Another psychedelic revolution, but this time it’s different
We cannot know the future, but there are a number of reasons to believe that psychedelic medicine really can break out of its ghetto and into the mainstream … What must not be allowed to happen is for these promising and much-needed drugs to fail for anything other than the purest of scientific reasons.
More still needs to be done. The law remains excessively tight: psychedelics are still schedule 1 drugs, which means they have no acknowledged uses in medicine. The onus is on scientists to show conclusively that they do. Some of the scientists also need to embrace the system rather than pushing against it. Talk to many a psychedelics researcher and it doesn’t take long to hear complaints of risk-averse funders and regulators. Enough. The outlaw-maverick pose was once an asset in this field; it [may also been seen as a liability through some lenses]. It may transpire that, as with so many drugs, the early promise melts away under the glare of full-scale clinical trials. Such is life in pharma research.
Original Article (New Scientist):
Another psychedelic revolution, but this time it’s different
Artwork Fair Use: National Institutes of Health