Ketamine company sues newspaper; atai to merge with Beckley Psytech; and Oregon disabilities case continues
Plus: Long-anticipated study on religious leaders published, and Maine psilocybin decriminalization bill advances
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.
Mindbloom sues The Wall Street Journal
On Monday, ketamine company Mindbloom filed a lawsuit against Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, in Delaware Superior Court. The suit was spurred by a 2024 piece, whose headline read: “People are injecting ketamine at home: Matthew Perry overdosed on anesthetic that Mindbloom is sending by mail.” Mindbloom claims the article constitutes libel, which they say has cost the company $4 million in profits, $35 million in “enterprise value,” and $350,000 in expenses, and that it invited “readers to draw a false and devastating connection” between the company and the death of Matthew Perry. “Mr. Perry was never a Mindbloom client. He never received medication from Mindbloom,” the lawsuit states.
“We will mount a robust legal defense against the feeble, unsupported allegations in Mindbloom's complaint,” a Wall Street Journal spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Microdose. “Mindbloom’s lawsuit is a misguided, meritless attempt to place blame for its alleged losses on the Journal. The Wall Street Journal is proud of its award-winning health coverage in general and this article in particular.”
atai to merge with Beckley
On Monday, drug company atai announced its plans to merge with psychedelics research company Beckley Psytech, pending results from Beckley’s Phase 2b study using BPL-003, a synthetic nasal form of 5-MeO-DMT, to treat alcohol use disorder. The resulting company would be called atai Beckley.
Beckley completed its Phase I study of BPL-003 in late 2022, and in February 2025, the company reported promising preliminary results from a Phase 2a study: 6 of the 12 participants who had received BPL-003 and therapy reported that they’d abstained from drinking in the 12 weeks after their dosing session. The Microdose reached out to atai to learn more about the “pre-agreed success criteria” for the Phase 2b study that this deal hinges on, but did not receive a response.
In January 2024, atai acquired a 35% stake in the company; the new deal would give Beckley shareholders around 31% of the new company. The company also expects continued investments from venture capital firms — altogether, according to the press release, these contributions value Beckley at $390 million. The deal comes on the heels of Beckley co-founder Amanda Feilding’s death. Her son Cosmo Feilding-Mellen is the other co-founder and serves as the company’s CEO.
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Oregon disabilities case continues
Last Friday, an Oregon judge ruled that Cusker v. Oregon Health Authority, a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court by four Oregon psilocybin facilitators against the state agency that oversees psilocybin services in the state, may proceed. In the suit, psilocybin facilitators allege that the Oregon Psilocybin Services’ requirement that all psilocybin sessions take place in a service center violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Facilitators say some of their clients with disabilities or terminal illnesses are unable to leave their homes and travel to service centers, and that the state has not made reasonable accommodations for those clients, as required by federal law.
Lawyers for the state of Oregon argued that the case should be dismissed, saying federal court was the wrong venue for the lawsuit. In a February hearing, they argued that if the federal court were to order the Oregon Health Authority to allow homebound clients to receive psilocybin at home, the federal judiciary would be ordering the state to violate federal law since psilocybin is a highly restricted Schedule I drug. But the plaintiffs have argued that they’re merely asking the state to provide the requisite access to existing services on the basis of the ADA, not asking the court to violate federal law.
In the end, Judge Mustafa Kasubhai sided with the plaintiffs, denying the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case. The plaintiffs’ “requested remedy rests on physical access rather than use or distribution of a controlled substance in violation of state and federal laws,” Kasubhai wrote in his opinion. Rather, he says, the facilitators “seek compliance with the ADA so that their disabled clients will have the same physical access to a service that is available to nondisabled individuals.”
Kathryn Tucker, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, said she was pleased with the result. “The case can now move forward and we will be doing all we can to press for prompt resolution,” she told The Microdose.
Long-anticipated study on religious leaders published
After more than 10 years, a study of psilocybin’s effects on religious and spiritual attitudes has finally been published in Psychedelic Medicine. In 2014, Johns Hopkins researcher Roland Griffiths began recruiting religious leaders for the study, which became one of the worst-kept secrets in psychedelics research. Many participants have gone on to found their own psychedelics religious organizations and have publicly talked about their experiences without directly mentioning the study.
The research was conducted at Johns Hopkins and New York University, where a total of 24 participants received two fairly large (20-30mg) doses of psilocybin in a gel capsue. Roughly half of the group received the two doses shortly after being enrolled in the study, and the other half received them six months later as a control for “changes in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that might occur spontaneously and/or in response to the extensive screening and decision to participate in the study,” the authors write.
At the 6 month mark after being enrolled in the study, those in the control group had not yet received psilocybin while those in the other group had. At that point, participants who had received psilocybin “reported significantly greater positive changes in their religious practices, attitudes about their religion, and effectiveness as a religious leader, as well as in their non-religious attitudes, moods, and behavior,” according to the paper. Those results held up when researchers checked back in with participants sixteen months after their last psilocybin session, and a majority said that the experiences had positive effects on their religious practice and appreciation of other religious practices.
The paper also includes a brief disclosure about an audit of the study conducted by the Johns Hopkins Institutional Review Board, spurred by a complaint Reverend Joe Welker sent to the board last year. The disclosure summarizes the audit’s findings: two people working on the study were not previously approved — one of whom was funding the study; the team had not properly disclosed that one of the approved team members was also contributing financially to the study; and conflicts of interest and funding for the study were not properly disclosed.
A New Yorker piece about the study, written by Michael Pollan and published in mid-May, mentioned these issues, and reported that the study would be published soon. For the last two weeks, people with knowledge of the paper’s status have received conflicting messages about the publication timeline; officials at SAGE, Psychedelic Medicine’s publisher, decided the paper would not be published because it did not meet the publishers’ ethical standards, but reversed their decision. In a comment sent to The Microdose, SAGE spokesperson Camille Gamboa wrote that, “In conversations with the Editors-in-Chief and in support of our editorial independence policy, we determined they should make the final decision on this article. It is our understanding that the editors are proceeding with publication.”
Maine psilocybin decriminalization bill advances
A Maine bill to decriminalize the possession of one ounce or less of psilocybin has just narrowly passed the Maine State Legislature. The bill does not specify whether “one ounce of psilocybin” means an ounce of fresh psilocybin mushrooms, an ounce of dried psilocybin mushrooms, or an ounce of the chemical psilocybin.
Maine law requires the house and senate to vote twice before a bill goes to the governor’s desk. That first vote — a vote to “engross” — took place this week: On Monday the State House voted 70-69 to engross LD 1034; the next day, the Senate voted 17-16 to engross.
To continue advancing the bill, a simple majority of both the House and Senate must vote to enact the bill. It’s still unclear when the legislature will conduct this vote — or whether they will vote on it at all. Bills become engrossed but not enacted “all the time,” a member of the Maine Legislative Information Office told The Microdose. The legislature is currently in special session, which has no set adjournment date, though the legislative staffer said they will likely wrap in the next couple weeks.
Elon Musk “told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms,” according to the New York Times. Musk took to X to deny it, writing that he’d tried prescription ketamine years ago but hasn’t taken it since.
Nine of the 34 psilocybin service centers opened in the past two years – about a quarter — have closed already, reports Willamette Week. Service center owners cite high licensing costs and stringent rules as threats to the legal psilocybin industry’s success.
In their newsletter, DoubleBlind covered the “Psychedelic State of the Union” address given by interim co-executive directors of the non-profit group MAPS Ismail Ali and Betty Aldworth. The speech was delivered at the electronic music festival Lightning In A Bottle, held over Memorial Day Weekend in California’s Central Valley. The two-hour address covered psychedelics politics and policy.
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