Florida legislature votes to ban psilocybin mushroom spores and Colorado legislators pass data collection bill; Federal leaders continue advocacy of psychedelics
Plus: Emotional blunting, SSRIs, and psilocybin; Healing Breakthrough merges with Heroic Hearts; Psilocybin given to person with post-coma brain damage
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Florida legislature votes to ban psilocybin mushroom spores and Colorado legislators pass Natural Medicine data collection bill
As most states wind down their legislative sessions, a couple of noteworthy psychedelics bills have passed state legislatures. Last week, the Florida legislature passed Senate Bill 700, which makes it illegal to possess, transport, sell, or give away psilocybin mushroom spores, and makes doing so a first-degree misdemeanor, which is punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1000 fine. The 111-page bill proposes a set of sweeping amendments to Florida state law, touching on everything from banning fluoride in local water supplies to creating misdemeanors for using a drone on agricultural land and for stealing mail. The bill now heads to Governor Ron DeSantis’s desk for a signature or veto. If passed, Florida would join several other states — Idaho, California, and Georgia — in outlawing mushroom spores.
And on Monday, Colorado’s House of Representatives voted 43-22 to pass Senate Bill 297, which directs state agencies to collect data on the use of natural medicine. The state has previously defined “natural medicine” as psilocybin or psilocin, DMT, ibogaine, and mescaline but not peyote. All data on the use of natural medicine must be de-identified and must include information about law enforcement incidents and adverse health events related to natural medicine, as well as consumer protection claims and impacts on healthcare facilities, hospitals, and healthcare systems. The bill also states that the governor may grant pardons to people who were convicted for possession of natural medicines or up to two ounces of marijuana. The bill is now with Governor Jared Polis, who has the final say.
Friends in high places: federal leaders continue advocacy of psychedelics
In a cabinet meeting held last week, President Donald Trump asked Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins for an update on his work addressing veteran suicide rates. (While only 6.1% of the U.S. population identify as veterans, veterans comprised 15% of adult suicides in the U.S. in 2022, according to the 2024 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report.) In response to President Trump’s question Collins mentioned psychedelics: “I’ve worked with Secretary Kennedy and others on the idea of opening up the possibility of psychedelic treatment,” he said. “We’ve got to research it to make sure it’s good, but it’s opening up that opportunity.”
On Tuesday, Collins again mentioned psychedelics in a Senate hearing on the future of the VA, saying the VA is currently assisting with 11 studies on psychedelic-assisted therapy to treat PTSD or traumatic brain injuries. Collins has been publicly talking about psychedelics often in recent days, suggesting he’s considering these substances as potential treatments for addressing veterans’ mental health.
This week, President Trump also announced he was nominating Casey Means for U.S. Surgeon General. Means went to medical school to become a surgeon but dropped out during residency, and has since turned her attention towards functional medicine, an approach that focuses on addressing the root causes of disease. She’s started a blood glucose monitoring company, and has been an outspoken critic of the U.S. medical system. In Good Energy, her 2024 book co-written with her brother Calley, Means wrote about her experiences with psilocybin-assisted therapy, and encouraged people to explore it. Calley has also been a vocal advocate for psychedelics, writing about them on his blog and lauding Rick Doblin as a hero; he is currently a senior advisor to the White House on MAHA-related issues. Over the last few years, the siblings have emerged as a powerful duo among the conservative MAHA set.
But some right-wing figures have spoken out against Means’s nomination. Robert F. Kennedy’s former running mate Nicole Shanahan appeared on Glenn Beck’s podcast to express her reservations, and Trump advocate and far-right activist Laura Loomer, known for her online arguments with other online personalities, criticized Trump’s pick on X in an all-caps post. In particular, Loomer seems to believe Means’s psychedelic advocacy is a liability. In her post, she cites Means’s use of “shroom as ‘plant medicine,’” among other spiritual practices. “So basically the new Surgeon General is a total crack pot, a shroom consumer and she talks to trees and doesn’t even have an active medical license,” Loomer wrote. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended Means in an equally long X post, writing that “Casey is the perfect choice for Surgeon General precisely because she left the traditional medical system--not in spite of it.”
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Emotional blunting, SSRIs and psilocybin
Some people who have tried selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to treat depression report that they experienced a flattening of their emotions. In some cases, this is a welcome change from negative feelings, but others report that their ability to experience positive emotions is blunted, and many experience a lack of sexual desire. Research published in The American Journal of Psychiatry this week suggests that psilocybin-assisted therapy may not have those effects.
In the study, London-based researchers studied around four dozen participants’ neural responses to emotional faces. One group received two 25mg doses of psilocybin, then 6 weeks of a placebo pill. The other group received two 1mg doses of psilocybin (essentially an active placebo), then 6 weeks of daily doses of the SSRI escitalopram. (This was the same set of participants whose data was used in a widely covered 2021 study, which found, among other things, that there was no significant difference in depression scores between the psilocybin and escitalopram groups.) Participants’ baseline brain activity was measured while they were at rest in an fMRI scanner, and they were also shown a range of faces — happy, scared, angry. Compared to their baseline brain activity, those in the SSRI group showed a weaker BOLD (blood-oxygen-level-dependent) response, a standard measure of brain activity derived from blood flow and blood oxygenation levels. However, while people taking SSRIs had a blunted response to faces, people in the psilocybin treatment group showed a stronger response to them.
Additionally, they found that in the psilocybin group, larger brain responses to faces were correlated with improvements in depression symptoms. But the opposite was true in the SSRI group: improvement in depression symptoms was instead correlated with decreased brain responses to faces. The authors believe this could be evidence that SSRIs work by blunting emotions. “Emotional blunting associated with SSRIs is generally viewed as an undesirable side effect,” the authors write, but their results, as well as other recent work, suggests “it may actually be a key factor in their antidepressant action.”
Healing Breakthrough merges with Heroic Hearts
This week, two veteran groups announced a merger: Healing Breakthrough, a non-profit advocating for the use of psychedelic-assisted therapy in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, will become a program under the non-profit Heroic Hearts Project, one of the best-known veterans’ psychedelic advocacy groups. In 2023, Heroic Hearts merged with The Hope Project, a program to help spouses of veterans access psychedelic-assisted therapy.
As veterans’ psychedelic advocacy groups have gained visibility both in Washington D.C. and in the media, joining forces has allowed groups to consolidate their collective power. In a strategy document published by the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative in February, the group named Heroic Hearts and Healing Breakthrough as two beneficiaries of the funders’ donations and suggested an investment of over $12 million in the two organizations over the next three years.
Case study: psilocybin given to person with post-coma brain damage
The May issue of Clinical Neurophysiology includes a case report of a woman who was given psilocybin through her feeding tube. The case appears to align with a story published in National Geographic last year, in which a woman sustained severe brain injuries after a car accident. Researchers call this condition a “disorder of consciousness,” or DoC: the term encompasses any severe neurological disorder that affects people after brain damage. The woman’s husband has tried many things — including psilocybin — to revive her consciousness, and according to both the Nat Geo piece and the newly published case study, the husband contacted researcher Olivia Gosseries after reading about her work on psychedelics. (Gosseries is the corresponding author of the case study.)
The woman was given a 2.5 gram liquid tincture of psilocybin, equivalent to roughly a 25 mg dose of psilocybin. During the session, the researchers took note of any behavioral changes, and measured her brain activity via electroencephalogram (EEG), as well as blood pressure and heart rate. The researchers note that she displayed “spontaneous behaviors” like lifting her legs, and opening her mouth and eyes. (According to the report, before this dosing session, the woman’s husband had been giving her microdoses of psilocybin and reported similar spontaneous movement.) The patient also had increased heart rate and blood pressure, which together with the spontaneous limb movement could be the result of serotonin syndrome, the authors speculate.
EEG measurements “showed a distinct change following psilocybin intake” demonstrating “a general increase in whole-brain entropy,” which co-author Robin Carhart-Harris has hypothesized is key to human consciousness. The measurement, often referred to as LZC or Lempel-Ziv complexity, is often higher when people are awake and lower during sleep or anesthesia.
The researchers close their report by remarking on the ethics of consent in this particular case. “Any medication or medical attention given to the individual with DoC is done so without their explicit consent. As with other cases of people who cannot consent, this authority is delegated to their legal representative,” they write. When we interviewed journalist Jonathan Moens about his National Geographic piece on the couple, he described the husband as “an incredibly intelligent man and desperately in love with his wife” who had thought through this decision and decided this was what his wife would have wanted.
The researchers note that the husband “signed an informed consent form and the Ethics Committee document of the University of Liege in Belgium, which reviewed the case. The committee concluded that they could not offer an opinion, as this was done outside of Belgium, and in a state where psilocybin is decriminalised and accessible to the public. However, they did not object [to] publication of the data obtained during the trial.”
The Guardian excerpts UC Davis evolutionary anthropologist Manvir Singh’s forthcoming book on shamanism, in which he challenges the idea that ayahuasca has a millenia-long lineage in the Peruvian Amazon. Rather, according to Australian anthropologist Bernd Brabec de Mori, “ayahuasca diffused through the Peruvian Amazon in the past 300 years.”
Vail Daily covers Avon, Colorado’s town council discussions around rules for psilocybin businesses.
Texas Monthly takes us into the 1980s and 90s Dallas club scene, where legendary MDMA manufacturer Robert Jenkins partied — and built a drug empire.
Two pharmacists discuss the role of psilocybin in palliative care in an interview for Pharmacy Times.
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