Mindbloom sued for wrongful death of 27-year old, and preliminary results for Delix’s non-hallucinogenic 5-MeO-DMT analog
Plus: A near death experience triggered by anesthetic ketamine, and psilocybin for OCD?
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Mindbloom sued for wrongful death of 27-year old
Last week, a North Carolina man filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the ketamine company Mindbloom and Enovex, a compounding pharmacy that manufactures Mindbloom’s ketamine troches (lozenges that dissolve on the tongue). Mindbloom, a privately held company, offers ketamine by partnering with providers who oversee telehealth appointments with clients. As of January, the company has been offering injectable, at-home ketamine in addition to troches.
The plaintiff in this lawsuit, John Ward, is suing in Pitt County Superior Court on behalf of his son Phillip, who died at 27. According to the lawsuit, Phillip’s official cause of death was ketamine toxicity — the toxicology report found 9.3 mg/L of ketamine in his blood. (Previous case reports of fatal ketamine concentrations have been considerably lower.)
The late Ward received ketamine from Mindbloom even after he failed to appear at multiple mandatory appointments with Mindbloom-affiliated clinicians, who were also named in the suit. “Defendants consciously disregarded critical safety protocols by continuing to supply Phillip Ward with ketamine troches,” the suit alleges. The suit also claims that Ward’s history of depression, hypertension, tachycardia, and substance abuse, “should have disqualified him from receiving a dangerous anesthetic for unsupervised, at-home use.”
The suit says that though Mindbloom sent Ward a blood pressure monitor, no clinician ever required him to submit readings. “Upon death, the blood pressure cuff was found unused in its original packaging,” the suit claims. Moreover, it says that Mindbloom’s business model “circumvents established FDA and medical safety protocols,” which, it claims, “constitute willful or wanton misconduct.”
The Microdose reached out to Mindbloom for comment on the lawsuit. “The Mindbloom team and I were saddened to learn of Phillip’s death. I lost my mother and sister during their battles with mental health challenges, and my heart goes out to his family,” founder and CEO Dylan Beynon wrote in an emailed statement. “The facts will bear out that Mindbloom provides the highest quality of clinical care backed by the largest peer-reviewed clinical studies in ketamine therapy history and proven out across hundreds of thousands of treatments, and the care provided to Phillip by Mindbloom was no different.”
Preliminary results for Delix’s non-hallucinogenic 5-MeO-DMT analog
On Tuesday, the biotech company Delix Therapeutics announced preliminary results from a Phase 1B study using a drug called zalsupindole, or DLX-001, to treat people with major depressive disorder. Delix focuses on creating what it calls “neuroplastogens”: drugs that are chemically similar to psychedelics but are engineered to remove common psychedelic effects like hallucinations. DLX-001 is an analog of 5-MeO-DMT.
In their study, Delix dosed 18 participants with DLX-001; half received the drug once a day for 7 days, and the other got it only twice over the course of a week. The company reports that compared to participants’ baseline scores on the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), a standard depression evaluation, participants showed a roughly 50% overall reduction in depression symptoms after the first week of the study. There was no difference between the two groups in MADRS improvements, and they report no serious adverse events or any experiences of hallucinations or dissociation, suggesting the drug does not cause people to trip.
The company also recorded participants’ brain activity but did not release results from these experiments, saying that they would be presented at upcoming conferences. In addition to these preliminary results, Delix also announced that the Food and Drug Administration has signed off on the design of a Phase 2 clinical trial using DLX-001 in which participants will take the drug at home.
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Case study: a near death experience triggered by anesthetic ketamine
Belgian clinicians published a case report in Brain and Behavior describing the near-death experience a woman had after accidentally receiving 2.5 times the intended dose of ketamine as an anesthetic. The 73-year-old experienced a flare-up of her chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and when her husband found her unresponsive, he called an ambulance for her. She underwent an emergency intubation and in the chaos, medics ended up giving her a much larger than standard dose of ketamine.
Researchers interviewed the patient about her out-of-body experiences (OBE): “she found herself ‘above,’ in a space filled with white light and people dressed in white,” and in another vision, “she could see herself from above lying in a coffin.” Those visions were “profoundly positive,” the woman said, and “she sings daily to express the love she felt during the event.” Her husband also told the researchers that she seemed to have “regained a sense of joy in life that had been absent for several years.”
Ketamine is a common choice for clinicians when performing emergency intubations, and according to the paper, near death experiences may occur in up to 23% of patients in acute emergency settings such as emergency rooms, but they are under-studied and under-documented. This particular case, the authors write, was a “unique opportunity” to study a near-death experience and its lasting effects.
Reviewing the evidence: Psilocybin for OCD
So far, the bulk of psilocybin research has investigated its use in treating mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. But a new review paper in Genomic Press digs into the existing literature on psilocybin’s potential in treating obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). They analyzed 13 papers — 4 studies of humans, and 9 of rodents — and reported that the emerging themes suggested psilocybin could reduce obsessive and compulsive behaviors in both humans and rodents. None of the studies with humans were randomized, controlled clinical trials — but the researchers point to a protocol for one such study that would enroll 36 participants and compare psilocybin’s efficacy to niacin (or vitamin B3), an active placebo. They also suggest that future work should investigate psilocybin’s efficacy in treating “disorders with overlapping neurobiological features, such as trichotillomania, dermatillomania, and hoarding disorder.”
According to an analysis from Psychedelic Alpha, federal lobbying by psychedelic drug companies reached an all-time high in the 3rd quarter of 2025, totalling over $300,000.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office announced the sentencing of five people connected to selling over $7 million of MDMA, ketamine, and other drugs on the dark web.
Ketamine therapy “saved my life,” the writer Taylor Prewitt writes in Slate. But the industry has been “Goop”-ified, she argues, referencing Gwyneth Paltrow’s new-age brand, and now falls in the grey area between wellness and healthcare. “What’s happened in my life since I first began ketamine treatment, and what I saw in these spas, suggests a country that’s not quite ready to decide what to do with a drug that people are turning to in ever-increasing numbers,” she writes.
The Transmitter interviews two scientists about how their research with the psychedelic DOI uncovered a previously “unaccounted confound” in interpreting fMRI brain imaging studies, and what that means for future psychedelic brain imaging studies.
Phoenix NPR affiliate KJZZ reports that a study investigating the use of whole psilocybin mushrooms in treating PTSD will soon be underway in Arizona.
DoubleBlind profiles the leaders contributing to The Black Psychedelic Learning Project, which aims to study and ultimately transform the training experience for Black psychedelic practitioners.
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