Psychedelics in the age after aquarius
Nick Powers, an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Old Westbury and a psychedelic drug advocate, warned that, “As Johns Hopkins research and MAPS push the legalization of psilocybin and MDMA… [they] most likely will become medicine for the elite… because I imagine the treatment may or may not be covered by health insurance, it would exclude working class, middle class, and definitely the poor … that psychedelics do not possess some inherently counter-cultural quality; rather, they “reflect the culture they are in.” With a medical system and a drug history that marginalizes people of color and the poor, the radicalism of psychedelia isn’t a given; equality and justice don’t just happen when people slip tabs of acid under their tongues.
The NYU and John’s Hopkins psilocybin trials were both funded in part through crowdsourcing. While the National Institute of Health, the primary national source of medical funding, is estimated to annually allocate $140 million to anxiety disorders research, $333 million to depression research, and $72 million to PTSD research, the three disorders that psychedelic research targets, it has not funded a single experiment with psychedelics … But despite the increase in popularity of psychedelic research and the remarkable outcomes of initial studies, finding funding is still difficult … Microdosing can be prescribed indefinitely – someone might follow the protocol for a week or the rest of their life. Grob predicts that this microdosing trend might cause pharmaceutical companies to reconsider their interest (or lack thereof) in psychedelics. On the cusp of medicalization, there is a very real chance that psychedelics will become another cash crop for the pharmaceutical industry … Furthermore, there is no guarantee that psychedelics will be a drug of the people.
Original Article (Harvard Politics):
Psychedelics in the Age After Aquarius
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