🫠 This Week in Psychedelics

PRESENTED BY ALTHEA 🤝

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that puts the gnosis in diagnosis. ⚕️

Here’s what we got this week.

• The first clinical trial of MDMA for depression 💊 

• New bill could fix broken Right to Try laws 🏛️

• A mushroom that makes you see tiny people 🧚

• How not to get banned on social media 📱 

FROM OUR SPONSORS

Here’s a topic most people don’t even want to think about.

Death.

But if psychedelics can help us live better, surely they can help us die better, too?

In 2025, Healing Hearts Changing Minds went all in on the D-word. Specifically, how psychedelic therapy can bring comfort, meaning, and dignity to people facing existential distress at the end of life.

HHCM recently closed its $500,000 “Walking Each Other Home” grant round for organizations advancing end-of-life psychedelic care.

Soon they’ll announce the final list of grantees. In the meantime…

Learn about their vision and selection process.

MICRODOSES

🔬 Research

Sharp as a tack: Psilocybin therapy appears to improve cognitive performance two weeks after treatment, independent of mood.
Laughter is the best medicine: A review of seven clinical trials found that nitrous oxide has rapid antidepressant effects.
Who needs coffee? In a randomized controlled trial of LSD microdosing, increased energy was the most commonly reported effect.
Better get that checked: Researchers found an association between lifetime psychedelic use and prostate cancer.
Start here: In a large-scale harm reduction survey, psilocybin mushrooms were the most recommended psychedelic for first timers.

🏛️ Policy

All hands on deck: At a national meeting of policymakers, former TX governor Rick Perry and Bryan Hubbard pushed for more states to join Texas in advancing ibogaine clinical trials.
Full speed ahead: New Mexico’s Medical Psilocybin Advisory Board held its first public meeting and announced plans to launch a year early. (See previous coverage.)
Democracy in action: Eight cannabis and psychedelics-related ballot measures could be on the ballot in 2026.
One and done: The FDA is moving to require only one Phase 3 trial (not two) for new drugs seeking approval.

📈 Business

Package deal: The rise of the psychedelic drug market raises all kinds of questions, including how to package them.
On the right Trk: Pangea Bio received its first clinical trial authorization from UK regulators.
Good things come in small packages: Biomind Labs is moving its 5-MeO-DMT product into development using a new proprietary nano-formulation.
Bring in the big guns: Mindstate Design Labs added a former CFO of Merck to its board of directors.
Triple threat: Boulder now has three psilocybin healing centers open for business.

🫠 Just for fun

Don’t pick that: After a spike in poisonings, California officials want people to stop foraging wild mushrooms.
Cloud dancer: Pantone’s 2026 color of the year is decidedly… uncolorful.
Performance enhancing trips: Can psychedelics and the right training create superathletes?
Meme of the week: Every time I come down from a mushroom journey…

THE PEAK EXPERIENCE

Happy medicine

This is gonna sound crazy, but hear us out.

A drug commonly called “ecstasy” might help people feel less sad. (*drops mic*)

Sorry, we should’ve asked for consent before blowing your mind like that.

Wait wait, don’t go. This seemingly obvious insight does qualify as news. Why? MDMA has received plenty of attention as a breakthrough therapy for PTSD. But before now, no one had seriously tested it as a treatment for depression.

This week, a Norwegian research team published the first-ever trial exploring MDMA-assisted therapy for major depressive disorder (MDD). We think the results are worth sharing.

• 🎯 3 out of 4 ain’t bad: 75% of participants responded to treatment (defined as a ≥50% reduction in depression scores).

• 💪 Durable effects: 75% achieved full remission, with 67% maintaining it at the 7-month follow-up. (Only one participant relapsed.)

• 😴 Bonus benefits: The participants also saw significant sustained improvements in anxiety, insomnia, PTSD, and functional impairment.

• 💯 Solid safety signals: There were no dropouts, and suicidal ideation remained below pre-study levels.

For you detail-oriented Cyclists, here’s how the study worked. 12 participants with moderate to severe MDD received two MDMA dosing sessions (80mg + 40mg booster, then 120mg + 60mg) integrated with 9 psychotherapy sessions over about two months.

The especially cool part is that the participants’ improvements persisted six months after the last MDMA session, which suggests the treatment kicks off a self-sustaining therapeutic process.

Of course, the study was small and open label, so we’ll need larger controlled trials before we draw any definitive conclusions (yada yada). But there’s something interesting here.

MDMA might work transdiagnostically by targeting trauma processing as an underlying mechanism across conditions.

Still gotta figure out why it makes dancing feel so good though. 🫠

AFTERGLOW

Right to Try 2.0

A bipartisan group in Congress just introduced the Freedom to Heal Act, which sounds boring until you realize it's meant to fix an absolutely insane loophole. Right now, patients with life-threatening illnesses technically have the legal right to try “experimental” psychedelic therapies. The problem is they’re still functionally impossible to get.

For context, the 2018 Right to Try Act was supposed to let dying patients who’ve run out of (approved) options access investigational drugs, so long as those drugs have cleared Phase 1 trials. (MDMA, psilocybin, and 5-MeO-DMT all fit that bill, btw.) But because Congress forgot to update the Controlled Substances Act, the DEA says it can't legally register doctors to prescribe Schedule I drugs, even for people who should be eligible.

The Freedom to Heal Act would create a narrow DEA registration just for physicians treating Right to Try patients with Schedule I therapies in clinical settings. It's backed by a coalition of veteran groups who are tired of watching Americans leave the country they served to access medicine that should already be available under a law we passed 7 years ago. Hear, hear.

Itty bitty parade

You say you’re a psychonaut, but you’ve never met the tiny guys? Pfft. Let us fill you in. A PhD student at the University of Utah is researching Lanmaoa asiatica, a wild edible mushroom that causes “lilliputian hallucinations.” That’s the clinical term for seeing hundreds of 2cm-tall people march across your tablecloth. And it has nothing to do with psilocybin.

In fact, chemical analysis shows no known psychoactive compounds, meaning whatever causes this phenomenon is novel to science. The mushroom, however, is hardly new. It’s been sold openly in China for decades as “Jian shou qing,” where 96% of affected patients report seeing “xiao ren ren” (little people). Similar reports have come out of the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, too. Even Daoist texts from the 3rd century CE reference a “flesh spirit mushroom” that lets you “see a little person.”

Which brings us to today. Now, the research team in Utah is testing extracts on mice to isolate the mystery compound. If they succeed, their work could reveal an entirely new class of psychoactive molecules. Mushrooms, man. Just when you think you know ‘em, they introduce a whole new cast of characters.

🙈 Oops! We flubbed a few details in our article about New Jersey’s psilocybin bill last week. The story has since been updated. Thanks to Denise Rue and Neal Usatin for their corrections and advocacy on the House floor. 🫠

CYCLISTS’ PICKS

• 🧑‍💻 Webinar: The Psychedelic Coaching Institute is hosting a lawyer with expertise in psychedelics and social media for a Q&A on keeping your content in the algorithms’ good graces.

• 📘 Book: Joe Tafur’s second book, Medicine Song, balances clinical evidence with great storytelling to make the case for psychedelic medicine and the integration of science and spirituality more broadly.

• 🎧 Artist: If Maneesh de Moor isn’t on your ceremony playlist, what are you even doing? The Dutch musician mixes mantras, icaros, and birdsong with otherworldly frequencies that make our arm hairs stand up.

• 📝 Quiz: The Psychedelic Preparedness Scale is a 20-question, research-validated assessment that can predict whether you’re ready and likely to have a positive experience with psychedelics. Take it before you trip.

UNTIL NEXT TIME

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

ONE CYCLIST’S REVIEW

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.