The New Science of Psychedelics : A Tool for Changing Our Minds
▻https://singularityhub.com/2019/03/31/the-new-science-of-psychedelics-a-tool-for-changing-our-minds
Moving Forward
The psychedelics renaissance is coming at a time when new tools for mental health are sorely needed.
Other branches of medicine—cardiology, oncology, infectious disease—have made huge strides in the last 50 years, both in reducing suffering and prolonging life. But mental healthcare has essentially been at a standstill since the introduction of the antidepressants known as SSRIs in the 1980s.
To go from their current classification as Schedule 1 drugs—high potential for abuse and no currently accepted medical use—to getting approved as a medicine, psychedelics need to go through the standard three-phase FDA approval process: first an open-label, no-placebo pilot study, followed by a placebo-controlled trial, then a larger placebo-controlled trial.
Pollan believes MDMA and psilocybin could be approved within five years; the FDA has granted breakthrough therapy status to both, which means they actively help researchers design trials that will move the drugs to approval. MDMA is already in Phase 3 trials.
The biggest bottleneck is funding. The studies are expensive and controversial, and the National Institute of Mental Health has a minuscule budget compared to that of the National Institute of Health. Thus far, psychedelics research has been privately funded.
“It’s not a right-left issue, especially when it comes to treating soldiers with PTSD,” Pollan said. But there is the issue of how to incorporate the drugs into mental healthcare as we currently practice it. The pharmaceutical industry isn’t interested in a drug people only need to take once; likewise, the therapy business model depends on people coming back every week for years. Even if this shifted, therapists would need extensive training before being able to administer psychedelics.
“I think we’ll figure it out, but it’s a whole new structure, a whole new paradigm, and that may take a little while,” Pollan said. After all his research, though, he for one is highly optimistic.
“One of the things that excites me most about psychedelics is that yes, there’s a treatment here—but they’re also very interesting probes to understand the mind,” he said.