New California bills focus on veterans; the State of Psychedelics; Death penalty for dealers?
Plus: The future of psychedelics philanthropy; and closing the gap between psychedelics research and implementation
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.
Two new California bills focus on veterans
Last Friday, California senators Brian Jones (R) and Josh Becker (D) introduced Senate Bill 751, which would create a pilot program at the University of California to provide psilocybin-assisted therapy to veterans and first responders. Last year, the two senators introduced a similar bill called the Heal Our Heroes Act that would have allowed San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and San Diego counties to launch psilocybin pilot programs for veterans or first responders. That legislation was sponsored by Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions (VETS) and Heroic Hearts Project. “Heroic Hearts Project is excited to support this bill, not only because it promises collaboration with local experts but aligns with our mission of ensuring veterans receive the care they deserve,” said Jesse Gould, Founder of Heroic Hearts Project.
Meanwhile, VETS co-founder Amber Capone said that while the organization was not sponsoring SB 751, they are working on Assembly Bill 1103, another bill introduced last Friday.
AB 1103 would exempt psychedelics studies registered with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and conducted with participants who are veterans from review or authorization from State of California Department of Justice’s Research Advisory Panel of California (RAP-C), which reviews all studies that include hallucinogenic drugs, as well as studies related to substance use disorders. In 2023, RAP-C stopped meeting over confusion about whether the panel was subject to state open meeting laws. The committee could not share in public some of the details for studies that involved trade secrets or proprietary information. The meeting cancellations led to a bottleneck in research approvals, and last legislative session, the state passed AB 2841, which allows RAP-C to hold closed sessions.
The new bill is an effort to “only employ RAP-C when we need to,” VETS’s public policy director Khurshid Khoja told The Microdose. RAP-C is typically the last stage of approval for California researchers, who must also receive approval from university or commercial institutional review boards, as well as relevant permissions from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for studies of human subjects, and the Drug Enforcement Administration. RAP-C approvals typically take at least two months, slowing research down further, Khoja says. “The reason VETS cares about this so much is that in the U.S. we lose between 17 and 44 veterans to suicide every day; that’s a staggering number when you think about the delays that clinical researchers face.” The bill, which Khoja initially drafted, included input from researchers, as well as RAP-C chair Jennifer Mitchell, a professor at University of California at San Francisco who studies psychedelic-assisted therapy and who worked on MAPS’s phase 3 MDMA-assisted therapy trials for PTSD. The bill has yet to be assigned to a committee, so it will likely not be discussed until mid-March.
The State of Psychedelics: Arizona ibogaine bill advances, new psilocybin bill in Missouri
This week, the Arizona House appropriations committee passed an ibogaine bill 13-1. House Bill 2871 would designate $10 million from the state’s general fund to study ibogaine in the treatment of neurological diseases, including traumatic brain injury and PTSD. In a hearing on Monday, former U.S. senator Kyrsten Sinema spoke in favor of the bill, claiming the drug has shown “extraordinary promise” in treating not only traumatic brain injury and PTSD, but potentially treatment-resistant depression, Alzheimers, and opioid abuse disorder too. So far, the bill has moved quickly through house committees — it was introduced in mid-February — and now heads back to the full house for a vote.
Missouri Senator Stephen Webber (D) introduced Senate Bill 90, which would remove state and local penalties for personal therapeutic use of psilocybin, but only for veterans participating in a study who provide the state’s Department of Mental Health with documentation and use “psilocybin tested in a licensed laboratory.” It also designates $3 million for psilocybin research.
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Death penalty for dealers?
President Trump has previously proposed the death penalty for drug dealers, and this week, he returned to that idea at a convening of state governors at the White House, calling the idea “very humane.” While it was clear Trump’s main focus was on fentanyl, psychedelics have been caught up in anti-drug backlashes before; last year, the Oregon legislature passed a bill essentially repealing Measure 110, a ballot initiative passed in 2020 that decreased penalties for the possession of a variety of drugs including fentanyl and psilocybin. Psychedelics advocates have described the inclusion of psilocybin in restrictive policies as collateral damage.
For years, psychedelics advocacy has been largely a bipartisan affair, due in no small part to the role that veterans organizations have played in calling for the legalization and further study of these substances. Will those political winds shift as state and federal leaders look for ways to strengthen drug laws? While it’s too early to know, recently, the conservative news site and magazine the National Review published an article calling on Trump to “overhaul drug policies and strengthen America’s commitment to reducing and delegitimizing drug use,” including states’ marijuana programs and “the incipient movement by states to legalize psychedelics.” The authors, one of whom is a senior legal fellow at the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, compare the overprescribing of opioids and the proliferation of fentanyl-laced drugs with the psychedelics movement, saying that “recent campaigns to use political means to normalize hallucinogens for medical use bear a striking resemblance” to the normalization of opioid and marijuana use. “[T]he U.S. must send a clear message to the world that we are not an open market for drugs,” they write.
The future of psychedelic philanthropy
Philanthropists have big plans for psychedelics. The Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative, or PSFC, has helped funnel millions of dollars into psychedelics research and advocacy; despite its name, its efforts have supported not only psychedelic science but also political campaigns, including the ballot initiatives that established psilocybin services in Oregon and Colorado. This week, the non-profit organization released an 80-page document detailing its philanthropic “strategic roadmap” into the 2030s, which calls for an investment of $125 million over the next three years. PSFC doesn’t intend to be directly involved with raising or directing those funds, but their recommendations have already influenced significant funding and provide an interesting look into the mostly unseen world of psychedelic philanthropy.
The report lays out four main goals. The largest portion of the proposed funding, $46.4 million, would go towards communication and public education, and much of that money would go to MAPS. (In recent months, the organization has shown signs of financial struggle; in August, MAPS laid off a third of its workforce.) PSFC also notes plans to create “a nationwide network of organizations and individuals to help shape the mainstream narrative of psychedelics” and place “targeted, impactful stories featuring thoughtful surrogates with aligned messaging.”
The group’s second largest proposed investment would go towards establishing legal pathways to psychedelics through state programs. PSFC proposes investing $19 million in the non-profit Healing Advocacy Fund (HAF). PSFC’s vision for HAF’s achievements by 2030 include supporting “at least eight established active state-level psychedelic care programs,” in addition to “at least another 3-5 preparing to launch or in early stages of execution” and “an additional 10 states actively considering or working to establish psychedelic care programs.” (Currently, only two states — Oregon and Colorado — have created such programs.) Another $9.2 million would go to the National Psychedelics Association to help psychedelic businesses, such as facilitator training programs, do things like procure business services such as banking and insurance.
The PSFC report also announced the launch of a new project called the Psychedelic Policy Institute, which would help guide the state-by-state approach to changing laws related to psychedelics. The roadmap document estimates that lobbying and state ballot initiative costs will range from at least $1.5 million a year on the low end to as much as $50 million a year on the high end. The list of states suggested as examples of strategic choices for future ballot measures include Arizona, Indiana, Missouri, Utah, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, California, Maine, and Alaska.
Additionally, over the next three years, the report proposes $7.5 million in funding to veteran-focused efforts, and $22.7 million towards indigenous medicine conservation and access.
Closing the gap between psychedelic research and implementation
While many clinicians and patients are excited about the potential of psychedelic treatments, the transition from research labs to therapists’ offices will take years. “Historically, it takes 15-17 years to move a non-pharmaceutical treatment innovation from research into routine clinical practice,” Washington University and University of Missouri researchers write in a new paper published in Nature Human Behavior on Monday. But an area of study called implementation science might help what the researchers call the “know-do gap.” The authors write that implementation of psychedelic-assisted therapy could be sped up if clinicians and researchers worked together more closely before final approval by the Food and Drug Administration to solve issues like licensure and training requirements.
That process could also be hastened by evaluating implementation strategies alongside research, the authors write. Though such strategies typically aren’t tested until after a treatment is approved, the researchers say that testing treatments and strategies for real-life implementation simultaneously can provide much-needed insight into not only whether such treatments work, but also how they should be rolled out at a larger scale to patients. The authors give the example of clinical studies that provide a private room for patients to lie down for 8 hours after receiving a psychedelic dose. “This infrastructure does not exist in the resource-constrained systems where community mental healthcare is currently delivered,” they write, and testing how variation in set and setting affects treatment “should be intentionally incorporated into treatment protocols so that its effect on treatment outcome can be quantified.”
In the Denver Post, reporter Tiney Ricciardi reports on the first licensees in Colorado’s new Natural Medicine Division.
For years, Instagram has been removing some posts and accounts that discuss psychedelics. Meta, Instagram’s parent company, has not shared reasons for these bans, but in DoubleBlind’s newsletter, Mattha Busby talks with the owners of some of the banned accounts and a former Meta employee to better understand what triggers the company to remove content.
Northwest Public Broadcasting reports that Washington’s two psychedelics bills this session — Senate Bill 5201, which would fund ibogaine research, and House Bill 1433, which would establish a regulated psilocybin program like Oregon’s — have missed the legislature’s cutoff for bills to leave committee and digs into why they did not move forward.
Boulder’s Naropa University announced a $1.5 million grant from Unlikely Collaborators, a nonprofit founded by Elizabeth Koch, daughter of billionaire Charles Koch. The younger Koch has previously spoken about her personal experience with psychedelics and her nonprofit funds research on “developing human connection and resolving internal conflict.” The funding will provide financial support to undergraduates who participate in the university’s new psychedelic studies minor.
Former psychedelic guide Alison Crosthwait shared a two-part account on Substack of how she “went from psychedelic facilitator to ketamine addiction in 2 months.” Now in recovery, Crosthwait examines her personal relationships as well as her relationships to psychedelics. “At a minimum there should be more awareness in how we speak about these substances around others,” she writes. “Remembering that there is much trauma and vulnerability around us and that we may be normalizing casual use of a substance that could kill someone who is listening.”
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