🫠 This Week in Psychedelics

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter with more balls in the air than a nudist colony. 🤹

Here’s what we got this week.

This experience is a purpose-built leadership development retreat for senior executives seeking expanded clarity, capacity, and impact, supported by a circle of peers. In ancient Greece, politicians, philosophers, and scientists pilgrimaged to drink the Kykeon, a psychedelic brew at the Temple of Delphi. At SANCTUM, you will continue this tradition. The retreat uses THE COURAGE METHOD™, a framework that integrates executive coaching, psychotherapy, somatic practice, and nature-based work.

Take the W: Microdosing LSD restored blunted reward processing in mildly depressed participants.
SEAL of approval: Ibogaine-magnesium treatment increased cortical thickness and reduced brain age in Special Ops vets with TBI.
Two birds, one shroom: Psychedelics could treat comorbid depression and chronic pain through the same mechanisms.
Comeback kids: People with severe early childhood trauma may benefit more than others from psychedelic retreats.
Growing pains: People who experienced post-psychedelic difficulties rated existential struggle as the most severe but also the most contributive to healing.

Slam dunk: Connecticut's Senate voted 35-0 to expand its psychedelic-assisted therapy pilot program to all eligible adults, not just veterans and first responders.
Bated breath: Virginia's governor signed a trigger bill that automatically reschedules Compass Pathways’ psilocybin under state law upon FDA approval.
A for effort: Minnesota lawmakers introduced bills to decriminalize psilocybin and create a therapeutic pilot program, though insiders doubt either will pass this session.
Gov’t speed: Hawaii lawmakers advanced a bill to create a psychedelics task force, and Maryland is one step away from extending its own through 2027.
Queen’s gambit: The woman who sold Matthew Perry ketamine received a 15-year prison sentence for her role in his death.

Setting the table: Compass Pathways announced a $750,000 grant program for organizations to produce training content for psychedelic care delivery.
What’s in the bag? Philly smoke shops are selling unregulated mushroom products with fake lab reports, mystery compounds, and salmonella.
Friendly fire: Colorado's first psilocybin center is suing two former employees for allegedly stealing trade secrets and funneling clients away.
A diverse portfolio: Wealth management exec Carolyn Armitage produced a documentary on psilocybin therapy called Journeys.
Let the good trips roll: For the first time, two major psychedelic research conferences ran back to back in New Orleans.

Know your history: Psychedelics landed in Schedule I because of moral panic and Cold War politics, not science.
Tough love: A man fed his 78-year-old alcoholic father seven grams of psilocybin mushrooms and wrote about what happened next.
Billable hours: NYT reporter Robert Draper traveled to Mexico to try ibogaine for a story and says it changed his life.
Meme of the week: You get answers from ChatGPT. I get answers from plants…

Many people know MDMA as the love drug.

Which makes what you’re about to read that much more awkward. Especially if you’re a gentleman who cares about your *ahem* equipment.

See, after Bryan Johnson's psilocybin experiment raised some uncomfortable sperm-related questions, we couldn’t help but wonder what MDMA was doing to the family jewels.

Like clockwork, a new study delivered answers. Researchers dosed male rats with MDMA daily for 30 days, then tracked their recovery for another 30, measuring everything from libido to sperm quality to testicular tissue structure.

Here's what they found. 

Ok yes, these are rats. But reproductive biology is one of the areas where rat models translate most reliably to humans. So don’t wave this one away too fast.

Also, these results don't arrive in a vacuum. A 2023 review of both animal and human data found that cocaine, ketamine, opioids, and cannabis all damage male reproductive biology through the same mechanisms. MDMA was called out as an understudied exception, but this study helps close that gap.

For what it’s worth, daily dosing for 30 days sounds more like heavy recreational use than a therapeutic protocol. So the clinical picture may well be less severe.

Either way, a moment of silence for those rats’ balls. Hang in there, fellas. 🫠

Wrap your giga brains around this one, Cyclists. Brains built AI to study brains, so brains could stop destroying themselves. (How recursive of us.) A team at UC Irvine recently fed their AI platform brain tissue from people who died of opioid dependence and asked it to find what went wrong. Then they used the answer to design a new compound that could rewire brains that are still alive.

The compound, GATC-1021, was given to rats addicted to fentanyl. It cut their intake by over 60% and kept working after five days of repeated dosing. (Tolerance, schmolerance.) The neat part is GATC-1021 targets 5-HT2A, the same receptor classic psychedelics hit, as well as 5-HT6, which is tied to cognition and memory. After treatment, the researchers saw big jumps in the rats’ biomarkers for neuroplasticity.

Now these brainiacs aren’t the first to recruit AI for psychedelic drug design. (Remember the guy precision-engineering specific states of consciousness?) But for all the compute we’ve thrown at this problem, it’s interesting that these models keep coming back to the same receptors and mechanisms our ancestors stumbled on in the forest millennia ago. Almost makes you think nature is the ultimate superintelligence. Almost.

We've come a long way since "got milk?”. It’s 2026, and Oregon just made destigmatizing psilocybin an official public health campaign. It's part of the state's 5-year State Health Improvement Plan (SHIP), which means mushrooms are now right up there with hand washing and flu shots as “culturally responsive options for healing and wellness.”

The SHIP tasks licensed facilitators with getting the word out to veterans, people of color, LGBTQIA2S+ communities, and people in addiction recovery. It also commits to training psychologists and therapists, since one study shows only ~55% of them feel equipped to counsel patients about psychedelics. The theory is, informed providers make more referrals, which widens access.

The state will be tracking outreach efforts and client demographics to see if their plan makes a dent. But of course, education is just one component of access. The SHIP doesn’t touch the cost and affordability issue. (So far, New Mexico is the only state to build a treatment equity fund into its program.) Until that’s sorted, guess the question is still… got disposable income?

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

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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.