In April, President Trump, with psychedelic advocates HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr. and podcaster Joe Rogan at his side, signed the “Accelerating Medical Treatments for Serious Mental Illness” executive order, which dramatically decreases some drug approval times. FDA Commissioner Makary promptly issued priority review vouchers to companies that make psilocybin and the Ecstasy chemical cousin methylone.
Many public health professionals are surprised at how fast the move to legalize Schedule 1 psychedelic drugs is advancing. A lot of energy and zeal comes from psychedelic drug users themselves and their personal anecdotes, but the momentum comes from the rapidly aggregating Corporate Psychedelia and its finances.
For example, a recent forum on the website The Hill called “Rethinking Psychedelic Treatment for America’s Mental Health Crisis” was funded by Definium Therapeutics, a major psychedelic biopharm that trades on the NASDAQ, and its gee-whiz fingerprints were apparent everywhere. The publicly traded psychedelic biopharma giants Compass Pathways and Atai Life Sciences fund and sponsor health care news, forums, and videos and, in conjunction with Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and the billionaires Peter Thiel and Christian Angermayer, have created a commercialized psychedelic therapy Wild West on Wall Street replete with patent frenzies and burgeoning IPOs. The rush coincides with exasperation among veteran groups with long-term psychiatric treatment that is ineffective and even harmful, and new, shorter pathways to drug approval instituted at the FDA.
Many cite the “Wonderland Miami” psychedelic business conference, which began in 2021, as a major legitimizing force and drug excitement accelerator. Hosted by Microdose Psychedelic Insights, the yearly convocation draws hundreds of venture capitalists, thousands of participants, and even celebrities.
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is now awarding tens of millions to companies developing and testing psychedelic treatments, as is the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of NIH. The Denver startup Invi MindHealth was paid handsomely by HHS to study psilocybin and ibogaine, and even former Texas Governor Rick Perry is backing psychedelic research with his Americans for Ibogaine group. In addition to the corporate sector, psychedelic legalization represents cash and jobs to strapped local and state governments, as seen with the evolving marijuana, hemp, and CBD economics.
Press conference highlights omitted psychedelic legalization questions
On June 4 the California Coalition Against Drugs (CCAD) hosted a press conference with national and local law enforcement and community leaders to address the impending expeditious review of hallucinogens, moderated by CCAD leader Frank Lee, a vocal and successful public advocate against drug legalization. Among the speakers were cardiologist Evelyn Li and ER physician Karen Randall, addressing medical dangers of psychedelic drugs, Anne Schlafly Carpenter of the Eagle Forum, and Rev. Walter Hoye.
Joel Justice, a retired chief of police from the Ventura County Community College District and retired captain from the Los Angeles Police Department, told participants that in 2020 there were over 6,000 emergency room visits related to hallucinogens among individuals 18 to 25 in the United States, a statistic not often heard during legalization gambits. “The population most likely to use psychedelics is the population most vulnerable to the onset of serious mental illness, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration,” he said. “Approximately 2.3 million Americans ages 18 to 25 used hallucinogens in the past year.”
Greg Burt, vice president of the California Family Council, addressed the dangers of fast-tracking psychedelic drugs with approvals promised in weeks or months instead of three to four years. “These drugs can cause psychosis, permanent psychological damage, dangerous behavior. As you heard before, people do not die from overdoses of LSD; they die because they have no idea what they are doing while under the effects,” he said. “When the safety testing process bends to political pressure, everyone who trusts that process is betrayed. Families deserve to trust that when a drug is approved, it actually went through the full process. That trust is not a technicality, it is a matter of life and death.”
San Diego County’s district attorney Summer Stephan cautioned about the expansion and the normalization of the use of drugs in her region and across the United States, noting that the fast-tracked MDMA, also called Ecstasy, is a major product that shows up in many road accidents and is also linked to many sexual assaults of young girls and women.
In a written statement, the National Narcotic Officers’ Associations’ Coalition said, “We are concerned about a slippery slope in which premature normalization of psychedelic use outside established medical frameworks could outpace the evidence and create public safety and public health risks, including increased risk of misuse among youth.”
Moderator and CCAD leader Frank Lee heartily agrees. “Based on the lesson from marijuana, everybody knows that ‘medical purposes’ and ‘veterans and patients’ are mainly excuses for the drug proponents to try to force a breakthrough for the deleterious drugs. We should not be falling into the same trap again.”
Greg Burt of the California Family Council summed up the conference’s ultimate messages and warnings this way: “We urge federal authorities to hold firm, apply the same rigorous standards to psychedelics that apply to every other drug, no shortcuts, no special treatment, no political fast lanes. Our veterans deserve real and proven health, our children deserve real protection, and every family in this country deserves a drug approval process that cannot be bought.”
Martha Rosenberg is an investigative reporter whose work has appeared in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Consumer Reports, Public Citizen, the Center for Health Journalism at USC Annenberg, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, and other outlets. She studied at Rush Medical School and writes on health care, food, medicine, and public policy.
Rosenberg’s reporting has been cited by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Public Library of Science Biology, ScienceDirect, the Journal of Pain & Palliative Care Pharmacotherapy, the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, Britannica, National Geographic, Hastings Law Journal, and Wikipedia. She is the author of several books, including Multidisciplinary Management of Chronic Pain: A Practical Guide for Clinicians, Born With a Junk Food Deficiency, Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Lies, and Food, Clothes, Men, Gas and Other Problems. She publishes on Substack, OpEdNews, and her Amazon author page.
