Veterans Affairs Secretary vows to “get to the yes” on psychedelics; Colorado licenses first psilocybin healing center; Perceived effects of psychedelics on sex
Plus: The State of Psychedelics, and volatile psychedelics stocks
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.
Veterans Affairs Secretary vows to “get to the yes” on psychedelic treatment for veterans
In an episode of former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan’s podcast released on Monday, Ryan and new Veterans Affairs (VA) Secretary Doug Collins discussed psychedelics at length, providing the first concrete insights into what high-level officials in the Trump administration are discussing about how and where these substances fit into their plans. Like Ryan, Collins is also a military veteran — he served in the Air Force, then became a lawyer, and has served in both the Georgia House and U.S. Congress.
In the interview, Collins highlighted the VA’s clinical trials, which are studying the use of psychedelics including psilocybin and MDMA in treating PTSD and depression. Collins told Ryan that the treatment “is working, we’re seeing tremendous change.” He also reported that two weeks ago he and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. met and talked about psychedelics and how treatments are being hamstrung by Congress and existing laws. Collins said he was looking into whether they could expand psychedelics programs using Right to Try laws, which allow terminally ill people access to experimental drugs.
Collins characterized “mindset change” as a major challenge to access to psychedelic treatments, and he expressed his belief that the potential rewards of psychedelic treatments were worth the risk. “What I’m facing almost all the time is, ‘Well, you can do that, but there’s a risk.’ Getting up out of bed in the morning and going to the bathroom and taking a shower is a risk, I’m gonna fall and bust my head and die,” Collins told Ryan.
Ryan brought up the possibility of setting up “voucher programs” where the VA pays for veterans to try psychedelic treatments through non-profit organizations. Collins said it was a possibility, and said he was dedicated to shifting the VA attorneys’ mindsets to “get to the yes.” He also said he and Kennedy have a “partnership” to continue research into psychedelics and to potentially involve the Department of Defense as well. He vowed to gather more information and then go to Congress and ask for more resources, if necessary.
Colorado’s Natural Medicine program licenses first psilocybin healing center
Last Friday, Colorado’s Natural Medicine program issued the state’s first license to a healing center called The Center Origin, located in downtown Denver. Co-founder Mikki Vogt told The Microdose that the center hopes to be serving clients by the end of the month, but that it is currently lacking state-legal access to psilocybin mushrooms. Thus far, no mushroom cultivators or testing laboratories have been licensed.
According to a database run by Colorado’s Department of Revenue, the agency that licenses Natural Medicine businesses, there are currently 36 other pending applications, including 19 other centers, 12 cultivation facilities, 4 product manufacturers, and one testing facility.
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Perceived impact of psychedelics on relationships and sex
Stories of how psychedelics have strengthened relationships, saved marriages, or improved couples’ sex lives abound in popular media. A new study published in The Journal of Sex Research set out to gather data on sexuality and intimacy, surveying 581 people who reported using psychedelics. The survey included general questions about participants’ psychedelics use, and also asked questions about how the drugs affected their relationships, gender identity, sexual orientation, and interest in “non-normative relationships,” including having multiple partners.
Overall, 70% of participants said they felt that their psychedelic use had changed their feelings about sex and sexuality, both in the short-term during trips (65%) as well as in the long term (53%). Around a third of participants reported being more attracted to their partners during a psychedelic trip, and a quarter said that enhanced attraction lasted beyond their trip as well. In replies to open-ended questions about how psychedelics affected gender and sexuality, some respondents said the drugs made them feel more open and free to express themselves, and to rejecting the idea of the gender binary. “I am female. Yet, with psychedelics I identify as male. This has not changed my sexual orientation. Heterosexual. I would describe it as waves from feminine to masculine, at times [tending] heavily masculine,” one woman wrote.
Proposed psychedelic task force in North Carolina; Colorado governor signs COMPASS’s synthetic psilocybin trigger bill while Virginia governor vetoes it
Last week, North Carolina senators Bobby Hanig (R) and Sophia Chitlik (D) introduced Senate Bill 568, which would establish a task force to “assess the potential use of psychedelic medicine in addressing the state’s ongoing mental health crisis” and make recommendations to the state about licensing and insurance requirements for psychedelics, should any be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The task force must submit a report by December 1, 2026.
Previously, we reported on trigger bills proposed by lobbyists from the company Compass in Colorado, Virginia, and Kansas, which propose that each state would allow clinicians to prescribe “crystalline polymorphic psilocybin” (Colorado, Kansas) or proprietary “COMP360” (Virginia), should the drug be approved by the FDA. While the Kansas bill has yet to move forward, both Virginia’s and Colorado’s legislatures passed their versions of the bill. Last week, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin vetoed his state’s bill, while in Colorado, Governor Jared Polis signed his state’s bill into law.
Volatile psychedelics stocks
It’s a turbulent time for the stock market, and that includes psychedelics companies’ stock prices. Compared to this time last year, Compass Pathways’ stock is down 70%, reaching a new 52-week low last week. Last month, the company published results from COMP 004, an open-label study that gave participants from two earlier psilocybin studies a 25mg dose of psilocybin a year after their previous treatment. Overall, the researchers concluded that the follow-up dose might help maintain antidepressant effects for longer, but the varying treatment groups and study designs of those two previous studies, combined with the fact that COMP 004 represented only a subset of participants from those studies, made for some difficult-to-interpret results. The results of the study are unlikely to help woo new investors after the company announced delays in its ongoing clinical trial results and laid off a third of its workforce.
Additionally, Cybin’s stock is down over 60%, with MindMed down 40% and atai down 21%. Recently, atai’s founder Christian Angermayer announced the company would embrace the cryptocurrency Bitcoin among its investments in hope that it would generate cash for the company. He later wrote that both psychedelics and bitcoin “stand for freedom.”
Altered States, a podcast about psychedelics produced by PRX and the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, has been nominated for a Webby Award in the science & education podcasts category. It’s also up for The Webby People’s Voice Award — vote for it through April 17 here: vote.webbyawards.com
For Vice, Mattha Busby investigates the history of the ayahuasca retreat center Soul Quest, and its founder Chris Young. In 2018, 22-year-old Brandon Begley died during a retreat; after a lawsuit, Young and SoulQuest were ordered last year to pay $15 million to Begley’s family.
In mid-March, a group called the Psychedelic Safety Institute held the first-ever Psychedelic Safety Summit at UC Berkeley, with advisory support from the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. Psychedelic Alpha’s Josh Hardman summarized the meeting, which hosted over 150 invitees, including representatives from psychedelics companies Compass, MindMed, and Lykos, as well as “psychedelic industry figures, researchers of various stripes, psychedelic harm reductionists, Indigenous people, government workers, and others,” Hardman writes. He also reports that the event featured “an undeniable undercurrent of suspicion.” Fellow attendee Jules Evans writes in his newsletter Ecstatic Integration that the gathering underscored the field’s need for “collaboration, coordination and joined-up strategy” that might also come with “game theory calculations - is this process generative or extractive? Zero-sum or non-zero-sum? Will generosity be reciprocated or exploited? Is this person or organisation a giver or a taker?”
Last week, pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturing company Benuvia announced that the National Institute on Drug Abuse had awarded it a five-year contract to synthesize high-purity, research grade psilocybin.
Slate’s podcast What Next: TBD featured journalist Shayla Love talking about ketamine, and Silicon Valley leaders such as Elon Musk’s use of the drug.
Big Think profiles cognitive scientist and philosopher Susan Blackmore, who speaks about the philosophy of tripping, including the idea that consciousness is just a form of “controlled hallucination.”
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