Two psilocybin bills progress in Massachusetts and Washington’s King County passes deprioritization proposal; New Mexico psilocybin program proposes new rules
Plus: AbbVie-acquired psychedelics company raises $60 million; Tracking psychoactive use via European wastewater; and selection bias in psychedelic studies
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 psilocybin bills progress in Massachusetts; Washington’s King County passes deprioritization proposal
The Massachusetts House Committee on Mental Health, Substance Use, and Recovery advanced two psilocybin bills last week. H.2203 would establish a pilot program run by the Department of Public Health to allow people with PTSD and other conditions to access psilocybin services, while H.4200 would establish a pilot program allowing licensed mental health treatment facilities to administer psilocybin.
In a press release from Mass Healing, an advocacy group whose leaders have been pushing for psychedelics reform in the state for years, the organization emphasized “the need for passage of a bill exploring therapies beyond psilocybin alone, including ibogaine.” In a LinkedIn post, Mass Healing co-founder thanked psychedelic advocacy organizations VETS and Americans For Ibogaine for their support, and pointed to testimony last fall from other groups, like MAPS, Clusterbusters, and Law Enforcement Action Partnership, as being influential in the bill’s advancement.
Washington State’s King County Council voted 6-2 to pass a motion stating the council’s support for continued entheogen-related research, and requesting that the investigation, arrest, and prosecution of “entheogen related activities” be among the county sheriff’s lowest priorities. Seattle, King County’s largest city, has already passed a similar motion, as well as other Washington cities like Tacoma, Olympia, and Port Townsend. King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn was one of the two councilmembers who voted against the motion, writing in a press release that “the State of Oregon experimented with full drug decriminalization in 2021. It failed so spectacularly and was so unpopular the state had to reverse course and re-criminalize in 2024.” Dunn’s statement incorrectly describes Oregon’s policies and inaccurately conflates them with the motion proposed in King County. Oregon voters passed a measure (110) in 2021 that lowered penalties for many drug-related offenses and provided an opportunity to waive some charges if those charged sought help from a drug hotline, but this did not constitute a “full drug decriminalization.” Meanwhile, King County’s policy calls for a deprioritization of county sheriff resources.
Unlike King County’s policy, Oregon’s Measure 110 included not just entheogens — a term which typically encompasses psychedelic substances such as psilocybin and DMT — but a wide variety of non-psychedelic drugs, including heroin and fentanyl. Indeed, in 2024, the Oregon legislature passed legislation reversing Measure 110 (for more on this, read our 5 Questions interview with attorney Jon Dennis); the bill’s supporters pointed to a rise in fentanyl overdose deaths in the state, despite evidence that decriminalization efforts and fentanyl deaths are not correlated.
Dunn’s statement reflects a common stumbling block in conversations around drug decriminalization: ambiguities regarding the definition of “decriminalization.” So-called decrim can mean changing the legal status of drug use, possession, transportation, or even sale so that they have no or decreased legal consequences (as in Oregon’s Measure 110), but it can also refer to a governing body directing local law enforcement to deprioritize the enforcement of existing drug laws (as King County’s proposal does).
New Mexico psilocybin program proposes new rules
New Mexico’s medical psilocybin program recently released a draft of proposed standards for psilocybin producers and testing labs. Some highlights:
Dual ownership is not permitted; people who apply for a permit for one business may not have an ownership interest in another psilocybin business applying for a permit.
Synthetic psilocybin is prohibited, as are pesticides
Product packaging “shall not feature a design that is attractive to minors,” and must list total psilocybin and psilocin amounts
Testing for adulterants like bacteria and heavy metals, as well as pesticides
Businesses must have permits to transport psilocybin, and while doing so, they have to have the psilocybin in a locked container in a car with an alarm system
These are the first proposed rules for New Mexico’s Medical Psilocybin Program, which is set to launch later this year. Program staff will hold a hearing to discuss the proposed rules on April 24, 2026 in Santa Fe.
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AbbVie-acquired psychedelics company raises $60 million
New York-based psychedelics company Gilgamesh announced Tuesday that it had raised $60 million in its Series A financing round. This comes on the heels of news that its lead product, bretisilocin, was added to the European Medicines Agency’s list of priority medicines. Bretisilocin is chemically similar to DMT, but engineered to provide a roughly two-hour trip, rather than the approximately 15 minute duration of a typical DMT trip. The EMA’s designation means the drug will have an expedited drug application process.
The $60 million raised was the first formal round of financing after pharmaceutical company AbbVie acquired Gilgamesh’s bretisilocin program for up to $1.2 billion around six months ago. Gilgamesh is also developing what it bills as a “cardio-safe” ibogaine analog; a Phase 1 trial investigating the drug, GM-3009, is expected to begin this year.
Tracking psychoactive use via European wastewater
Wastewater analysis has been around for decades, but it became better known to the public after the rise of COVID-19, as researchers used wastewater to track the spread of the virus. A group analyzing sewage in 19 cities across Europe first formed in 2010, and since then, they have been tracking illicit drug use — specifically, cocaine, cannabis, methamphetamine, amphetamine, MDMA, and ketamine — through studying European wastewater. Last week, the European Union Drugs Agency released data that the group collected in 2025 across 115 European cities.
Overall, the researchers report that, unsurprisingly, metabolites of illicit drugs were found in all of the cities. From 2024 to 2025, the amount of MDMA in wastewater decreased by about 16%, but the overall amounts of ketamine increased by 41%. Belgium and the Netherlands seem to be hotspots for both, and many cities in those countries seem to have higher loads of MDMA or ketamine use over the weekend, as opposed to on weekdays.
The researchers note that the methods associated with wastewater analysis as a form of drug monitoring are still being improved. “Translating the total consumed amounts into the
corresponding number of average doses is complicated, as drugs can be taken by different routes and in amounts that vary widely, and purity levels fluctuate,” they write. Still, they say, the studies they’ve done so far present a “promising” method of monitoring drug use, a notoriously hard-to-study area.
Selection bias in psychedelic studies
Conducting psychedelics clinical trials is no small feat — only select institutions have the funds and resources to apply for the proper licenses to store and administer controlled substances and to obtain the required regulatory approvals of the research. It’s much easier to conduct studies of self reports of psychedelics users about their previous experiences, so many modern studies rely on survey data instead. But who chooses to participate in such surveys might represent a specific subset of people who are more enthusiastic about psychedelics than the average person.
A new study recently published in Journal of Psychoactive Drugs dug into this question by recruiting over 1100 participants to complete a survey about psychedelics. About half of the participants were what the researchers considered “psychedelic enthusiasts” — they were recruited via social media accounts of a psychedelic science nonprofit, while the other half represented what the researchers considered the “general population”; they had psychedelic experience but were recruited via an online survey platform.
Participants were asked questions like how their most meaningful psychedelic experiences affect their relationships and what their motivations are for using psychedelics, as well as a standard personality trait questionnaire. Overall, the researchers found that the psychedelic enthusiasts were much more likely to say that their psychedelic experiences influenced their quality of life in the long-term, even when controlling for other variables like personality traits. They conclude that recruiting participants through psychedelic groups can bias samples, as it likely favors people who have had good psychedelic experiences in the past. “Individuals who have had unremarkable or adverse psychedelic experiences are unlikely to be recruited through such channels,” the authors write, so studies that seek to represent the general public should take steps to recruit outside of these channels.
Australia became the first country to allow physicians to legally prescribe psilocybin and MDMA to patients, but the high cost is preventing many from seeking treatment, The New York Times reports.
What are the legal ramifications of operating a foreign psychedelic retreat center? Attorney Jason Adelstone details a range of liability considerations in Harris Sliwoski’s Psychedelics Law Blog.
The Wall Street Journal reports on the rise of mail-order ketamine and on the death of Tricia Anne Dewey, whose family is suing a telehealth company called Better U after it provided a ketamine prescription to Dewey, which ultimately played a role in her death.
Tech founder turned longevity influencer Bryan Johnson livestreamed his 5-MeO-DMT trip on X, during which UCSF psychedelics researcher Robin Carhart-Harris joined him on the livestream. Johnson has been experimenting with psychedelics in an effort to boost longevity. In November, he also took large doses of psilocybin, livetweeting and then streaming his trips.
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