Pilot who attempted to cut plane engines after shrooms trip avoids prison time, and LSD microdoses not more effective than placebo in treating depression
Plus: Psychedelics advocate Calley Means now an advisor to RFK Jr., and Mixing antidepressants and classic psychedelics
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.
Pilot who attempted to cut plane engines after shrooms trip avoids prison time
On Monday, a U.S. District Judge in Portland, Oregon ruled that former Alaska Airlines pilot Joseph Emerson would not face prison time for a 2023 incident in which he attempted to shut down the engines of a Horizon Air flight from Everett, Washington to San Francisco. He had pled guilty to a federal count of interfering with a flight crew; he had also pled no contest to 83 counts of endangering another person (one for every other person aboard the flight), as well as one count of endangering an aircraft that had been brought against him by Oregon prosecutors.
Emerson told investigators that at the time of the incident, he had not slept in 48 hours. He had traveled to Washington to memorialize the death of his best friend and had tried psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. He described his experience aboard the flight as “dreamlike:” he said he tried to shut down the engines to get out of the dream. After the incident, some commentators in news stories cast doubt about psilocybin having anything to do with Emerson’s actions, saying that mushroom trips typically only last 6 to 8 hours and that the substance would have cleared his system by the time he got on that plane two days after ingesting psilocybin. “I felt that the psychedelic movement was, in effect, trying to throw him under the bus by insisting that magic mushrooms couldn’t have affected him 48 hours after he took them,” writes Jules Evans, founder of the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, who earlier this week published an extensive interview with Emerson in his newsletter, Ecstatic Integration.
In the interview, Emerson told Evans that before taking mushrooms he’d seen the Netflix documentary “Have a Good Trip,” and had no idea that psilocybin could produce such prolonged difficulties. “If I knew the risks, there’s no way I’d take that substance,” he said. He goes on to describe his trip, where he felt increasingly paranoid and anxious that something was amiss. He says he did not return to “a full sense of reality” until he was being arraigned for attempted murder.
Emerson was sentenced this week to time served and three years of supervised release. In Oregon, he was previously sentenced to time served and five years probation, as well as over 600 hours of community service, which he can serve in part by working on a new non-profit organization Emerson and his wife founded called Clear Skies Ahead. The organization supports mental health and wellness for pilots, air traffic controllers, and their families.
LSD microdoses not more effective than placebo in treating depression
Results from a Phase 2B clinical trial from Melbourne-based psychedelic company MindBio Therapeutics suggest that LSD microdoses are not more effective than placebo at treating major depressive disorder. The results have not yet been published in an academic journal, but CEO Justin Hanka published topline results on LinkedIn. In the study, 89 patients were given either LSD microdoses or placebo (caffeine) pills to take at home twice a week for eight weeks. Their depression symptoms were measured using the MADRS, a standard depression rating scale, at the beginning of the study and after eight weeks. Both groups showed a reduction in symptoms, but there was no significant difference between the placebo group and the LSD microdosing group.
The results are “not what we expected or hoped for,” Hanka wrote in his LinkedIn post. But the company claims they have found that participants’ speech changes when taking an LSD microdose, and that they have developed a “proprietary predictive algorithm” that can, they claim, detect whether someone has taken the drug. Hanka’s LinkedIn post did not include any further details to substantiate these claims, but Hanka did write that the company is also developing a tool to detect alcohol intoxication for use in law enforcement and suicide prevention.
Results from MindBio’s Phase 2A trial appeared in a special issue of Neuropharmacology focused on microdosing. (We included results from another study from that issue two weeks ago, which found no differences between psilocybin microdoses and placebo for mood and cognition.) Unlike the 2B study, the 2A clinical trial was open-label, meaning all participants knew that they were receiving an active drug. In the 2A study, participants saw an average reduction of 59.5% in MADRS scores; in the 2B study, those reductions were 36.4% in the placebo group and just under 30% in the LSD microdose group. In previous psychedelic studies, researchers have theorized that even the suggestion that participants could receive a placebo might decrease overall drug efficacy in clinical trials, and this could explain the large differences between efficacy in the 2A and 2B trials.
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Psychedelics advocate Calley Means now an advisor to RFK Jr.
The New York Times reports that Calley Means is now officially serving as a senior advisor to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Means has been a vocal advocate for psychedelics, writing about them on his blog and lauding MAPS founder Rick Doblin as a hero.
President Trump nominated Means’s sister Casey Means as U.S. Surgeon General, but she went into labor with her first child shortly before her Senate confirmation hearing in October and has yet to be confirmed. Casey, too, has publicly advocated for psychedelic access. In Good Energy, a 2024 book she co-wrote with her brother Calley, she described her experiences with psilocybin-assisted therapy. Upon Casey’s nomination as Surgeon General, some right-wing figures, including Laura Loomer, criticized her psychedelic use.
Reports from people mixing antidepressants and classic psychedelics
Antidepressants like Prozac act on the body’s serotonergic system, as do psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD. To avoid potential interaction effects between antidepressants and psychedelics, which can include serotonin toxicity, some clinical trials as well as many underground practitioners advise that people go off antidepressants before taking psychedelics. In online forums, it’s common to see people advising others that SSRIs can dampen a trip, and suggesting that SSRI users try a higher psychedelic dose to compensate for that potential dampening effect.
A new study published in the recently launched academic journal Psychedelics analyzed reports from 40 people who had mixed psychedelics and antidepressants that act on the body’s serotonergic system, and wrote about their experience on the drug education website and community forum Erowid. Of those reports from people taking SSRIs, 20 people used psilocybin, 14 LSD, and six used both psilocybin and LSD. The majority — 26 people, or 65% of participants — reported having less intense trips, a common experience for SSRI users. But six people felt SSRIs did not affect their trip, and another five said they felt it enhanced the trip. While many reported weak visual or other sensory effects, nine included elements indicating a mystical-type experience, which the authors define as “profound alterations in consciousness, including experiences of unity, transcendence of space and time, and noesis.” The preservation of these mystical experience elements could be the reason people on SSRIs in previous clinical trials still experience therapeutic effects of psychedelics, the authors write.
In terms of safety, the authors report that two people who had taken LSD reported symptoms that could indicate serotonin toxicity, like body temperature dysregulation or struggling to breathe — but those symptoms could also just indicate a difficult trip. “Our exploratory findings challenge widespread beliefs that combining serotonergic antidepressants with classical psychedelics poses inherent safety risks,” the authors write. But Erowid reports are hardly a general sample, they note, and they call for more robust, controlled studies investigating interactions between psychedelics and SSRIs.
An ultrarunner is filming a documentary detailing his LSD- and psilocybin-fueled 500-mile run from Manitou Springs to Moab, the Colorado Sun reports.
Author Abbie Rosner writes about the details of a new clinical trial studying psychedelics in older adults, funded by the National Institute on Aging and National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, both a part of the National Institutes of Health.
Political reporter Olivia Nuzzi’s new book has made quite the splash in the journalism world for its flowery prose and dishy gossip. According to The New York Times, Nuzzi, who had a romantic entanglement with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while he was on the presidential campaign trail, stated that the Health Secretary still takes psychedelics, including DMT, despite being sober for decades.
Three weeks ago, Jamaica was hit hard by Hurricane Melissa, and recovery will likely take years. DoubleBlind talked to leaders in its burgeoning psychedelics industry, who fear that wealthy developers will buy up land that once belonged to Indigenous and rural people.
MAPS and Ohio State’s Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education announced that they will be partnering to train more than 127,000 Ohio doctors, nurses, social workers, EMTs, police officers, and other professionals in psychedelic harm reduction and crisis response. The Ohio Department of Behavioral Health is providing $400,000 in funding for the program.
Attention journalists: applications are now open for $10,000 awards to report in-depth print and audio stories on psychedelics. The Ferriss – UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship application is due on January 31, 2026.
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