Today a letter from a few months ago was finally publicly released. This letter shows a very important shift in how the US Federal Government is approaching psychedelic research.
Believe it or not, despite strong federal and state laws supporting the idea of a “Right to Try“, the DEA routinely blocks terminal patients from access to medicines prescribed by their doctors. Try to imagine that, here you are a dying human, all doctors have agreed that you are going to die. Then you find out that maybe you can improve your last few months of your life just a little bit with some well researched, but technically illegal, substances.
You get your hopes up. There you are, in the hospital ready to receive treatment, and the DEA breaks down the door with guns drawn and arrests you and the doctor. They take you to federal prison on a stretcher because you can’t walk, you die alone waiting for your arraignment hearing.
This is the sad reality in the United States, we have these non-life threatening, non-addictive substances with 50+ years of established medical research from labs all over the world — including millions of dollars in US federal funding from the time before the moral panic happened. And people call us the crazy ones…
We don’t blame the DEA for doing their job, but somebody needs to read the room a little bit. Arresting doctors trying to care for terminal cancer patients in 2022 just feels like a different kind of evil, even coming from the DEA.
Well that might all stop soon. This letter shows that the FDA is ready to start taking this research more seriously. Further, there is a co-sponsored, meaning both R and D are involved, bill currently working through the senate to formalize this even further. It seems odd that we need a new law to force the DEA to follow the existing laws, but here we are, welcome to America. At least it is nice to see the winds starting to change a little bit.
The FDA would have the power to force the DEA to recognize once and for all the long proven medicinal value of these substances.
Psilocybin specifically has such a long history of helping people with 100s of completed medical studies already published. The fact this substance is still schedule 1 underscores the injustice of the scheduling system and completely destroys any credibility the DEA has as an enforcement agency. It’s tantamount to scheduling aspirin at this point, by their own stated criteria, it is seriously that well studied and we can show you the papers. Although again, we can’t really blame the DEA here — everyone knows cops can’t read, but maybe the FDA can draw them some nice pictures so they can understand.
While we are on the subject, we’d like to remind you of a few great organizations that helped get all this done. These are the groups that fund and lobby for these changes, without them — this would not have happened. If you need to get a gift for a loved one, consider a donation in their name:
John Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research: https://hopkinspsychedelic.org
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