RFK Jr.’s first acid trip, and federal health leaders appear to be keen on psychedelics; The rise of ketamine use disorder
Plus: The State of Psychedelics, and how moments of “insight” contribute to psychedelics’ therapeutic effects
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.
RFK Jr.’s first acid trip, and federal health leaders appear to be keen on psychedelics
Last week, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke at the 2025 Rx and Illicit Drug Summit in Nashville, Tennessee, where he discussed his journey with psychedelics and addiction. Kennedy has previously voiced his general support for psychedelics as part of mental health treatment, but in Nashville his stories were more personal. He described his first experience with LSD, which he took after a party in the summer of 1969, when he was 15. That LSD trip kicked off his addiction to other drugs, he said.
At the time, Kennedy said he was “addicted” to comic books, particularly one that depicted characters taking mescaline and going back in time. He was also interested in paleontology. “If I take that, will I see dinosaurs?” he asked the boy who offered him the LSD. “You might,” the boy responded.
Kennedy said he took the tab of LSD and had a “wonderful experience, with very, very intense hallucinations,” but felt remorseful. As he began to walk home, he felt like he was crashing. He encountered several older boys in the woods who offered him methamphetamine. When he took it, “all my problems went away,” Kennedy said. Within three weeks, he said he was addicted to meth and by the end of the summer was shooting heroin.
Kennedy was not the only member of President Trump’s cabinet talking about psychedelics in recent days. This week, on X, Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins wrote that the VA is “looking at psychedelic treatments as well as other alternative treatments such as hyperbaric oxygen chambers, and virtual reality therapy,” and is “working with Congress to approve more treatments.”
While Congress may be able to approve bills earmarking funding for new treatment programs or research into their efficacy, ultimately the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would need to approve any new drug before it could be used as medication. Trump Administration officials seem keen to accelerate drug approval. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary recently gave his first public interview to former Fox News commentator Megyn Kelly, who now hosts a podcast on Sirius XM. Makary told Kelly that he plans to “speed up the approval process,” even allowing some drugs for rare diseases to be conditionally approved without clinical trial data if “the mechanism is scientifically plausible that this treatment would help.”
Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency headed by Elon Musk has eliminated tens of thousands of federal positions in HHS that supported and communicated basic science research in the U.S., and has terminated thousands of grants issued by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Psychedelics research may not be directly affected by federal cuts — many psychedelic studies done with human participants are funded by philanthropy or are sponsored by companies — but scientific research will be significantly hampered by these mass firings and dismantling of research infrastructure. “Scientists can’t function without a lot of other resources. They need an entire support infrastructure,” one NIH employee told CBS News this week. “And that has now been decimated.”
The rise of ketamine use disorder
Over the last few years, ketamine has gained popularity as a potential treatment for depression and anxiety — and as more people are going to ketamine clinics and getting mail-order ketamine prescriptions, some clinicians are concerned about the drug’s abuse potential. In a new study published in the journal Addiction on Monday, researchers at the University of Exeter and University College London surveyed ketamine patients about their use of the drug to better understand the symptoms and circumstances associated with ketamine use disorder (KUD).
Of the 274 respondents who self-identified as having ketamine use disorder, most first encountered ketamine through recreational use as teens or young adults; only four responded that they’d first obtained the drug through a clinical prescription. The majority — 87% — reported experiencing physical symptoms associated with their ketamine use, the most common of which were bladder issues (60%), nasal issues (60%), and cramps (56%). Around 41% of respondents had sought addiction treatment for their ketamine use, including 16% of people who said they’d tried such treatment more than five times. However, 43% of those who’d received addiction treatment said that their programs were not tailored to ketamine use. Thirty one percent of respondents said the addiction treatment centers they attended had minimal awareness of ketamine, and thus were only somewhat effective.
“As ketamine use continues to increase both clinically and recreationally, developing effective treatments for KUD has become increasingly urgent,” the authors conclude. “The findings expose significant gaps in our current understanding of KUD and highlight the shortage of effective treatment strategies, offering patient-centred recommendations to improve accessibility and treatment outcomes.”
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Oregon psilocybin services improvement bill passes house; California veterans pilot program advances; Massachusetts bill proposes psilocybin permits
Recently, the Oregon House of Representatives voted unanimously to advance House Bill 2387, also known as the Oregon Psilocybin Services Program Improvement Bill. The bill was proposed by the non-profit group Healing Advocacy Fund and introduced by representative Dacia Grayber (D) in January. If approved by the State Senate and signed by the governor, the bill would make changes to the state’s psilocybin program. Specifically, health professionals who facilitate psilocybin sessions would be protected from disciplinary action by state professional regulatory boards such as the Oregon Medical Board. The bill would also require that the Oregon Health Authority keep investigations of complaints confidential. The make-up of the Oregon Psilocybin Advisory Board would also be changed. While the regulations currently call for a board of between 14 to 16 members, HB 2387 shrinks that number to nine, and it requires that one board seat go to a licensed service center operator and another to a licensed facilitator. Finally, the bill would also require that all psilocybin products be labeled with their psilocin content, in addition to their psilocybin content, to provide more accurate information about the potency of the products. Psilocybin is a prodrug of psilocin, which means that the human body metabolizes psilocybin into psilocin, which is the psychoactive compound capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier. Because most psilocybin mushrooms contain both psilocybin and psilocin, knowing the quantity of psilocybin alone is not sufficient to predict the strength of a dose.
The bill is now with Oregon’s Senate Committee on Early Childhood and Behavioral Health.
Meanwhile, California’s Senate Health Committee voted unanimously to advance Senate Bill 751, which would create a pilot program at the University of California to provide psilocybin-assisted therapy to veterans and first responders. When the bill was introduced in February, it called upon the state’s Health and Human Services Agency to oversee the program, but has now been amended to name the University of California as the entity in charge.
And in Massachusetts, House Bill 4050 was referred to the legislature’s Joint Committee on Revenue. The bill, sponsored by State Representative Patrick Kearney (D), would create a state licensing system for psilocybin mushrooms, but one that uses a model quite different from those rolled out in Oregon and Colorado. The Massachusetts program, developed in consultation with grassroots advocates who worked on the state’s failed ballot initiative last November, would allow people with qualifying health conditions to apply for a psilocybin permit after they pass a health screening and take an educational course (which, according to the bill, must be no longer than five hours). A similar bill was introduced in New York last year.
The list of qualifying conditions is extensive and includes everything from mental health conditions like anxiety and depression to pain and neurological conditions like Parkinson's disease or traumatic brain injury, as well as substance use disorder and behavioral addictions such as gambling, pornography, or shopping. Permit holders would be allowed to grow their own psilocybin mushrooms or buy them from state-licensed cultivators.
How moments of “insight” contribute to psychedelics’ therapeutic effects
While many people have reported that psychedelics have helped with their depression, anxiety, eating disorder, pain, or other ailments, the therapeutic mechanism through which the drugs work is still not well understood. A new paper published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews investigates one possible contributor: insight. Many people are familiar with insight as that lightbulb moment one feels upon realizing something new or profound. The authors, Australian and U.S. researchers, write that insight isn’t just that a-ha moment, but it can also be defined as a type of cognitive process. They reviewed previous psychedelics research that measured insight through questionnaires.
Overall, they identified 25 studies that measured insight and therapeutic outcomes, and found that in 86% of those studies, there was a significant positive correlation between participants reporting they’d experienced moments of insight as a result of their psychedelic use, and beneficial outcomes from their treatment. Correlation is not causation, but these results suggest the need for more research.
Salon talks with people who say psychedelics have improved their sex lives and relationships.
An Army helicopter pilot sold $122,000 in LSD on the dark web, reports The Washington Post. First lieutenant Kyle Norton Riester claimed he had received messages from on high to sell LSD, and, per the Post, also “believes bitcoin is sacred because of ‘the autonomy it gives visionary religious practitioners, such as himself’ to facilitate the distribution of the ‘Holy Sacrament’ (LSD) to his spiritual fellows.”
For Psychedelic Alpha, journalist Charles Bliss recaps the first two days of Breaking Convention, Europe’s largest psychedelic research conference.
In a New York Times op-ed, Challenging Psychedelics Experiences Project founder Jules Evans writes that while tech leaders and the current political administration in the U.S. seem enthusiastic about psychedelics, the substances should not be embraced too hastily. “I worry that the psychedelic enthusiasts of Silicon Valley will apply their ‘move fast and break things’ philosophy to mind-altering drugs, approving them too quickly and without adequate protections for Americans,” Evans writes.
Also from Evans: in his newsletter Ecstatic Integration, he interviews lobbyist and military veteran Jonathan Lubecky, who expresses concerns about how veterans’ groups have conducted their psychedelics retreats in conjunction with media coverage.
Ski magazine explores “microshredding” (shredding the ski slopes while microdosing) and whether Coloradoans might trip while skiing or snowboarding.
Journalist Robin Berghaus profiles Sue Sisley and her work studying marijuana and now psychedelics for Nature.
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