Notes from a conference on psychedelic medicines — At this week’s Psychedelic Therapeutics and Drug Development Conference, the vast majority of the speakers were white. The vast majority of the audience was white. The vast majority of people who have participated in clinical trials of psychedelic medicines that were discussed at the conference? Yes, they were white, too. …

Foundations, individuals, companies and government fund research. “Everyone’s got an angle.” — By any measure, Matthew Johnson is one of the most influential scientists in the world of psychedelics. He is a professor of psychiatry and a leading researcher at Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, the largest psychedelic research institution in the U.S., where more than 40 physicians, psychologists…

The author of Brave New World was enchanted by mescaline and frustrated by the “mesozoic reptiles” of philanthropy. — Foundations can change the world with the grants that they make. Grants they don’t make matter, too. This is a story about one: A proposal to research psychedelic drugs that the Ford Foundation rejected many years ago and how the world might be different had Ford said yes. The year…

The National Institutes of Health is funding research to see if a psychedelic drug, along with therapy, can help smokers quit. — It’s crazy hard to quit smoking. More than half of adult smokers try to quit in any given year, according to the most recent data from the CDC, and fewer than one in ten succeed. Nicotine patches, nicotine gums, nicotine lozenges, medicines like varenicline, cognitive behavioral therapy–nothing works especially well.

But investors like venture capital firm Palo Santo are diving in — Until recently, scientists who wanted to research psychedelic medicines depended on private philanthropy. Little or no government money was available, and investors were reluctant to support the development of drugs that were stigmatized and illegal. My, how things have changed, and quickly. Last year, nearly $2 billion in capital poured…

A drug war victim, he talks about 20 years in prison, Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and the psychedelic renaissance — America’s war on drugs is not just misguided; it is misnamed. It is, in truth, a war on people — millions of people who, in a just society, would have the right to decide what to put into their bodies. …

The 2020s will be the decade when psychedelic medicines shake up the way doctors treat an astonishing range of mental disorders. This decade, too, will see millions more people turning to psychedelics to pursue personal growth, or simply to revel in the pleasures of getting high. It’s increasingly clear, in…

A clinical trial using MDMA-assisted therapy to treat veterans with PTSD is coming to a veterans hospital in the Bronx — A hundred years ago — before anyone put together the initials PTSD — a public hospital in the Bronx, NY, began to care for World War I soldiers who suffered from “mental and nervous disorders.” Shell shock, it was called. It was notoriously hard to treat. PTSD remains so. That…

It could help people suffering from trauma, people who drink too much, couples in therapy and, importantly, the rest of us. — In 1976, Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, a brilliant and eccentric chemist who concocted hundreds of psychoactive drugs in a home-based laboratory in the hills of Berkeley, California, cooked up a batch of MDMA, the drug that later became known as Ecstasy or Molly. He then tried some, as was his habit.