priorities: the country is facing blackouts and a deepening humanitarian crisis due to the U.S. government cutting off the oil supply and imposing an ongoing economic blockade.

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So how should we make sense of the world’s most famous “magic” mushroom being named after a country that doesn’t have a deep cultural relationship with it, especially when neighboring countries like Mexico have much longer and more established traditions of psilocybin use?

One part of the answer is, of course, that a species being entered into scientific literature has very little to do with when that species first became known to humans. The people Indigenous to any given landscape have often been using local flora and funga for millennia before a scientist “discovers it,” giving it a Latin binomial name and sticking a specimen in an herbarium. Looking at the long history of use of psilocybin-containing mushrooms in nearby countries like Mexico, it would be tempting to assume that those populations were intimately familiar with P. cubensis even if Cubans weren’t, and that if Earle had happened to be stationed in Oaxaca rather than Santiago, he might have found the same mushroom, recognized its significance to local populations, and named it after Mexico rather than Cuba.

But the truth is that even in places like Oaxaca, Mexico, where P. cubensis is frequently used now, it likely wasn’t a commonly used psychedelic there at the time of Earle’s finding. Alexander Bradshaw, who has been researching psilocybe species as an evolutionary biologist, said that on his visits to Oaxaca, he was told many times that there’s not a strong historical tradition around P. cubensis the way there is with other psychedelic mushrooms. This anecdotal evidence seems to check out: the psychedelic mushrooms from which psilocybin and psilocin were first crystallized, which were brought back from Mexico by Gordon Wasson in the 1950s, when “magic” mushrooms first burst into the U.S. spotlight, were not cubensis, but the species that would come to be known, fittingly, as Psilocybe mexicana.

Bradshaw’s theory is that P. cubensis was first introduced to the Americas (likely via cattle dung, as first proposed by Mexican psilocybe expert Gastón Guzmán), perhaps after originating in Asia. Earle’s finding of the type specimen is likely from this first dispersal. But after that, Bradshaw noted, there’s a bit of a gap in the historical record — cubensis doesn’t really show up in herbarium collections after that for decades, which is odd considering that “if you’re in a cow field and they’re occurring there, they’re extremely obvious,” Bradshaw told me. If they had been widely present, “these things would have been found,” he believes.

And then “all of a sudden, post 1970s, they seemed to be everywhere,” showing up in the fungarium collections of museums all over the world. One example he pointed to is in Fiji, where museum collections specifically note that they had never had samples of P. cubensis before, but they believe the mushroom was brought into the nation by Peace Corps volunteers. Since the Peace Corps only operated in Fiji from 1969 to 1973, that seems to fit Bradshaw’s theory that cubensis’s most significant dispersal came not from cattle or ancient sacred usage in Mesoamerica, but from the much more recent “shroom boom” of the hippie era, propelled by U.S. counterculture types.

“There was definitely at least secondary or even tertiary spread via those populations,” he said. Why cubensis rather than other species of psychedelic mushrooms, like P. mexicana? “I think people latched on to [cubensis] because it was very easy to grow,” he said.

If that’s the case, then perhaps Earle’s lack of recognition that he’d found something special in cubensis at the beginning of the 20th century makes sense: not only was it not used by Cuban populations as a psychedelic, but even nearby people in neighboring countries that did use psychedelics more regularly weren’t using P. cubensis at that point. The mushroom was just biding its time, waiting for its turn in the limelight.

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.

An Amanita mushroom poisoning outbreak in California

A May 28 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes nearly 40 cases of Amanita mushroom poisonings in northern California from November 2025 through March 2026. The poisonings resulted in three liver transplants and four deaths. “This is the largest reported outbreak of mushroom-associated hepatotoxic poisoning in California history and the largest in the United States in several decades,“ the report authors write.

The Amanita genus contains about 600 species of fungi. Some are toxic, with ‘amatoxins’ responsible for about 90% of mushroom poisoning deaths worldwide. Others, including Amanita muscaria, are increasingly being ingested in various forms including in tinctures and gummies. A. muscaria has psychoactive effects that can cause unpleasant trips, and the mushroom’s iconic red cap with white dots is featured in popular media from Super Mario Bros. to Alice in Wonderland. On the other hand, toxic all-white Amanita species A. phalloides and A. ocreata, are responsible for poisonings like those in northern California.

The CDC report authors say distributing educational materials in languages other than English during seasons when toxic mushrooms fruit could make a big difference in preventing poisonings. Patients from the northern California poisoning outbreak spoke Spanish, Ukrainian, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, and Mixteco and Mam Indigenous languages from Latin America. Some reported the mushrooms they consumed resembled edible types in other countries.

While foragers are unlikely to confuse red-capped Amanita muscaria with white, toxic, Amanita phalloides and Amanita ocreata – A. muscaria is rising in popularity.

Whereas psilocybin is a federally controlled substance, muscimol, the psychoactive alkaloid found in Amanita muscaria, is not. A 2025 RAND Corporation survey estimated about 3.5 million U.S. adults used A. muscaria mushrooms in the past year. According to RAND, Amanita muscaria was one of the most popular psychedelics used that year. “Amanita muscaria is not the same as psilocybin-containing mushrooms, and it acts on different receptors in the brain,” emergency physician and columnist Leana Wen told CNN. “Yet mushroom products are often marketed together under broad wellness or psychedelic themes, which can create a lot of confusion.”

A recent case study reported a reversal of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms following a high psilocybin dose

In a buzzy case report published May 27 in Frontiers in Neuroscience, researchers in São Paulo, Brazil describe a woman in her 80s with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. After about 10 years of Alzheimer’s-related decline, she displayed symptoms including urinary incontinence and mostly speaking in single syllable words. After giving the woman a large dose (5 grams) of the Enigma strain of psilocybin-containing Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms, researchers noticed improvements such as the return of urinary continence and spontaneous recounting of personal memories in the days that followed. The patient also began to dress herself and have sustained social interactions. During a second dose of psilocybin mushrooms (3 g), a month after the first, the patient described surfing with her son on a peaceful island, the study reports.

“The findings do not imply disease reversal but suggest that residual functional capacity may persist in late-stage neurodegeneration and may become transiently accessible under specific neuromodulatory conditions,” the authors write. “Causality cannot be established, and spontaneous fluctuations inherent to neurodegenerative disease cannot be completely excluded.” Still, many online were quick to hype the report’s findings. Longevity influencer Bryan Johnson went so far as to call the case “biblical” on X.

Studying psychedelics in dementia cases is not a new idea. An ongoing trial at Johns Hopkins University is testing whether psilocybin improves quality of life and/or depression for those with early Alzheimer’s disease. However, such research comes with questions and debate about informed consent. “This case publication raises several ethical red flags, and violates several of the requirements that make clinical research ethically acceptable,” Dominic Sisti, a medical ethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania told The Microdose on June 9. “What was the purpose and rationale for dosing this particular patient? Was it just out of curiosity that they exposed this woman with dementia to an unknown level of risk?”

The case report describes that after the first psilocybin dose, the Alzheimer’s patient experienced “hyperthermia, profuse sweating, and a prolonged deep sleep-like state.” The case report’s ethics statement says approval for the study wasn’t required because it was conducted in “routine private clinical practice, in accordance with local legislation and institutional requirements.” The authors add that they obtained informed consent from the patient’s legal guardian for publication of the case report. However, there is no clear evidence of consent for the intervention itself, Sisti said.

Johns Hopkins psychiatry and behavioral sciences professor Albert Garcia-Romeu, who has worked with most of the participants in the university’s Alzheimer’s trial, agrees the case raises a number of ethical concerns. He said thus far, his observances of psilocybin’s effects on trial participants with early Alzheimer’s have not shown “any responses of this sort.” He also had methodological concerns about the paper, such as the patient not having brain scans to better understand the Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Also, the case report did not mention whether improvements persisted beyond a few weeks of follow up.

“We risk sensationalizing anecdotal reports and potentially encouraging people who are desperate and suffering to do things that could put their loved ones at serious risk without clear rationale or safety protocols in place,” Garcia-Romeu told The Microdose on June 10. “We currently have no rigorous evidence for clinical benefits of psilocybin or other psychedelics in patients with dementia and need to proceed accordingly until we have more data.”

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Risk of psychedelic-induced mania is low in clinical trials and higher in unsupervised settings

Researchers often exclude participants with diagnoses or family history of bipolar disorders from clinical trials testing psychedelics. The drugs have been documented to induce psychotic and manic symptoms, according to a recent review published in Nature’s Molecular Psychiatry.

“Given the increasing use of psychedelics outside clinical research—often in unregulated, unsupervised, or recreational contexts —better characterization of bipolar-relevant adverse outcomes, particularly treatment-emergent dysphoria/euphoria, mania, and hypomania, is needed,” the study authors write.

In their review, researchers examined over 20 studies that tracked symptoms of mania following psychedelic use – including psilocybin, LSD, DMT, ayahuasca and MDMA. They found rates of dysphoria, euphoria, hypomania, or mania associated with psychedelics varied greatly, depending on study format. For example, rates of such symptoms were about 6% in controlled trials testing psilocybin for depression disorders. Meanwhile, rates could be as high as about 30% in naturalistic studies of people with self-reported bipolar disorder.

The review, led by a research team in Switzerland, concluded that hypomania and mania symptoms following psychedelic use occurred mainly in people with bipolar I, or those who had a genetic predisposition to the disorder. The authors didn’t find evidence of psychedelics inducing bipolar disorder in participants without a previous diagnosis or predisposition. They also described the instances of mania as acute and resolving on their own. “Psychedelic use is associated with a low but clinically relevant risk of manic or hypomanic symptoms in individuals with bipolar vulnerability, particularly in naturalistic or unsupervised settings,” the authors conclude.

Legislative sessions wound down in May, and a final picture of this year’s psychedelic legislation is appearing.

Psychedelic Alpha reports psilocybin measures led state enactments this season, and the success rate of ibogaine-related bills was nearly 25%. Over all, 17 of the 115 psychedelics-related measures tracked by Psychedelic Alpha were signed into law, while around 50 are still pending.

Even in the slow season, some legislative efforts are still marching forward, including a new federal ‘clarification’ act on controlled substances introduced by Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen (D) this week. The ‘Controlled Substances Act (CSA) Clarification in Sciences Act,’ would not re-schedule substances like psilocybin or MDMA, but instead would help define terms like ‘abuse potential’ and ‘currently accepted medical use’ that are part of the criteria used to schedule drugs at the federal level.

“Therapeutic progress depends directly on the ability of physicians and researchers to study substances of interest,” said Cohen in a statement. He said the act’s updates will make sure “the evaluation of controlled substances is made on the best scientific evidence of today, not decades-old processes and outdated knowledge.”

Gina Giorgio with the organization ‘Students for Sensible Drug Policy’ told The Microdose the move is long overdue. “For decades, outdated and imprecise language in the Controlled Substances Act has created unnecessary barriers for researchers, delayed promising therapies, and cost us irreplaceable scientific progress,” Giorgio said.

On the state level, Connecticut’s SB 191 was signed into law on June 4 by Democratic Governor Ned Lamont, expanding access to the state’s psychedelics pilot program. Previously, the pilot program was limited to veterans, retired first responders, and health care workers. In Louisiana, lawmakers sent SB 43 to their governor – the legislation would use opioid-settlement dollars to create a psychedelic-assisted therapy program for trials of psilocybin, ibogaine and MDMA. Michigan lawmakers are debating whether to advance HB 6020, an ibogaine bill that would award grants to researchers within the state conducting drug development trials. New Hampshire’s ibogaine bill HB1772 awaits a final vote. Meanwhile, Colorado’s ibogaine research pilot program HB26-1325 was signed into law on June 4.

• President Trump’s executive order will not only accelerate research on psychedelic treatments for adults – but potentially also for children, Scientific American reports.

• German biotech entrepreneur Christian Angermayer, who founded psychedelics company atai Life Sciences and co-founded Compass Pathways, went on The New York Times podcast “Interesting Times” to discuss humanmaxxing, psychedelics and God.

• This week, Hunter Biden shared his psychedelic use in addiction recovery. In an X post reflecting on recovery, he shared “I have done ibogaine, ayahuasca, ketamine infusion therapy, 5 MEO-DMT, and a few others. All with the intention of “fixing” me, but without doing the work that comes along with realizing that intention. I have seen amazing results in others though and I am completely open to people seeking their own path to recovery,” Biden writes.

• A new collective bargaining agreement between the WNBA and players makes key changes to its banned drug list. For example, the updated agreement moves marijuana off the banned list, while also prohibiting use of ketamine, ibogaine, psilocybin, MDMA and synthetic cannabinoids such as delta-8-THC.

(Editor's note: An earlier version of this post did not make clear that the Amanita mushroom poisonings in northern California from November 2025 through March 2026 described in the CDC report were due to toxic all-white Amanita species A. phalloides and A. ocreata. Not to be confused with red-capped Amanita muscaria. We have updated the post for clarity.)

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After three packed days, my brain is buzzing from everything I’ve seen and heard here in Haarlem, at ICPR, one of Europe’s biggest psychedelics conferences. The program certainly lived up to the promise of being “interdisciplinary.” As I mentioned in my first dispatch, the conference didn’t shy away from difficult topics, while also highlighting psychedelic research from many fields. In practice, however, it’s not always easy to be critical, and at some points I got the sense that Joost Breeksema, the executive director of the OPEN foundation, was right when he determined that the psychedelic field is in its awkward teen years. Here are some takeaways and interesting tidbits I gleaned from a few different talks.

On Friday morning, I went to a symposium called “Negative clinical trials in psychedelic research: Lessons learned and future recommendations”, where three researchers talked about negative findings from studies they had conducted. A negative result means that an expected effect, relationship, or treatment outcome was not found. Scientific conferences usually highlight what went right, and negative findings are often left unpublished, or talked about with shame. As the moderator mentioned, such negative trials contain information about the limits of certain treatments, which populations may not be the best responders, and how clinical trial designs may be clashing with real-world experience. Jurriaan Strous, a Dutch psychiatrist at the University Medical Center Groningen, began the talk with a study on ketamine for suicidality that found no difference between a group given ketamine compared to a group given midazolam, a benzodiazepine. The trial ended early with 54 patients when a safety monitoring board said it would be unethical to continue since it seemed there was no effect at all. Strous pointed out that these were patients who he and his colleagues saw in the midst of crisis, and so the researchers didn’t advertise for the trial. Therefore, these patients may have had less expectations about ketamine. In fact, some had never heard of it. When they tested for blinding, the number of study participants who guessed which group they were in was the same as chance, suggesting that they may have successfully concealed who got which drug, which has proven to be particularly difficult in studies involving psychedelics. Strous showed the audience a graph of how the participants in each group rated on various scales, including the Beck Suicidal Ideation Scale. “You see no difference whatsoever,” he said. He added that he started off as a real believer back in 2014,” but after this study, “I was able to get a more neutral stance towards ketamine.”

Another panelist, psychotherapist Lea Mertens presented on the EPIsoDe study, a randomized clinical trial of psilocybin for Treatment Resistant Depression shared how, because they didn’t meet their primary endpoint of a 50% reduction of a certain depression measurement—the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale—their study was considered a negative finding. But she shared how in their long-term follow up, some participants still showed a reduction in depression. She wondered aloud how clinicians should make sense of that. Compass Pathways’s Phase 3 trials had similar results as the EPIsoDe study, but had a different predetermined end point, and so were considered positive outcomes. Mertens said it might be “a bit too simple to declare a study positive or negative based on one P-value.”

The negative findings panel was very thought-provoking. There has been research from Stanford University’s Boris Heifets and colleagues suggesting a role of expectancy on ketamine outcomes, and so these negative trials—where blinding was seemingly achieved—could help fill out that picture. But in the Q&A, some audience members pushed back, especially on the ketamine trial. One psychologist asked if there might be an anti-anxiety effect of midazolam that masked ketamine’s effects. Strous mentioned this in his talk, but said for suicidality, research on midazolam was scant. He said one explanation might be that suicidal people naturally drifted back to a less depressed baseline.

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Later on Friday morning, I went to “Living with guilt: Interview on stage between Garik Rober and Peter Gasser.” Gasser is a recent president of the Swiss Medical Society for Psycholytic Therapy and Rober is a former doctor and therapist who led an illegal group psychedelic session in which two people died. Rober explained that before leading the group session, he himself took 30 to 40 micrograms of LSD; a dose slightly higher than the typical microdose of 5 to 25 micrograms. He did so because he said he “knew all of the patients and expected tensions between them,” and thought that taking LSD would “open” him up to being better equipped to manage the participants. The group first took methylone, a synthetic drug with stimulant properties, and then MDMA. When Rober left the room to measure out the MDMA powder, he said he had trouble reading the scale and accidentally gave each person 10 times the expected dose. When certain participants started openly responding with agitation and distress, he gave one man diazepam, a drug that can relieve anxiety. A few minutes later, the man turned blue; Rober administered CPR while asking his wife, who was co-leading the session with him, to call emergency responders. The man died, as did another young man in the session. Rober was sent to jail that same day. He was ultimately charged with negligent homicide, and served three years in prison. (Despite his lifetime ban on practicing medicine or therapy, I noticed on his website that Rober still offers “coaching” by donation.)

It was a harrowing story, but if the purpose of the panel was to provide cautionary lessons to other facilitators or therapists, the interview fell short in significant ways. A number of key mistakes in the narrative weren’t addressed: like, why did Rober think that LSD would make him a better leader of a group of impaired and vulnerable people? Does that kind of thinking still exist in psychedelic circles—above or underground? When Rober doubted his MDMA measurements, he considered asking for help from his wife, but ultimately didn’t because they had had a small argument that morning. This could be a warning against spouses or people with personal relationships leading together if they let their personal lives interfere, but that wasn’t commented on either. Also, the question of training wasn’t acknowledged. Rober said he was trained by Samuel Widmer, a controversial therapist who died in 2017 whose permit to use psychedelics for research was banned by the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health. Widmer started the Kirschblütengemeinschaft, or the Cherry Blossom Community. This group of adults and children has been described in European news media and testimony from former members as cult-like, and dangerous—where alleged sexual abuse took place between patients and therapists and within families, and people died of overdoses. Did training with Widmer influence Rober’s decision-making and general attitudes towards guiding others during psychedelic trips?

In the Q&A, one person asked a good question about how therapists working with psychedelics often use psychedelics themselves. The audience member asked Rober if his own drug use led him to “erroneous ideas” and “narcissism?” Rober acknowledged that his psychedelic use supported his views at the time. “What can you learn out of my case?” he said. “How important, how necessary is supervision, intervention, being in contact with colleagues, and being honest with whatever happened.” But Gasser said, “I think we have to differentiate between taking psychedelics while being in the treatment of patients or taking it outside in a special setting for your training and self exploration. I mean, here it was clear LSD does not help managing any tools,” meaning the scale. The audience laughed. The question asker raised their voice to add, “They both have risks!”

The next day, on Saturday, I sat in on a talk called “A decade of clinical Insights: real-world evidence from European ketamine clinics.” Four experts shared their experience opening clinics that offer ketamine-assisted therapy in the Czech Republic, Germany, Norway and The Netherlands. It seems like a big undertaking to open a clinic, but my takeaway from this panel was how wildly different ketamine clinics (though likely not all of them) could be in Europe compared to the United States. Off-label ketamine clinics in the United States have faced their fair share of criticism; the industry was called in one paper the “wild west.” Clinics rarely take any form of insurance, and people might receive ketamine infusions without psychotherapy, with same-day appointments, or even get intravenous ketamine injections mailed to their home. This is radically divergent from what I heard from the European panelists who all described how ketamine was embedded in rigorous therapy programs that in some cases also involved art therapy, music, and even kayaking. “I can’t imagine giving ketamine to people… to just leave people in a room,” said Rutger Engels, a professor in Developmental Psychopathology, at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and co-founder of a clinic called Senz in the Netherlands. I admit that my American brain kept thinking, This sounds expensive! But then, each expert also described how most or all of their clinics were covered by insurance, and often with state-funded healthcare. In Norway, for example, at the Axon clinic, they use an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy-based approach in combination with generic ketamine, for which the country has approved nationwide reimbursement for treatment-resistant depression. Each panelist also shared how they discern who is the best fit for ketamine-assisted therapy —it’s not a given that any person will be administered the drug.

Later on Saturday afternoon, I went to a talk called “Patient perspectives and experiences of a novel psychedelic treatment for postpartum depression.” The talk covered findings from an interesting survey of women who participated in a postpartum depression study funded by the company Reunion, using RE104, a novel compound similar to psilocybin but with a shorter trip duration. University of South Florida epidemiologist Amanda Elmore was not involved in the original study but interviewed seven participants from one trial site about what it was like. All the people she talked to who got the active higher dose experienced remission in their depression, and said they felt more present with their babies after, and that their confidence as mothers was boosted. Getting insights from participants is invaluable. For example, the women did not bring up concerns around having to stop breastfeeding during the study, though they did express wishing for more counseling and support after the trial. One woman complained about only meeting with her counselor once. In the active group some people had positive drug experiences, while others were distressed: “My brain was just splitting open… I was so angry during it…very chaotic… not a moment of it was pleasant.” Yet both kinds of experiences still could lead to good outcomes. One person in the low-dose placebo group also had similar remission levels in depression scores. But for another woman who was aware that she was in the low dose group, the trial didn’t seem to manage her disappointment well. She told Elmore, “I’m back at square one… if I didn’t have the treatment then it’s like well what now? Where do I go? What do I do?”

Looking to the future psychedelic applications, in a talk called “Can psychedelics ever be given in the clinical setting to someone who does not have capacity to give consent?” Caroline Hayes, a psychiatrist based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK spoke about a 2025 case report in which a woman in a minimally conscious state was given a dose of psilocybin. “This made me feel a little bit uncomfortable,” she said. I thought about Jonathan Moens excellent National Geographic piece on this topic about a husband who grappled with giving his minimally conscious and vegetative wife psilocybin. Hayes’s main message, bolstered by the legal concepts of capacity and consent in the UK, is that the research wasn’t far enough along to justify giving minimally conscious patients psychedelics. A person wouldn’t be able to receive preparation before their experience, or integration after—which are known to be helpful. And their experiences may be quite different than we are able to grasp. In a recent case report, a woman with a significant brain injury woke up from a 20-day coma and reported that she had had a traumatic near death experience without any drugs at all; this shows it’s possible to have a challenging experience, even in different brain states. “Patients with disorders of consciousness have no way of communicating that the experience that they’re having is challenging,” she said. During the Q&A session, Hayes said her views also extended to dementia cases, in spite of anecdotal cases where people with dementia gain some function for a short time after taking psychedelics. A person commented that in the Netherlands, patients could give prior consent to euthanasia, and asked whether such consent could apply in these cases too. Again, Hayes was wary. “Your opinion might change, you know, the version of you that signed that form isn’t the version of you that is experiencing that later stage.”

Throughout the entire conference, there was some good psychedelic fun to be had as well. Some of my favorite moments included cognitive scientist Christof Koch’s face projected on the overhead screen while calling in virtually, looming over the other panelists in the consciousness debate, demanding of neuroscientist Anil Seth: “Have you ever had the experience of becoming ‘one’?” Or University of Fribourg philosopher, Jason Day, breaking down the psychedelic experience into phenomenological categories that included, “What the f*ckness.” Drug historian and sociologist Ido Hartogsohn gave a spirited talk on non-hallucinogenic compounds, comparing them to diet soda that force us to define the value of a psychedelic experience.

A tradition of the closing session is that a random group of speakers is brought onto the stage with little notice and asked to reflect on the conference. Adana Omagua Kambeba, an Indigenous Brazilian medical doctor shared that at ICPR two years ago, there was only one Indigenous representative from Brazil (there were three in total), and this year only five. “The vast majority are scientists, researchers, and people connected to pharmaceuticals, but where are the guardians of these medicines that here are called psychedelics?”

Her comments led to applause, and then the other chosen panelists shared more groups they felt were underrepresented. Grace Blest-Hopley wanted the focus on women’s health to continue, while sociologist Joanna Kempner mentioned the cluster headache community—which is sometimes ostracized because they don’t necessarily prioritize the psychedelic experience in and of itself, but are seeking relief from debilitating pain. Psychedelic Alpha’s Josh Hardman said that as medical psychedelics become more available, the need to have patient representation will increase.

There have been similar calls for more inclusivity at many psychedelic conferences, for Indigenous representation, but also other groups: a greater diversity of socioeconomic classes, people of color, or those with serious mental illnesses that are often excluded from studies. I reflected on something that anthropologist Manvir Singh said in the closing panel about how the psychedelics community is now crystallizing into a proper field. There’s much to gain from that—unified questions and definitions—but things can be lost when an interdisciplinary project becomes a “field.” It risks becoming self-referential, and the questions asked become informed by only other people in the group. “How can psychedelics continue to benefit from interdisciplinarity and new ideas flowing in, while not being subject to the limitations that come as a field develops, which can close it off from other conversations?” Singh asked.

A part of the urgency around inclusion may be a response to what Singh is talking about: that the “psychedelic field” is being defined in real time, before our eyes. There’s fear that the gates will be closed, and only the people inside its borders will be able to participate and contribute. I still think that Breeksema was onto something with his metaphor around development—psychedelics are growing up. I welcome that maturity whole-heartedly, but maybe in some instances, the community should be careful about growing up too fast.

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This Friday, I’m reporting to you from ICPR, the Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research, one of Europe’s biggest psychedelics conferences. It takes place in Haarlem, located just 20-minutes on the train from Amsterdam. Haarlem is the oldest city in North Holland; it’s home to the first museum in The Netherlands—a fabulous mix of fossils, scientific instruments, and Dutch art—plus all the canals, cobbled narrow streets, and gabled houses you could want when visiting this part of the world.

This is the 7th ICPR put on by The OPEN Foundation, a nonprofit that was founded in 2007 to advance psychedelic research and therapy. For the past three iterations, ICPR has been held at the Philharmonie Haarlem, the city’s concert venue. With its brick and wooden interiors, the conference setting feels warmer than those held at a convention center or a university. It also adds to its distinctly European flair. I’m attending ICPR this year in part to suss out how the European psychedelic sphere and European researchers view what is transpiring in the field in the U.S. Before I’d even begun talking to people, I could tell the vibe was different; more dress shirts and slacks and fewer of the giant Amanita muscaria hats and other psychedelia attire that you’d find at MAPS’s Psychedelic Science conferences.

This morning, I reflected on what it’s been like to regularly go to psychedelic conferences in the U.S. over the last seven years, as I have. Initially, some felt so intimate it was like I was intruding on small communities of people who all knew each other. A hype-y period followed, where newcomers from biotechnology, the pharmaceutical industry, and longevity space flooded in, attendance swelled, expectations crested, then fell—and ultimately became confused in the midst of political and regulatory back-and-forth.

“At the risk of generalizing, I think that Europe has approached this field with a certain moderate temperament,” Joost Breeksema, the executive director of the OPEN foundation, said at the opening talk. He acknowledged that this might feel frustrating compared to the spurts of activity taking place in the U.S. But consider how “so much of the discourse is driven by financial pressure, political volatility, opportunism, pharmaceutical companies, deep pockets, celebrities, influencers, tech bros looking for immortality,” Breeksema added. “Our sober outlook looks a little bit more like a sign of maturity.”

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Honestly, it is a relief to put the U.S. out of my mind for a few days, even if it’s a case of “the grass is always greener.” President Donald Trump’s executive order on April 18 caused a flurry of debate around whether psychedelics belong to the right or left, if the U.S. is moving too fast or too slow, while reigniting evergreen questions about cost, commercialization, and tensions between regulatory change and medicalization. The executive order “hardly plays a role here,” Breeksema told me. Attending ICPR is a reminder of the European—and global—psychedelic community that is managing its own steady growth and evolution. And they too seem to be grappling with how to make sense of the forward motion of the last several years.

Breeksema offered a metaphor for this sense-making, different from the concept of a “Renaissance” or the hype boom-bust cycle. He compared it to the developmental stages of becoming an adult. “In some ways, I think we’re somewhere in the middle of adolescence,” he said. “The field is growing fast, faster than many of us anticipated, or were even ready for. We are still trying to figure out what kind of adults we will grow to be, what we stand for, what we owe to the people and traditions that were here before us.” And part of embracing maturity is confronting the awkward parts of getting older.

ICPR’s program is wide-ranging, and it doesn’t have a theme. It’s focused more on the humanities than read-outs of clinical trial results. It almost exhaustively considers the experience of different demographic groups and under-addressed experiences. There’s a pervasive critical slant; for example, there are panels on negative results, erotic feelings that emerge in therapy, and the lived experience of psilocybin non-responders.

At the last ICPR I went to, in 2022, I remember the conference also dealing with complex topics. It’s where, for instance, I talked at length to researchers about issues with the limitations of placebo two years before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration listed those reasons in their rejection of MDMA for PTSD. That same year, Johns Hopkins researcher David Yaden created the Wet Blanket award, an honor given to the most “negative” presentation, to encourage psychedelic researchers to share difficult aspects of their work. In 2024, the award was given to Jamila Hokanson from Yale University for presenting on cases where OCD patients did not respond to psychedelic therapy.

I’m glad to see this ethos still stands—one that takes psychedelics’ potential as a given, and then gets into what emerges after that presumption. In the first talk I saw, a keynote by the neuroscientist Grace Blest-Hopley, whose PhD focused on how cannabinoids affect the brain. She asked why women’s health and biology hasn’t been more of a priority. Even though sex as a biological variable was introduced by the FDA in 2016, very few studies monitor sex-based differences that could emerge based on where a woman is in her menstrual cycle, or what else is going on for her hormonally—let alone the other social and psychological factors that could be unique to women. Estrogen and progesterone fluctuate throughout a woman’s cycle, interacting with the brain and serotonin receptors in meaningful ways, even before you add a psychedelic into the mix. Her non-profit, Hystelica, will be doing research in collaboration with King’s College London on psychedelics and menopause.

Continuing on the motif of narrowing in on specific groups, I heard intriguing presentations on two small research projects, one that revealed psychedelic use among Orthodox Jews, the other among Muslim women. It was fascinating to hear how the Jewish men made psychedelics “kosher,” by making changes to ceremonies that aligned with their views. In some cases, they had encounters with Jewish entities, whereas a Muslim woman interviewed, said she found her connection to the Quran deepened.

There is a very strong therapy theme I’ve picked up on here, which struck me as notable given the trend in the U.S. among companies looking to bring psychedelic drugs to market is to move away from psychotherapy and towards the more nebulous “psychological support.” I heard Dutch psychotherapist Guy Simon speak about cases when therapy doesn’t help those with extended difficulties after taking psychedelics. An interesting talk from Dutch psychiatrist Damiaan Denys asked whether psychedelics should affirm, without question, or move beyond the diagnostic categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, published by the American Psychiatric Association. And I spotted panels on a Foucauldian analysis of “losing your mind,” how Jungian therapy might shape psychedelic therapy, and culturally adapting therapy for Indian and Rwandan patients. Breeksema told me that the program is largely driven by what would-be presenters submit; it’s like a snapshot of what researchers are thinking about at the moment. But he has a penchant for big-picture perspectives that drive the curation.

For the rest of Friday and into the weekend, I am looking forward to a symposium on Asian psychedelia, which is something I’ve long been curious about—how cultural norms might interact with psychedelics. In anthropologist David Dupuis’ talk on Ayahuasca-induced voices, he’ll explore why auditory hallucinations are less considered than visual ones. And there’s a very striking interview that will take place with Garik Rober, a German physician and psychotherapist. In 2009, Rober led an illegal psychedelic group therapy, and two people died. He was sentenced to four years in prison for negligent homicide plus a lifetime ban on being a therapist. “Our conditions for giving this a stage were that we would neither try to absolve him or justify him, or neither try to condemn him,” Breeksema said. “Instead, honestly, exploring what could lead to such a situation, what we can learn from it, how we can prevent it from happening in other such situations.”

Finally, three big names in consciousness research—Bernardo Kastrup, Anil Seth, and Christof Koch—will debate whether psychedelics teach us anything about the nature of consciousness or reality. I love when experts in other fields highly related to psychedelics (like consciousness or neuroscience) come to psychedelic conferences and share their wisdom.

The array of perspectives, in some ways, is overwhelming. The conference is trying to acknowledge ethical breaches and the ongoing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, as well as give voices to clinical trial patients, honor Indigenous lineages, shine light on women’s health, nod to the recreational psychonaut, and make space for various religious belief systems all at once. It’s a staunch reminder that psychedelics mean very different things to different people—and we should try to contend with all of them. How do I feel about the ability to do so? As I overheard one attendee say to another over coffee in the main lobby: “neither too optimistic nor too pessimistic.”

I’ll be back on Monday to give you a recap of what else I found at the conference!

When Gwyneth Paltrow wanted to go on a psychedelic mushroom retreat for her Netflix show, she went to Jamaica. As a country where psilocybin-containing mushrooms have always been legal and where dosing limits don’t exist, the island nation has found itself playing host to a growing crop of psychedelic retreat centers that cater to wealthy foreigners. At MycoMeditations, the center Paltrow visited, retreat prices are listed as ranging from $6,250 to $13,600, with another tier for private retreats that are “price upon request.” Meanwhile, the gross income per capita in Jamaica is around $10,000 per year.

For Maria Pinto, a Jamaican American author and mycophile who lives in the Boston area, this leads to complicated feelings. On the one hand, these retreat centers can feel to her like “neocolonial endeavors” where (usually white) foreigners come in to “extract the ‘natural resource’” of Jamaica’s permissive drug laws. On the other, she’s a person who has found psilocybin to be a medicine in her own life — often from mushrooms she’s found for free while out foraging. That first hand experience makes Pinto interested in the ways that these retreat centers spread the potential benefits of psychedelics in Jamaica by training local therapists and enabling psychedelic research.

Pinto digs into this dynamic in her recent book Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless, a meditation on all things fungi that brings together personal essay, scientific musings and cultural criticism. The Microdose spoke with Pinto, a respected figure in East Coast mycology circles, about retreats for the rich, her experiments with lesser-known psychedelic mushrooms, and the relationship between psychonauts and the broader mycological community.

In the book you write about a new wave of psychedelic retreat centers in Jamaica, and wrestle with the tensions they represent. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Because of Jamaica’s permissive laws around psychedelics and the fact that psilocybin has never been illegal there, I knew that as soon as public will and money were behind them, there were folks who were going to go to Jamaica to do something like this. As someone who loves the fact that society is talking more about psilocybin and all of the wonderful benefits of it as a medicine, I have a very complicated relationship to seeing these centers become luxury getaways for rich folks. Because it’s the very same thing that the tourism industry does: it parcels out land, making it inaccessible for Jamaicans themselves. People are coming from elsewhere to profit. It feels very much like the same frontiersperson attitude of, ‘They’re not doing anything with it. We might as well go down and make a mint off this thing.’

In my interview with Justin, [the founder of] MycoMeditations, in the book, I did want to get him to own up to what I see as the same old VC thing — which is something like, ‘We see a way to make a lot of money, and now I’m going to spend however long it takes to make a profit out of this place.’

But it’s a complicated relationship, because there are aspects of what he’s doing that I love. I love that they’re taking some of this capital, and they’re training therapists on the island who are interested, which is very thrilling. Who knows how long it would have taken for that kind of relationship to emerge without centers like these? And they’re at the forefront of a lot of the studies, because they are doing this all unencumbered by the law. So there are benefits too.

I have complicated feelings about it. But at the heart, I’m like, ‘How is the average Jamaican gonna get a piece of this pie?’ That answer remains unclear.

What would it look like to build non-extractive and equitable access to the benefits of psychedelics in Jamaica and beyond?

Having several different kinds of models is key. I talk a little bit in the book about non-medicalized spaces that have started to emerge in the past few years that are run by Jamaicans. You pay something like $200 to basically get your set and setting taken care of, and these people who have worked in hospitality industries in Jamaica facilitate your experience. I’m interested in seeing more stuff at that level emerge, because it’s a lot more accessible.

We know how it played out here in the States with legalization around marijuana, and that’s what I don’t want to see. The cottage industries that had been around for a long time felt the hurt. [For psilocybin], there has to be something between the big guys charging thousands and thousands of dollars, and just finding someone on the beach who doesn’t even know how to tell you about dosage. There has to be a middle tier. And I fear that that won’t happen, because we’ve seen how often the big guy stamps out the little guy.

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Psychedelics are just one facet of your interest in mushrooms. Did an interest in mycology lead you into an interest in psychedelics, or was it the other way around?

So many people I know became serious mycologists because they were looking for psilocybin-containing mushrooms. But I got into foraging and the culinary aspects of mushrooms well before I considered looking for my own medicine or anything as lofty as that. I had a psychedelic experience with psilocybin back in college, but it was not at the fore of my mind when I first started foraging for mushrooms. It became extremely interesting when I realized that you could find Psilocybe ovoideocystidiata around the Boston area. I did start looking for those once I realized that their range was this far north.

Now, though, people in my life that I never even would have imagined have gotten interested in microdosing for the therapeutic aspects, to help with OCD or depression symptoms, or to be less anxious about being a new mother. It’s been quite moving to be able to point people in the direction of certain research, and say, ‘Yeah, I know a little bit about this thing that everyone’s buzzing about.’

As someone who attends lots of mycology conferences and forays, do you ever witness tension between the psychonauts and the more ecology or biology-focused fungi lovers?

Yes. It’s palpable to me, especially when you have people who are a little bit more serious and staid in their study of mushrooms, who maybe feel that there’s a tendency to make into a party this pursuit that they deem noble. Because when you tell people that you study mushrooms, the first question is generally going to be, ‘Oh, you mean the fun ones, the magic ones?’ To sort of militate against that within the community is probably just seen, for some, as self preservation.

But there’s a scientistic dislike I’ve seen of anything to do with the Spirit, and anything to do with the intangibles of this stuff that we’re studying. There can be a desire to distance yourself from the thing that looks unserious. I’ve definitely seen people scoff when there’s certain programming at one of these convergences, especially if it feels like it’s too touchy feely. On the other end, I’ve seen people being like, ‘Wow, you all are joyless grinds.’

Even within communities of people who are very much into psilocybin, there can be a divide between folks who want to be objective about it and want to speak only in terms of the usefulness of psilocybin as a drug, versus people who use terms like ‘entheogen,’ and who feel that they are communing with God. It’s easy for them to misunderstand one another or talk past each other if they feel like the other group is misrepresenting or somehow ruining the image of the mycological community.

In the chapter of your book focused on your own psychedelic experiences, you chose to focus on Gymnopilus species, aka Laughing Jims — a genus of over 200 fungi with fourteen psilocybin-containing species, which you describe as “complicated and misunderstood even by those who study fungi.” Why concentrate there rather than on one of the better-known psychedelic mushrooms?

Because these are mushrooms that grow in my neck of the woods that I was learning about in real time. There’s something so cool about going to my home woods, seeing a new spot where gyms are emerging, and harvesting them. And that came just from my noticing, from me being out in the places that I go. People have related to the land in this way for millennia. I feel like it’s this wonderful reconnection to be able to say, ‘I found the thing that helps me with my ADHD on the ground. It was free.’

One of the main ways that I became comfortable with taking them was through a poisons expert who lives in Rhode Island named Spike Mikulski. He’s a chef, but also the Amanita guy — he’s the one that people are calling for toxicology cases, so he knows the emerging science. I was watching him like a hawk, because he would make Gymnopilus lemon bars. When people were like, ‘I found this huge cluster of gyms, but they’re too bitter to eat,’ he was always raising his hand, saying ‘Shoot them my way.’ I watched that with great interest.

I saw all the oldheads on the internet talking about taking gyms at the conferences to get through boring, dry lectures. There was an openness that they had in talking about it that didn’t quite square with how people seem to feel about [them]. You know, people who say stuff like ‘Those aren’t worth it; they’re too bitter to have in enough quantity to actually experience anything.’

One of the reasons I wanted to write about them was because I didn’t see anyone else talking about them, except people within the mycological community. We don’t know as much about gyms as we do about the traditional Psilocybe species. I wanted to be very clear that I was not telling anyone that they should experiment with them, and I was obsessively looking for papers to see what other chemicals that could hurt you might be present as well.

But I also wanted to be clear that some of these mushrooms are extremely potent. I was seeing visuals sometimes, and I had never seen that reported anywhere else. It felt exciting to be talking about something that no one else was talking about, and to watch as this little-known vessel for psilocybin was used by people who knew more about it than me.

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

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Veterans Affairs announces new MDMA clinical trial

In the Department of Veterans Affairs’s latest push to research the potential for psychedelic treatments to help American veterans nationwide, the department announced a new MDMA clinical trial on Tuesday. Study leaders are enrolling approximately 80 veterans to test MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol use disorder. Some participants will receive 180 mg of MDMA in each of the three sessions, while others will get an “active placebo” (a 40 mg dose of MDMA). Patients in both treatment conditions will receive psychotherapy, and they will be recruited from VA health systems in Rhode Island and Connecticut, where study leaders are employed.

The department is currently participating in 19 other psychedelic therapy clinical trials, according to the notice announcing the latest trial. All VA research in this field is taking a “strict” approach to safety, leadership said. Of note, the MDMA trial has a long list of exclusion criteria for would-be study participants, including if they’re likely to be re-exposed to trauma during the trial period or don’t have a “support person” at home, presumably to avoid recruiting patients who may be at higher risk of adverse events.

In a recent hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, VA Secretary Doug Collins noted that ibogaine will likely be the next psychedelic the department focuses on, following President Trump’s executive order last month, which specifically called for more research on ibogaine. In the hearing, Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) asked how the VA is approaching psychedelic-assisted therapies. “If it helps a veteran, we’re gonna look into it,” Collins replied. “We’re developing the standards right now, on how we’re going to be implementing this.” He mentioned the MDMA trial, and said ibogaine will probably be the department’s “next big one.” “It’s gonna take a little time to get that because … that’s gotta come through the FDA first.” Importantly, officials will also need to source the ibogaine, he said, “which we don’t have a costing on at this point.” Indeed, sourcing the drug for studies is “the single most important issue facing the ibogaine lobby,” journalist Jack Gorsline wrote on X.

Senator Gallego, championing the VA “Novel Therapeutics Preparedness Act,” went on to encourage Collins to “work with Congress” to close the gap between research and access to the treatments. The Novel Therapeutics Preparedness Act, introduced in late March, would establish a new office within the VA to make “implementation-readiness plans” and prepare the department to approach psychedelic treatments safely. VA leadership has voiced skepticism about the new office being duplicative of their current systems, potentially making the VA’s efforts less efficient.

Psilocybin’s antidepressant results are both rapid and long-lasting, small trial shows.

A single dose of psilocybin has a rapid and months-long antidepressant effect on people with major depressive disorder, compared to an active placebo. That’s according to results from a small clinical trial out of Sweden. The Phase 2 randomized trial found that over half of the psilocybin group was considered “in remission” six weeks after a single psilocybin dose, compared to only one of the patients in the placebo group.

The study, published in JAMA Network Open, recruited 35 participants that received either a 25 mg dose of psilocybin or a 100 mg dose of niacin, a B vitamin used as an “active” placebo because it produces skin flushing. All participants underwent five psychotherapy sessions over 17 days. Those who received psilocybin displayed a significantly greater reduction in depression scores, as measured by the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale, eight days after dosing. Participants’ self-rated depression symptoms showed improvement even sooner.

“Such rapid effects are comparable only to those of ketamine and possibly electroconvulsive therapy and faster than other MDD treatments, including SSRIs, cognitive behavioral therapy, and repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation,” the authors write.

The antidepressant effect persisted for over three months. However, it didn’t last up to a year, suggesting that repeat treatments might be needed, lead author Hampus Yngwe said in a press release. “This needs to be investigated in larger studies,” he added.

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Psychedelic trips leave traces in speech through vocal “jitter” and “shimmer”

Scientists recently analyzed speech patterns in participants who attended a psychedelic 5-MeO-DMT retreat. 5-MeO-DMT, which can be made in a lab and is also found in secretions from the Sonoran Desert toad, produces brief, intense psychedelic experiences. By analyzing retreat attendees’ language and vocal dynamics before and after their trips, researchers at the University College London reasoned that they may be able to predict users’ subjective experiences and even psychological outcomes.

“Language may serve as a valuable proxy for understanding and predicting mental health,” the authors write. “Vocal features,” measured by sound quality, frequency, and amplitude, they added, could also reflect changes in people’s mental states. The article, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology on May 23, reported that participants’ speech markers indeed predicted “psychological transformation” from the 5-MeO-DMT retreat.

The researchers analyzed voice notes recorded by 29 participants for two weeks before and after their 5-MeO-DMT trip at the Tandava Retreat Centre in Mexico. The researchers used acoustic analyses to find increased “jitter” (variability in fundamental frequency of voice) and “shimmer” (irregular variation in loudness) in participants’ voice quality after the trip. Higher jitter and shimmer have been linked to anxiety but in this case “may reflect a temporary turbulent or liminal state,” the authors write. “Taken together, these findings underscore that elevated jitter and shimmer might not necessarily indicate clinical distress but rather a transient window of malleability and openness following a profound psychedelic event,” they add.

Overall, the researchers suggest that linguistic and vocal markers may serve as prediction tools for therapeutic response.

Scientists pair intravenous ketamine with drug targeting opioid receptors to enhance antidepressant effects

In the latest attempt by researchers to pair ketamine with other drugs to better harness antidepressant properties, Stanford scientists conducted a Phase 3 clinical trial testing if the medication buprenorphine could prolong ketamine’s transient effects.

Buprenorphine is frequently used to treat opioid use disorder, and it’s known as a partial agonist of the brain’s opioid receptors, meaning it can stabilize their activation. Scientists believe opioid receptors play a role in ketamine’s antidepressant action, and many are testing drug pairings to enhance ketamine’s effects and produce symptom relief while mitigating side effects.

The Stanford researchers published the results of their trial in the American Journal of Psychiatry last week. They recruited 45 participants with major depressive disorder, randomized to receive either buprenorphine or a placebo for four weeks following a single infusion of ketamine. Participants’ score on the Scale for Suicide Ideation was assessed every week from day one through day 31.

Those in the buprenorphine group had a greater reduction in suicidal ideation scores. Thus, the trial provides the first evidence that buprenorphine “sustains and enhances” the antisuicidal properties of ketamine for patients with major depression, the authors wrote. “We have a sequence of treatments that’s doable now if the field wants to adopt it,” senior author Alan Schatzberg said in a Stanford Medicine article about the study.

More states join the ibogaine push and Connecticut expands psychedelic access while Georgia ups regulation

Michigan lawmakers recently introduced an ibogaine bill that would award grants to researchers within the state conducting drug development trials. The legislation, HB 6020, would also require the state’s participation in a multi-state consortium working towards Food and Drug Administration approval and breakthrough therapy designation for ibogaine treatments. In an announcement from the bill’s sponsors, psychedelic researcher Kevin Boehnke from the University of Michigan Medical School said that while ibogaine holds promise for treating conditions like substance use disorders, “rigorous, thoughtful studies are essential to determine who may benefit, how to reduce risks, and how to build treatment models that are safe, ethical, and grounded in evidence.”

In other ibogaine news, Tennessee’s SB 2149 was recently signed into law by Governor Bill Lee, a Republican. It creates a state fund for “mental health innovation” using money from intellectual property and commercial rights that may come from ibogaine trials, along with public dollars.

In Connecticut, legislation to expand access to the state’s psychedelics pilot program has passed and was sent to the Governor on May 26. 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.

And in Georgia, a revived HB 717 was signed into law by Republican Governor Brian P. Kemp this month. The legislation aims to regulate psychedelic-assisted therapy in the state by directing a medical board to create rules by the end of the year “to establish consistent standards, ensure continuing competency, and promote patient safety.”

• For The Atlantic, our very own Shayla Love sat down with Americans for Ibogaine co-founder W. Bryan Hubbard to learn how he rallied Republicans behind ibogaine.

• And our newest writer Robin Berghaus did a Q&A for Nature with cognitive scientist Félix Schoeller, covering his development of an artificial intelligence chatbot that could train facilitators for psychedelic-assisted therapy. His team used thousands of anonymised recordings from the Fireside Project’s psychedelic support phone line to build the AI platform, “Lucy,” with the goal of helping train facilitators using realistic scenarios.

• ABC profiled a manufacturing hub in Brisbane, Australia, that produces MDMA and psilocybin for clinics across the country. This follows Australia’s 2023 approval for authorized psychiatrists to prescribe the drugs.

• “Friends” star Matthew Perry’s assistant, who injected the actor with the ketamine that killed him, was sentenced to more than three years in prison on Wednesday, according to The New York Times.

  

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Researchers ask probing questions about methylone study

In February, the New York-based psychedelic company Transcend Therapeutics published promising results from a Phase 2 study on methylone, which is similar to MDMA, for the treatment of PTSD. Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration chose the company for a coveted priority voucher to expedite review of their drug for potential approval. But this week three researchers wrote a probing commentary in JAMA Psychiatry, where the initial research was published, suggesting that the company provide more transparency about its trial methodology and data.

Transcend’s initial Phase 2 study was a double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial in which 65 people with PTSD were treated either with weekly doses of Transcend’s drug candidate, TSND-201 or methylone, or a placebo for four weeks. They found that participants treated with methylone showed greater improvement than the placebo group on standard scales measuring depression and PTSD symptoms, and that the adverse effects reported by participants were generally mild.

In their commentary about Transcend’s initial publication from the study, the authors — Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Veterans Affairs psychedelic researcher Rachel Yehuda, and Stony Brook University researchers Geoffrey Russell and Apurva Parikh — ask for data that they say could “refine mechanistic understanding and inform the design of subsequent trials.” Though these questions apply to Transcend’s data specifically, they touch on broader questions that psychedelic science is grappling with, especially in light of recent efforts to fast-track psychedelic drugs. Since Transcend’s original study was published, the company received one of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s priority vouchers for methylone. An executive order signed by President Trump in mid-April sought to accelerate access to psychedelics, and it included an order for the FDA to issue priority vouchers to psychedelics companies that would expedite the FDA’s review of their drug candidates submitted for approval. (Later that week, then-FDA commissioner Marty Makary announced three developers — Transcend, Usona, and Compass — will receive those vouchers.)

Parikh, Russell, and Yehuda suggest Transcend needs to collect data that quantifies the psychological support received by Transcend’s clinical trial participants. (Other companies, such as Compass, another priority voucher recipient, have begun describing the oversight that facilitators have over participants as “psychological support,” in contrast to psychotherapy.) The commentary’s authors also recommend probing whether aspects of that support were associated with the study’s outcomes, and examining whether participants’ ability to guess which condition they were in — 70% of participants who received methylone correctly guessed which condition they were in, whereas 53% of participants in the placebo group guessed correctly — was associated with outcomes. Additionally, they ask whether Transcend would consider reporting a more rigorous analysis of their results, and for the company’s researchers to further articulate their theory of how TSND-201 might lead to sustained improvement in participants.

According to a note accompanying the article, “this letter was shown to the corresponding author of the original article, who declined to reply on behalf of the authors.”

The complications of psychedelics access under the Right To Try Act

President Trump’s April executive order on psychedelics included a clarification on the use of psychedelics as part of the FDA’s Right To Try policies, which allow people with terminal and life-threatening conditions to try experimental drugs that have undergone Phase 1 trials and are being considered as an investigational new drug by the agency but have not yet been approved. The executive order specifically directs the FDA and Drug Enforcement Administration to “facilitate and establish a pathway for eligible patients to access psychedelic drugs” under Right To Try.

Since 2021, Seattle-based physician Sunil Aggarwal and his lawyers have sought clarification from the federal government on accessing psilocybin for terminally ill patients via the Right To Try Act. They reached out to the Department of Justice after Trump’s executive order on psychedelics was signed on April 18, asking about next steps given the development, and were told that the authorities were “analyzing the relevant evidence and consideration,” with no estimated time for completion. In a reply sent this week by Aggarwal’s lawyer Shane Pennington, he points out that the FDA has “already twice granted Breakthrough Status” to psilocybin as an investigational drug, arguing that analysis of the evidence “has already occurred.” The delay signals the disconnect between the declarative act of a president signing an executive order and the reality of enforcing the order, which requires action and coordination among large government agencies.

Moreover, as attorney Kimberly Chew points out in a recent Law360 piece, the executive order’s Right To Try clarification might also include some new legal issues for psychedelic drug companies — especially for any ibogaine drug developer, given the administration’s recent decision to designate DemeRx’s noribogaine as an investigational new drug. “On the surface, this looks like accelerated progress,” Chew wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Underneath, it creates a regulatory collision that every ibogaine sponsor, clinical trial lawyer, and regulatory affairs professional needs to understand right now.” Noribogaine’s investigational new drug status means that technically, patients could access ibogaine under Right To Try — and, as Chew explains, those Right To Try patients could experience adverse events that drug sponsors are required to report as part of any drug application, even if the sponsor did not administer it. Physicians providing psychedelics to Right To Try patients are not required to follow any particular protocols to monitor patients for safety. “That is the control paradox: full regulatory responsibility for settings you cannot govern,” Chew wrote on LinkedIn, and went on to say in her Law360 piece that Right To Try access “could generate the adverse event data that derails development programs.”

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Maine ayahuasca church sues federal government

On Tuesday, an ayahuasca church in Maine called Pachamama Sanctuary and its leader Derek Januszewski sued several U.S. cabinet leaders in Maine’s U.S. District Court, alleging that the federal government’s seizure of “sacramental plant materials” used to make ayahuasca violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Defendants include U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, DEA administrator Terrance Cole, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner Rodney Scott. The suit alleges Customs and Border Protection agents seized multiple packages containing plant materials between 2020 and 2022 but does not specify how many packages were intercepted, where they were intercepted, or how much plant material was seized.

In their suit, the plaintiffs cited previous cases with Brazilian ayahuasca churches Santo Daime and União do Vegetal which successfully fought the DEA’s efforts to challenge their ceremonial use of ayahuasca. In 2006, União do Vegetal won a landmark case in the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that the federal government could not prohibit the group from importing and consuming ayahuasca tea in ceremony. Pachamama is a non-profit church registered with the state and has safety protocols in place. The plaintiffs are represented by Portland, Maine lawyer Alexander J Mihalov and Texas lawyer Greg Lake, one of the co-founders of the Church of Psilomethoxin.

More states pass ibogaine research bills

After recent successes in Louisiana and Tennessee, ibogaine advocates continue to gain political traction in states across the country. Last week, the Colorado legislature passed House Bill 26-1325, which creates an ibogaine research pilot program and allows the state’s licensing authority to accept gifts, grants, and donations to support the work. A similar bill in Oklahoma, passed by its legislature in early May, was signed by the governor last week.

• Adult mangrove rivulus fish are usually aggressive towards one another, but when they’re given psilocybin, they chill out and are less likely to fight, according to a new study in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

• Psychedelic patent watchdog organization Porta Sophia launched a psychedelics legislation tracker.

• Psychedelic Alpha’s Josh Hardman reported on a recent talk given by U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse director Nora Volkow at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting. Volkow had previously said she thought it was unlikely ibogaine could ever receive FDA approval, but she’s become increasingly publicly enthusiastic about the drug’s potential. “If I can’t change my views based on evidence, then why do science at all?” she explained during her presentation.

• What happens when you feel like Jesus after taking psychedelics? Double Blind reports on the connections among spirituality, psychedelic, and psychotic states.

• Some therapists who worked on psychedelic clinical trials are increasingly concerned about the safety of participants and how the studies are being run, reports Jules Evans in Ecstatic Integration.

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