Federal legislators try again on psychedelics legislation; New Mexico to launch psilocybin program a year early; and Mapping psilocybin in the brain with…rabies?
Plus: Are the “MDMA blues” real? And newly launched Center for Psychedelic Policy
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.
Federal legislators try again on psychedelics legislation
Last week, U.S. Senators Cory Booker (D) and Rand Paul (R) and Representatives Madeleine Dean (D) and Nancy Mace (R) introduced the Freedom to Heal Act, which would force the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to create a registration process for physicians to administer MDMA and psilocybin, a system that sounds similar to the one enacted in Australia two years ago. The press release announcing the new bill says it would give access to Schedule 1 drugs to “people with severe, life-threatening conditions, including Veterans.” Most psychedelic substances including psilocybin, LSD, DMT and MDMA are currently classified by the DEA in the most restricted Schedule 1 category.
Under the 2018 Right to Try Act, terminally ill patients can try “investigational drugs” — drugs that have undergone Phase 1 clinical trials, but have not yet been approved by the agency. But because of psychedelics’ status as Schedule I drugs patients have been unsuccessful in accessing the drugs under Right to Try laws, leading to years-long legal battles such as the case AIMS v. DEA, where palliative care physician Sunil Aggarwal sought psilocybin for his terminally ill patients. (Here at The Microdose, we’ve been covering this case for so long that it has its own tag.)
Aggarwal told The Microdose he and his team were not consulted about the newly introduced legislation. “I am happy, of course, to see it as I welcome any option that will provide complete safe harbor to patients and doctors who wish to try psilocybin therapeutically as a palliative measure, given that this option exists in several countries around the world,” he said.
This isn’t the first time Booker and Paul have tried to introduce legislation that would increase patient access to psychedelics via Right to Try laws. In 2022, they introduced the “Right to Try Clarification Act,” which would have amended the Right to Try act with a statement explicitly allowing patients to access investigational drugs even if they are Schedule I substances, but that bill never made it out of committee. In 2023, Booker and Paul first teamed up with Mace and Dean to introduce another psychedelics bill called the Breakthrough Therapies Act, which proposed updating the Controlled Substances Act to reclassify any Schedule I drugs designated by the Food and Drug Administration as potential breakthrough therapies as Schedule II drugs instead. That bill also died in committee.
Those who have been close to these failed legislative efforts struck a cautiously optimistic note about the new proposed law. Kathryn Tucker, an attorney who brought the AIMS v. DEA case, as well as a petition to the DEA to reschedule psilocybin from Schedule I to Schedule II (which, as of August, had been transmitted to U.S. Health and Human Services), noted the failure of the previous two federal Right to Try bills. But she is hopeful about this new one. “There is no reason it could not sail through,” she says, pointing out that Republicans control Congress and President Trump signed the 2018 Right to Try act into law.
New Mexico to launch psilocybin program a year early
Last Friday, New Mexico’s Medical Psilocybin Advisory Board held their first meeting. It opened with an introduction from State Senator Jeff Steinborn (D), who sponsored the legislation that created the country’s third state-regulated psilocybin program. The meeting was led by Dominick Zurlo, director of the New Mexico Department of Health’s Center for Medical Cannabis and Psilocybin, who introduced the seven-person advisory board, and the news that the Medical Psilocybin Program had hired a program manager — its first dedicated staff member — and were in the process of hiring an environmental scientist and a compliance officer.
The biggest news was that the state plans to accelerate its launch of its psilocybin program. “We have until December 2027 to get the program implemented,” said Zurlo. “Because there has been such large interest in this and a push for us to try to help people with psilocybin treatments earlier, we have set a goal now to have the program see initial patients by the end of December 2026 — a full year earlier.”
The meeting also featured public comment from attendees, including individuals speaking about their personal mental health struggles, and aspiring practitioners voicing concerns about high cost of facilitator training in Colorado and Oregon, and urging the state to build a more affordable and accessible program.
Denali Wilson, of the non-profit psychedelic advocacy organization Healing Advocacy Fund (HAF) also spoke in the public comment portion of the meeting. Wilson is HAF’s New Mexico Director of Strategic Support; her counterparts in Colorado and Oregon have played significant roles in launching and supporting those states’ programs. “While it is important for the program to move forward with urgency, achieving the right balance of safety, affordability, and equity will require careful attention and thoughtfulness - so let’s be sure that any acceleration of the regulatory timeline doesn’t unintentionally compromise patient safety, undermine long-term sustainability, or limit meaningful public engagement,” Wilson said.
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Mapping psilocybin in the brain with…rabies?
While we still don’t know what, exactly, makes psychedelics effective in treating depression or anxiety, researchers do have theories. One of them is that a drug trip interrupts cycles of negative rumination. Some researchers have gone as far as to use the phrase “rewire the brain.” A new study published in Cell tried to illustrate how psilocybin might rewire brain connections with an unconventional method: they injected psilocybin into the frontal cortex of mice’s brains, and then injected a dose of rabies.
We know rabies as an incredibly contagious and fatal disease. That’s because the rabies virus is highly adept at infecting a host’s cells and then spreading via its connections to other cells. Neuroscientists have developed methods that harness rabies’ power as a way to map the brain and track neuronal changes.The researchers in this study used those methods to map differences between mouse brains that had received psilocybin, and those that did not.
Compared with mice injected only with rabies, mice injected with psilocybin and rabies showed weaker connections between the retrosplenial cortex, visual cortex, and default mode network with frontal cortex neurons. A Cornell press release about the study framed this as evidence that “psilocybin weakens the cortico-cortical feedback loops that can lock people into negative thinking.” While some previous studies suggest that cortical and subcortical connections underlie rumination and negative feedback loops in the human brain, it’s unclear whether these weaker connections in mice are a direct analog for rumination.
They also found that mice injected with psilocybin showed stronger connections between the mouse analog of the default mode network, visual cortex, and sensorimotor network, which the researchers said in the press release could be a sign that psilocybin strengthens the link between perception and action. Again, mice are not people, and it is not yet clear how, and if, these mouse brain areas and their connections map onto human brains, but the researchers say that this is an “exciting avenue for future research” to better understand how psychedelics influence brain plasticity.
Are the “MDMA blues” real?
Among recreational MDMA users, it’s a common belief that ecstasy’s comedown includes a period of lowered mood. To find out more about this phenomenon, researchers in the UK and the Netherlands surveyed around 250 young adults who had used MDMA recreationally, and they published their results in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.
The study used data from a longitudinal European study called the ALAMA Nightlife study, which collected data on not just MDMA but any recreational substance use.
For 35 days after people used MDMA, researchers asked them to fill out an app-based, daily 3-minute questionnaire about their mental well-being. It included questions such as ranking their mood, reporting substance use, sleep quality, and cognitive and social functioning.
Overall, the researchers found that participants’ reported decreased mental well-being in the three days following MDMA use. They concluded that at least part of that decrease was attributable to MDMA use, but other factors, such as sleep quality post-drug use, pre-existing depression and anxiety symptoms, and cocaine use were also associated with worse well-being ratings, though none of those factors were associated with as strong an effect as MDMA use. But, they point out, factors like sleep quality could be directly associated with MDMA use as well; the dehydration and stimulation caused by the drug could lead to worse sleep.
The mood dip post-MDMA use is sometimes called the “Tuesday blues,” based on the belief that these blues hit three days after Saturday night MDMA use. But the researchers conclude that the decrease in well-being could actually carry through the entire three days after taking MDMA.
Newly launched Center for Psychedelic Policy
On Wednesday, a new non-profit think tank called the Center for Psychedelic Policy announced its launch. Its founder and executive director is Sam Chapman, previously campaign manager for Oregon’s Measure 109 (the ballot initiative that launched the state’s psilocybin program) and former executive director of the non-profit Healing Advocacy Fund.
In an email announcing the new center, Chapman enumerated the advances in state-by-state psychedelic policy over the last five years, including the launch of Oregon and Colorado’s psilocybin programs (and the impending launch of New Mexico’s), and hundreds of psychedelic-related bills across the majority of U.S. states. “But with this momentum comes a reality we cannot ignore,” he writes. “Now we must solve the challenge that will determine whether these programs truly serve the people who need them most: affordability.”
Chapman says the center’s goal is to expand access to psilocybin, and it will focus on translating lessons from Oregon into “actionable guidance for states”, with an emphasis on affordability.
Portland alt-weekly Willamette Week reports that the psilocybin service center The Sacred Mushroom is shuttering as a psilocybin company and its parent company will instead be pivoting to cryptocurrency.
For the MIT Press Reader, cultural anthropologist Graham St John tells the story of how Terence McKenna became a champion for entheogens like DMT.
The playwright Jeremy O. Harris was released after being imprisoned for three weeks in Japan for MDMA possession. According to The Guardian, “Harris was detained at Naha airport on 16 November when customs officers allegedly found 0.78 grams (0.028 ounces) of a substance containing the stimulant MDMA.” For reference, a typical dose of MDMA is between 80 to 120mg. Assuming those 0.78 grams were pure MDMA, that would be equivalent to between 6 and 10 doses.
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