What will a Trump Administration do with psychedelics?; Massachusetts voters reject Question 4; and Oregon municipalities appear to opt-out of psilocybin services
Plus: Protecting patients from exploitation in an era of psychedelic hype
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.
What will a Trump Administration do with psychedelics?
As Donald Trump prepares to take office in January, psychedelics are likely to remain a popular issue among members of his inner circle. According to Politico, presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed last week that Trump promised him “control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH, and a few others.” (Trump’s
campaign communications director told Politico that “formal discussions of who will serve” in a Trump administration are “premature.”) In a post on X two weeks ago, Kennedy wrote that the “FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” after which he included a long list of things he believes the agency has suppressed. First on the list: psychedelics. He went on to include raw milk, sunshine, exercise, and ivermectin, a veterinary antiparasitic medication that some have used after contracting COVID-19, despite no evidence of its efficacy in treating COVID.
While Trump has not directly addressed his stance on psychedelics, vice president-elect J.D. Vance appeared on podcaster Joe Rogan’s show last week, where the two discussed the possibility of using psychedelics to treat veterans. In their conversation, Rogan summarized the FDA’s rejection of MDMA and mentioned anecdotes of veterans who had found relief in trying psilocybin. “This is the first time I’ve heard about this,” Vance claimed. He later summarized his attitude towards the issue by saying that he believed “we should be doing whatever we can” to “help veterans get the mental health treatment they need.”
Some advocates in the field appeared to see the new administration as a fresh opportunity to advance psychedelics initiatives. On Wednesday, psychedelics industry consultant Greg Ferenstein posted to X that he was collecting "a list of potential executive orders and reforms to the FDA for the next administration related to psychedelics and drug development.” He told The Microdose the list will inform a forthcoming piece for the libertarian think tank the Reason Foundation, where Ferenstein is a policy fellow.
While it isn’t clear what kind of psychedelic-related policies or directives the Trump Administration might take up, many among the MAGA donor class embrace these substances. In a piece published in The Atlantic last week, journalist Shayla Love reports:
The German psychedelic investor Christian Angermayer wrote on X that many attendees at a recent psychedelics event in San Francisco were pro-Trump, “some of them very openly.” In recent years, Silicon Valley has moved both to the right and toward psychedelics. Musk, Trump’s largest donor, has said that he has a ketamine prescription for depression, and has been reported to take other psychedelics. Rebekah Mercer, a benefactor of Breitbart News and of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, gave $1 million to MDMA research. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, has invested millions in companies researching psilocybin and other psychedelics; Thiel is also the vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance’s mentor, and was Vance’s largest donor during his 2022 Senate race.
Massachusetts voters reject Question 4
On Tuesday, Massachusetts voted to reject Question 4, a ballot measure that would have created a state-regulated psychedelics program. The state will not release official certified election results for another few weeks, but the Associated Press estimates that with more than 99% of votes in, around 57% voted no, with 43% in favor. The initiative was initially submitted by the political action committee New Approach, which was also behind successful psychedelic ballot initiatives in Oregon and Colorado. If it had passed, Massachusetts would have been the third state in a row to successfully pass a psychedelics ballot initiative. After the Food and Drug Administration rejected an application to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for the treatment of PTSD in August, some advocates were hopeful psychedelics policy could continue to advance via individual state ballot measures.
Question 4 proposed that Massachusetts spend two years establishing rules for a program to administer psilocybin, ibogaine, mescaline, and DMT. It also allowed individuals over 21 to possess, ingest, obtain, transport, and cultivate “personal use amounts” (less than two grams) of those drugs.
The race had looked tight for weeks; recent polling suggested about half of voters were opposed to Question 4, with the other half in favor or unsure.
Groups that opposed Question 4 claimed victory. The Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions, published a press release alleging that “Question 4 was never about providing health benefits to patients in need.” Instead, they claimed the measure was based on the drug industry’s “drive to make billions in profit while risking the health and safety of the public.”
The Yes on 4 campaign posted a statement on X in the waning hours of election night. “While the results today don’t look to be what we wanted, we made hugely important strides on this issue,” they wrote. “We will keep fighting to find new pathways for all those who struggle with their mental health and look forward to working with legislators in the new session to continue advocating for access, for hope, and for healing.”
“Changing laws and challenging entrenched stigmas against psychedelics isn't easy, and we have to expect some setbacks,” New Approach’s Jared Moffat told The Microdose. “While we didn't achieve our goal, the campaign created a robust public discussion around the need for access to psychedelic healing, and it galvanized public support from influential leaders, including doctors, local veterans groups, law enforcement, and elected officials such as Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congressman Seth Moulton.”
Oregon municipalities appear to opt-out of psilocybin services
During the 2020 election, Oregon voters passed Measure 109, the ballot initiative that created the state’s psilocybin program. The measure allowed municipalities to opt out of having psilocybin services, and in November 2022, as the state prepared to roll out its program, many did. That year, voters in 27 Oregon counties and dozens of cities voted to prohibit psilocybin services.
While some of those municipalities banned psilocybin outright, others passed temporary, two-year bans; on Tuesday, voters in 15 cities and one county with those temporary bans voted on whether to make their bans on psilocybin services permanent. (For a full list and forthcoming results, check out Psychedelic Alpha’s tracker.) While results will not be finalized in Oregon for another few weeks, current numbers from the Oregon Secretary of State shows that the only municipality of the 16 that might reject a ban is Nehalem, in Tillamook County, a town of around 300; with just under 200 votes counted, the results are 49.4% for a ban, and 50.6% against.
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Protecting patients from exploitation in an era of psychedelic hype
With the rising popularity of ketamine, “there is a need to protect vulnerable persons from exploitation,” write Columbia University psychotherapist Jeffrey Zabinski and medical school student Zachary Verne in a new piece published in the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics. More people are becoming interested in using ketamine for “peace and wellness,” which has led to its use in many settings, including for-profit clinics and at home via mail-order clinics. “The numerous settings in which ketamine is offered raise considerable concerns about the consistency and quality of treatment,” they write. Ketamine will likely be a model for other psychedelics, too, should they be approved by the Food and Drug Administration as pharmaceutical drugs. Ketamine is approved for use as an anesthetic and is widely used off-label to treat mental health disorders ranging from depression to OCD. The authors state their concern that a similarly loosely-controlled prescribing pattern could develop with other psychedelics, where clinicians and private companies will “develop and market their own methods of psychedelic administration without substantial evidence to support them—mirroring practices that have proliferated with ketamine.”
The authors argue that, in this rapidly changing landscape, clinicians have a responsibility to educate clients about current uses of psychedelic drugs, and that they should also “caution against perceptions that these medicines are a panacea, as well as to give clear safety recommendations for patients with clinically and psychiatrically complex illnesses.”
Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Geoff Norcross profiles the Cora Center, a psilocybin service center focused on serving BIPOC and LGBTQ+ clients.
The California Institute for Integral Studies, known for its psychedelic certificate program, will soon be the first accredited college to offer an undergraduate major in psychedelics, according to the San Francisco Standard.
Leafie visits Poppi, an “XTC shop” in the Netherlands which actually only serves candy that resembles MDMA. The exhibit is meant to ignite conversations about the legal status and use of the drug.
Another psychedelics exhibit in Norwich, England examines why people trip and the cultural context around taking the drugs, reports the New York Times.
In her newsletter Rave New World, drugs journalist Michelle Lhooq talks with The New Yorker’s Emily Witt about raves, psychedelics, and politics.
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