Psychedelic science is doing well, companies are doing badly – 03/30/2023 – Psychedelic Turn

There are those who say that the bubble of enthusiasm burst with advances in psychedelic science, in its resurgence in medicine less than two decades ago. Before the War on Drugs, around 40,000 people were treated with mind-altering compounds, but between 1970 and 2000 clinical studies ebbed under the prohibitionist heel, to return with force from 2010.

US companies and state governments are struggling this year, it’s true, to rehabilitate substances like psilocybin, DMT, MDMA and LSD as drugs. But the research follows its methodical course to make them therapeutic alternatives against disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress.

If it’s to favor bad news, just turn your eyes to startups and investors in the psychedelic sector, which until 2021 were boiling. Since then, several buckets of cold water have passed: atai Life Sciences, a giant in the field, cut 30% of its personnel and saw its shares retreat from US$ 5.60 to US$ 1.20; in Cybin, 15% cut and retreat from US$ 1.14 to US$ 0.41; on MindMed, from $19.95 to $2.85.

The Psychedelic Invest Index is down 15.13% over the last 12 months. It is estimated that only 8 out of 10 startups will survive in the market.

Synthesis, from the Netherlands, which planned to open a psilocybin clinic in Oregon, the US state where mushrooms psilocybe cubensis became legal this year. Two hundred students enrolled in his course to train psilocybin facilitators were left on hand.

In the second half of March, units in 13 US states of two large ketamine treatment chains, Ketamine Wellness Centers and Field Trip, closed. The analgesic is not a classic psychedelic, but the dissociative effect of off-label use has shown good results against depression.

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (Maps) has had a hard time and is offering to indirectly sell shares of its trading arm Maps PBC. In its 37 years of existence, the NGO raised US$ 140 million (over R$ 700 million) from philanthropists to finance clinical studies that put the drug MDMA on the verge of approval by the FDA to treat post-traumatic stress.

Now, however, founder Rick Doblin struggles to get the necessary resources to implement the treatment on the market, as soon as the FDA license comes out, possibly in 2024. the right to receive shares of Maps PBC in exchange.

There are many bad news in the corporate sphere, but they may not represent more than a predictable accommodation in a market that is effervescent with exaggerated promises of profits. In parallel, in the legal and scientific fields, things are not going too badly.

In addition to Washington DC, Oregon and Colorado, which have decriminalized P. cubensis psychedelic mushrooms, 15 other American states are preparing or considering legislation in the liberalizing sense, such as California, Florida and New York. Several cities have already taken steps in the same direction, as have the governments of Australia and Canada. The US Congress can facilitate the reclassification of psychedelics.

True, permits are being delayed to open psilocybin treatment centers in Oregon, where the state government began taking orders in January. The process is bureaucratic and expensive, which should greatly restrict access to preparation, dosing and integration sessions, a package that could cost a few thousand dollars. But there was encouraging news: the health department (OHA) has granted Satori Farms the first license to grow psychedelic fungi.

The list of universities that maintain important psychedelic research centers or groups, compiled by the Blossom website, is impressive: Johns Hopkins, Imperial College London, Arizona, California in San Diego, Berkeley, Davis and San Francisco, NYU, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Texas in Austin, Nebraska, Oregon Health and Science. Washington State. Minnesota, Columbia, Duke, Emory, Michigan, Wisconsin in Madison, Toronto, USP, UFRN, Buenos Aires, Basel, Maastricht, Leiden, Utrecht, Zurich, Manchester, Charité Berlin, Copenhagen, University College London, King’s College London, Aarhus, Monash, Sydney…

Ufa. Anyone who is surprised by the presence of Brazilian institutions on the list should know that there are more, as can be seen here. The most recent information is that Unifesp received a first installment of funding from the company Bienstar to start clinical studies with ayahuasca and mushrooms for alcoholism and smoking, respectively.

New articles about come out all the time, including Brazilian ones. The UFRN group, for example, published on the 15th, with collaborators from Germany, Spain, Ireland and Italy, an analysis on how the conversation between areas and networks of the brain intensifies after ingestion of ayahuasca. From this study comes the beautiful and eloquent image that opens this post.

The main psychedelic compound in the tea used ritually in the Santo Daime, União do Vegetal (UDV) and Barquinha churches is dimethyltryptamine (DMT). The alkaloid was also at the origin, but pure and injected into 20 volunteers, in the most talked about study in recent weeks, carried out by Imperial College in London.

The Chilean Christopher Timmermann is the first author of the article published on the 20th in the journal of the US National Academy of Sciences, PNAS, under the title “Effects of DMT on the Human Brain Evaluated via EEG-fMRI”. Also on staff are celebrities David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris, who have brought Imperial College to the forefront of psychedelic research.

They combined brain electrical signals captured by electroencephalography (EEG) with images of neuronal activation obtained with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). With this, they detected that the profound alteration of consciousness under DMT encompasses the increase in global functional connectivity of the brain accompanied by the disintegration of neural networks, reinforcing the Carhart-Harris entropic brain model to describe the psychedelic effect.

Psychedelic science is doing well, thank you, although attempts to monetize it through startups, patents, IPOs and corporations are floundering. Perhaps it is better to walk slowly, with firm steps supported by clinical data and technologies used for centuries by indigenous peoples, instead of buying the capitalist interest in the psychedelic resurgence at face value.

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NOTICE TO NAVIGATORS – Psychedelics are still experimental therapies and certainly do not constitute a panacea for all psychic disorders, nor should they be the object of self-medication. Speak with your therapist or doctor before venturing into the area.

To learn more about the history and new developments of science in this area, including in Brazil, look for my book “Psiconautas – Viagens com a Ciência Psychedelica Brasileira”.

On the tendency to legalize the therapeutic and adult use of psychedelics in the US, see the article “Cogumelos Livres” in the December 2022 issue of Piauí magazine.

Be sure to also see the articles in the series “A Ressurreição da Jurema” in Folha: