This Week in Psychedelics: Shrooms for sale in British Columbia, disturbing MAPS MDMA trial footage released, and treating eating disorders with MDMA
This Week in Psychedelics: Shrooms for sale in British Columbia, disturbing MAPS MDMA trial footage released, and treating eating disorders with MDMA
Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Microdose. Here’s the news of the week:
Shrooms for sale in British Columbia. In Vancouver, four dispensaries have begun openly selling psilocybin mushrooms. While the sale of recreational psychedelics is not explicitly allowed, it seems dispensary owners are hedging their bets that they won’t be shut down by authorities. One owner told CBC that “city bylaw officers sometimes visit,” and that “his business license as a café was recently renewed.” In a statement to CBC, the Vancouver Police Department said that they prioritize prosecuting organized crime around opioid drugs — the subtext, it seems, is that going after psilocybin mushroom sellers isn’t a prime concern. You may recall from previous issues of The Microdose that Health Canada’s process for approving psilocybin therapy for patients and psychedelic therapy practitioners is long and complicated. More Canadians may look to circumvent those approvals by visiting these not-quite-legal shops.
Disturbing MAPS trial footage released. In her twenties, Meaghan Buisson was a competitive inline speed skater. But after years of racing, she experienced a series of injuries and sexual assaults which brought her to an emotional low point. In 2015, she was one of six Canadians chosen for MAPS’ clinical trial using MDMA to treat PTSD. On paper, Buisson was a success story, and she even spoke at conferences about how the treatment changed her life. Behind the scenes, though, things got worse for her — she moved to British Columbia’s Cortez Island to live with the two therapists, a married couple, who administered her MDMA therapy, and eventually filed a complaint with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C. against Donna Dryer, one of her therapists. (Richard Yensen, the other therapist, is not licensed, but Buisson has reported him to the police for sexual assault and therapy abuse.) Her story appears on Power Trip, a podcast produced by New York Magazine and Psymposia.
Recently, New York Magazine published a video of Buisson’s MAPS therapy sessions. (View with care — the footage is difficult to watch.) Buisson appears distraught as her therapists touch and cuddle her; she rocks back and forth, covering her face as she asks if she’s safe. MAPS told the magazine it was “doing a compliance review” and published a statement saying that Yensen and Dryer — Buisson’s therapists — “had previously been removed as investigators on MAPS-sponsored trials for not complying with MAPS Public Benefit Corporation’s requirements for providing study records in a timely and organized fashion.” (In an update to that statement, MAPS also claims that a subsequent episode of Power Trip included details that “were not accurate.”)
Since the video’s release, Canada’s CBC published a piece about the footage, and the Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy has released a statement saying they “unequivocally condemn the ways in which MAPS…failed to acknowledge the lack of oversight on this research study, and the harms this has perpetrated.”
There has never been a more exciting – or bewildering – time in the world of psychedelics. Don’t miss a beat.
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Treating eating disorders with MDMA. Results are in from a MAPS-funded, phase 3 clinical trial that used MDMA-assisted therapy to treat eating disorder symptoms in people diagnosed with PTSD. (The two issues often co-occur.) The study included 89 participants from the U.S., Canada, and Israel, who were evaluated for PTSD by a clinician, and filled out a questionnaire called the EAT-26, which is used to assess eating disorders. Then, participants underwent three 8-hour sessions of either MDMA-assisted therapy, or a placebo with therapy. After the study, participants filled out the EAT-26 again.
In a paper published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, the researchers report that after treatment, participants who received MDMA-assisted therapy had lower EAT-26 scores compared with participants who received a placebo. But one big caveat: of the 89 participants in the study, only 13 had initial EAT-26 scores in the range that would clinically qualify as having an eating disorder. Another 28 scored in a range that suggests they might be “at risk” for an eating disorder. Altogether, that means fewer than half of the participants in the study showed symptoms of eating disorders — a fairly small number. The authors write that further investigation of MDMA-assisted therapy for eating disorders is underway, but it seems unlikely to address the small sample size issue; according to that clinical trial’s entry in the National Institutes of Health’s database, that study will enroll just 12 participants.
Psychedelics in the Peach State? Georgia joined Washington, Utah, Virginia, Colorado, Maine, Utah, Missouri, Rhode Island, and Connecticut when legislators introduced a new psychedelics bill earlier in March. The state’s HR 896, introduced by a bipartisan group of legislators, would establish a study committee to investigate the use of psychedelic treatments for veterans diagnosed with depression and PTSD. This follows in the footsteps of states like Texas, which has passed its own bill mandating more research into psychedelic therapy. (See The Microdose’s 5 Questions for Lynnette Averill for more.) Marijuana Moment reported on Tuesday that the Georgia bill is headed to the House Rules Committee.
A lay of the land. Mental Health advocacy group BrainFutures has released a 160-page report titled “Psychedelic Medicine: A Review of Clinical Research for a Class of Rapidly Emerging Behavioral Health Interventions,” which gives a bird’s eye view of key issues in the field, summaries of clinical trials, and details on the history, pharmacology, and potential applications for specific psychedelics, including LSD, MDMA, and ibogaine. Each section of the report begins with a figure representing the number of publications in the National Institutes of Health’s research database PubMed that mention that drug: while some drugs, like mescaline or ayahuasca, have seen multiple spikes in research interest since the 1950s, others, like ketamine, have seen a huge surge of interest mainly in the last decade.
Canada’s Globe and Mail reports on the potential benefits and risks of ketamine, and Toronto-based Field Trip’s role in what it calls the “volatile psychedelic sector.”
Stanford professors Boris Heifets, Patricia Suppes, and Gianni Glick teach Psych 215: Introduction to Psychedelic Medicine. Heifets has shared videos of course lectures — including guest lectures from other researchers — in a Twitter thread.
A correction: In Monday’s 5 Questions for Lynnette Averill, we mischaracterized esketamine as “a molecule that is the mirror image of ketamine.” Generic ketamine is actually a mixture of esketamine and arketamine, which are mirror images of one another. Also, we wrote that esketamine can cost ten times as much as generic ketamine, but the disparity in cost is often much greater. Generic, injectable ketamine can cost under a dollar per treatment session, whereas Spravato nasal spray (esketamine) costs upwards of $500 per treatment session. The 5 Questions post has been updated.
You’re all caught up! Have a great weekend. Stay tuned for a new 5 Questions on Monday.
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