This column is a collaboration with DoubleBlind, a print magazine and media company at the forefront of the psychedelic movement.
This fall, the federal government granted researchers funding to study the therapeutic potential of a classic psychedelic for the first time in 50 years. The National Institutes of Health granted Johns Hopkins Medicine, in collaboration with University of Alabama at Birmingham and New York University, $4 million to investigate if psilocybin — one of the primary psychoactive ingredients in psychedelic mushrooms — can help people quit smoking.
“This is a huge step for really solidifying the science [behind psychedelic research],” says principal investigator Matthew Johnson, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University. “NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research not just in the United States, but in the world and, in fact, the majority of the research upon which any pharmaceutical company is operating has been funded largely through NIH.”
We’re now amidst what many are referring to as the “Psychedelic Renaissance.” Around the time President Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act into law in 1970, the flourishing research into psychedelics as therapeutic tools almost entirely stopped. Then, beginning in the 1990s with a study looking at DMT, and picking up in the 2000s with research at Johns Hopkins University looking at psilocybin for depression and anxiety in terminally ill patients, an abundance of psychedelic research began again — but it’s been funded privately, through philanthropy and investments.
Clinical trials are expensive. The median cost for developing a new drug in the U.S. is $985 million, according to a study published in the medical journal JAMA. NIH was a major funder of the early research that showed the promise of psychedelics for mental health decades ago — they once funded more than 130 studies just looking at LSD. But amid the political and media frenzy surrounding psychedelics, which ultimately led to the signing of the Controlled Substances Act, NIH, in large part, stopped funding psychedelic research, too. The psychedelic renaissance is now several decades old — and growing exponentially, with a wave of for-profit psychedelic drug development companies now raising millions of dollars to take various psychedelic compounds through the FDA approval process and get them to market.
“A lot of folks say, ‘How do you get past DEA [the Drug Enforcement Administration] and FDA? They’ve been onboard for decades now. If you have your protocols right, the t’s crossed and i’s dotted, they’re going to approve your protocol,” says Johnson. “The public still hasn’t gotten that in terms of the government, the funding side of the government has been last to the party.”
Luckily for researchers like Johnson, that seems to finally be changing. The grant that he and his fellow researchers received came…
Read more:U.S. Government Funds First Therapeutic Psilocybin Research in 50 Years