What is one psychedelics story you will be following in 2025?
To kick off the new year, we at The Microdose asked a handful of journalists who closely follow and regularly report on the psychedelics beat to answer a few questions: What is one psychedelics story you will be following in 2025? Why?
These are smart, thoughtful people who ask a lot of questions. Here is what they are thinking about for the year ahead.
Erin Schumaker, future of health reporter at Politico
After a roller-coaster year for psychedelics policy, my sights are set on the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2025.
My conversations with members of Congress, researchers and lobbyists early this year returned to a single question: Would the Food and Drug Administration approve Lykos' MDMA-assisted therapy application?
It was an inflection point. When the FDA turned down Lykos' application in August, everything shifted. Lykos laid off staff and gutted top leadership. Competitors turned skittish. My conversations now increasingly focused on the VA, which for the first time since the 1960s was putting money behind studying psychedelics.
With a pause at the FDA, my sources said, the VA was now the primary place in government where psychedelics could move. The agency also had a secret weapon: VA Undersecretary for Health Dr. Shereef Elnahal, who championed the agency's psychedelics research and worked behind the scenes with lawmakers to advance it.
But with President-elect Donald Trump's win, Elnahal may soon be out of a job.
If Trump asks him to stay, Elnahal told me he would gladly do so, and would further the psychedelics research his agency's doing now. With or without him, the VA's research will continue, he stressed. Studies are ongoing and millions of dollars in VA-funded psychedelics research are slated to be awarded next year. But if Trump replaces Elnahal, as he is likely to do, those who have worked with the undersecretary say it will take more effort to advance psychedelics without him.
Veterans advocates are cautiously optimistic about Republicans controlling Congress and the White House in 2025. Should Trump want to boost psychedelic medicine, he has allies in Congress, including Reps. Jack Bergman (R-Mich.), Morgan Luttrell (R-Texas) and Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), who are eager to fast-track approval of MDMA-assisted therapy for veterans.
Trump hasn't taken a position on psychedelics, but the president-elect has surrounded himself with advisors, like Elon Musk, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., his pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, who are critical of the FDA's approach to regulating them.
I'll be watching closely to see whether Kennedy's "Make America Healthy Again" movement embraces psychedelics as part of its wellness and natural medicine agenda.
Shayla Love, staff writer at The Atlantic
Last year, when the Food and Drug Administration was considering MDMA-assisted therapy for approval, I was hoping to get an answer to a longstanding question of mine: how would the FDA regulate the psychotherapy paired with the drug? After the FDA’s rejection, my attention shifted to a broader concern—will there be a turn away from the “therapy” part of psychedelic-assisted therapy, if including the therapy makes it more difficult to get medical approval?
We’ve already seen companies highlighting, as a positive, that their drugs don’t need psychotherapy. There’s been speculation that Lykos’ next submission to the FDA won’t be seeking approval for therapy plus drug, but midomafetamine capsules alone. This echoes what happened in the 1960s, when the FDA began requiring data from studies that used placebo groups and blinding. The early wave of psychedelic researchers struggled to fit psychedelic-assisted therapy into that framework, and the historian Matthew Oram has argued that researchers focused less on therapy, which made the interventions less effective.
What people do while they’re taking a psychedelic drug continues to be inconsistent between practitioners, guides, or therapists. I think we don’t know if the therapy can be perfectly codified, or if there are certain therapeutic modalities that definitely work better than others. In 2025, I’ll be watching how companies pushing forward psychedelic drugs for FDA approval include—or don’t include—psychotherapy.
Chris Walker, freelance audio producer in Denver, Colorado.
Colorado is on the cusp of opening its first “healing centers” in 2025, places where state-licensed facilitators can administer psilocybin journeys to paying clients. Similar to Oregon, Colorado regulators spent about two years figuring out the rules around this program after voters approved it through a statewide ballot measure. Unlike Oregon, Colorado’s Proposition 122 also decriminalized various naturally-occurring psychedelics, including the ability to “gift” them.
One result of that gifting has been a burgeoning gray market. Type in “mushroom stickers” on Facebook Marketplace, and you’ll enter the equivalent of an online dispensary for psilocybin products, including chocolate bars. “High quality ✨🍄 gifts with every purchase of a sticker,” one ad reads besides photos of various mushroom stickers. Sean McAllister, a lawyer and Prop 122’s co-author, told me it’s reminiscent of what used to happen around “gifted” medical marijuana, before Colorado authorities tamped down on that.
So, there’s already a legally-questionable market for mushrooms. But the area I expect to see even more tension around is psychedelic guides offering paid journeys. This could present a challenge to the livelihoods of the state-regulated healing centers that are about to come online, which will likely charge thousands of dollars per guided session to justify costs. Unlicensed operators don’t have to follow as many rules and they will likely charge less. In 2023, Colorado lawmakers seemed to anticipate problems around this and passed SB23 290, which restricts unlicensed players from advertising while clarifying they can only accept payments for “bonafide harm reduction” or “bonafide support services.” The results have been predictable; search online, and you can now find psychedelic sessions that promise gifted shrooms, trip sitters, and—surprise!— “harm reduction” and “support services.”
McAllister told me Colorado’s Department of Revenue recently sent cease-and-desist letters to over a dozen operators who are taking payments while offering psychedelics. As for whether this will escalate to enforcement actions next year? “I don’t know, but I hope we don’t get to the point where there’s a crackdown,” McAllister told me. “The whole point of the initiative was to stop having people arrested for possessing and sharing natural medicines.”
Rachel Nuwer, science journalist, author of I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World
The past 12 months have been tumultuous for the field, most notably with the FDA’s decision not to approve Lykos’ application for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. My primary interest as a journalist is in science, but in 2025 I will be closely following how politics might shape the MDMA story. In particular, there is buzz about what Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s potential D.H.H.S. appointment might mean for the treatment’s approval. If the new administration went so far as to directly overturn the F.D.A.’s prior decision, I would have concerns about the role overt political interference might come to play in what should ideally be an evidence-driven drug development and approval process.
The new administration could also expand access to psychedelics by amending Right-to-Try regulations to include Schedule I substances under clinical investigation. I can imagine a scenario in which people with treatment-resistant PTSD—a potentially life-threatening illness—are permitted under this legislation to undertake MDMA-assisted therapy.
If the FDA’s decision stands, then I will be eager to learn the specifics of what regulators determine is needed from Lykos. Will it be as straightforward as collecting additional data on things like durability and measures of abuse potential? Or will it be something more involved?
Likewise, I look forward to seeing the results of the external review that Lykos has agreed to undertake of its videos from all Phase III therapy sessions. Among other things, that review could give more insight into therapist conduct. Throughout 2024, unsubstantiated allegations of widespread bias and abuse in Lykos’ Phase III trials were spread and widely repeated in the mainstream media, complicating the drug approval process. If the video review fails to uncover evidence of wrong-doing, will that change the public narrative or temper any of the growing divisiveness in the field?
Grant Stringer, formerly a freelance journalist covering Oregon’s psilocybin industry, now an enterprise reporter at the Bay Area News Group
So far about 7,000 people have taken mushrooms legally in Oregon, the world’s first regulated psilocybin market. That number is either revolutionary or totally underwhelming, depending on who you ask. People with depression and anxiety from across the country, and the world, are going to Oregon. Medical emergencies and disasters are very rare. Public health researchers are watching closely and will have new demographic data to parse in 2025, thanks to a new state law requiring the collection of information from clients on such things as race, ethnicity, disability status, income and the reason the person is seeking psilocybin services.
But a legal shroom trip is still a luxury in Oregon. One trip costs up to $2,000. Advocates are launching scholarships to cover costs for lower-income folks. Bigger companies might be able to cut costs by operating at scale, unlike the mom-and-pop shops we’ve seen so far. We’ll see if that happens. Up until now, only Oregon residents could operate service centers. But starting in January, out-of-state entrepreneurs can officially set up licensed shroom centers in the state. Is Big Mushroom on its way? We might have a better sense of what that looks like in 2025.
Sam Reisman, senior cannabis and psychedelics reporter at Law360
In 2025, I will be following how our federal trial and appellate courts rule on the several psychedelics-related matters before them, and what the implications of those rulings will be for different modes of lawful access to these substances.
We are awaiting a ruling from the Ninth Circuit which could allow physicians to administer psilocybin to terminally ill patients under federal and state Right-to-Try laws. We are seeing multiple lawsuits across the country from religious organizations seeking to assert their right to use psychedelic substances as sacraments. And there is a pending lawsuit in Oregon federal court that aims to expand that state’s pioneering psilocybin program to patients who are unable to visit a licensed clinic.
In short, the legal right to access psychedelics via multiple avenues is in the balance as these cases play out. As a legal reporter, I am particularly interested in how attorneys shape their arguments and navigate the inherent tensions between their advocacy for lawful use and the blanket prohibition of the federal Controlled Substances Act.
Mattha Busby, freelance health and drugs reporter
We already know about dodgy retreat centers and bad shamans, but as more and more people seek the psychedelic experience in the US and abroad, I suspect that greater attention will be paid to the growing issue of psychedelic-related harm.
Regarding ayahuasca, there is little historical precedent for the scale of some of the mass-attended ceremonies which are taking place today – whether in Brazil at Santo Daime churches or in the US, Costa Rica, and elsewhere – and there are questions over the extent to which participants are fully informed about what they are stepping into.
When anthropologist Marlene Dobkin de Rios undertook fieldwork in the Amazon during the 1970s, investigating the use of ayahuasca, she found that some notable uses of psychedelic potion were for sorcery. Sending or removing curses, love magic, that sort of thing, with conflict between shamans who are believed to energetically attack each other from afar reportedly common too.
Later, in 2004, anthropologists Neil Whitehead and Robin Wright published the anthology In Darkness and Secrecy, which further detailed the practice of so-called “dark shamanism.” The focus on love and light, and the erasure of the darker aspects, in popular representations of shamanism is “not only a vain self-deception”, they wrote, but “a recapitulation of colonial ways of knowing through both the denial of radical cultural difference and the refusal to think through its consequences.”
Neoshamans today are conjuring new hybrid methods of psychedelic therapy combining Indigenous shamanism with other modalities, including methods from other lineages for “entity extraction” which are largely untested in combination with psychedelics. Similarly, some retreat centers are marketing unproven stem cell treatments and a whole host of other little-understood add-ons to guests while they are still under the influence of psychedelics.
A new class of psychedelic nouveau riche entrepreneurs is emerging, among their number some wildly successful medicine people. With that, for some, will come increased avarice and greed. Naturally, when issues do happen, there will be an economic imperative to keep those quiet – as we have already seen.
Jane C. Hu, senior writer The Microdose
With the road to FDA approval uncertain and other federal powers in flux, psychedelics advocates’ best chance at widening access to the drugs may be a state-by-state approach. Oregon Psilocybin Services is entering its third year of operation and Colorado is launching its Natural Medicine program, so the question remains: which state is next? Advocates had been hopeful that Massachusetts would be the third, but 57% of voters rejected Question 4, a ballot initiative that would have created a program allowing the state-legal use of psilocybin, ibogaine, mescaline, and DMT.
There are a few states with proposals on the horizon. In Illinois, lawmakers have proposed the Compassionate Use and Research of Entheogens (CURE) Act, which would create a state psilocybin program. New Jersey, too, has a similar bill under consideration, and New York lawmakers have proposed a program that looks a little different from Oregon or Colorado’s: people could apply for a permit to buy psilocybin mushrooms from licensed sellers, but only if they undergo a health screening and drug education course first.
But so far, bills proposing full-blown psychedelic programs have not had much luck in state legislatures. For instance, California legislators have been trying for years to pass psychedelic legislation without success. There are now rumblings that advocates in California are going to launch a psychedelics ballot initiative that voters would consider in 2026.
