🫠 This Week in Psychedelics

PRESENTED BY SCHOOL OF PSYCHEDELICS 🤝

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that tried bottling up our emotions, but it backfired. Now we proactively schedule time for primal screaming and ugly crying. Things run much more smoothly around here now. 👍

Here’s what we got this week.

• Real-world psilocybin results from Oregon 🍄 

• The first precision-designed state of consciousness 🤯

• Mushrooms evolved psilocybin twice 🧬

• Win a free ticket to Global Psychedelic Week 🌍

FROM OUR SPONSORS

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MICRODOSES

🔬 Research

Executive function: In a survey of 1,500 professionals, 52% attributed long-term improvements in company leadership to their psychedelic use. 76% noticed increased creativity.
Harm, reduced: A real-world study found that psychedelic use among people with substance use disorders was associated with reductions in overdoses, relapses, hospitalizations, and mental health crises.
Head to head: Intravenous ketamine may be more efficacious than intranasal esketamine for treatment-resistant depression.
Mommy issues: Preclinical research in mice suggests psilocybin may worsen symptoms of postpartum depression.
What’s in a name? Researchers have proposed a new lexicon for psychedelic research and treatment.

🏛️ Policy

Everything’s bigger: Will Texas be the epicenter of the psychedelic revolution?
Live from New York: Yesterday, the New York Assembly’s Committee on Health held the state legislatures’s first ever hearing on psilocybin.
Question 4, no more: Massachusetts may be following New York’s lead.
The last frontier: Natural Medicine Alaska has officially launched its signature drive to place a psychedelic legalization question on the 2026 ballot.
Coca colonialism: A World Health Organization report concludes that coca leaf consumption carries no significant risks. Rather, it’s the control strategies that are harmful.

📈 Business

Phase shift: atai and Beckley plan to take their 5-MeO-DMT nasal spray into Phase 3 trials in the first half of 2026.
Closing time: At-home ketamine provider Noma Therapy is shuttering.
Mo’ money: Reunion Neuroscience upsized its Series A round to $133 million total.
Doubling down under: Medibank, a private health insurance provider in Australia, will cover psilocybin therapy for treatment-resistant depression.
Hard pivot: Silo Wellness, a publicly traded company that once organized psilocybin retreats in Jamaica, is moving into defense and national security investing.

🫠 Just for fun

Business trip: Execs are using psychedelics in record numbers to cope with stress.
Happy trails: Most people who “hikrodose” don’t get lost in the woods. They just feel harmony, wonder, and gratitude.
Released: In an essay for Marie Claire, a New York writer explains how MDMA therapy helped her get creatively unstuck.
You’re literally glowing: Science confirms we emit a visible light that vanishes when we die.
Meme of the week: When the mushrooms reveal that you are part of nature…

THE PEAK EXPERIENCE

They brought the receipts

For nearly three years, Oregon's been running the country’s first legal psilocybin therapy program. Thousands of people have tripped under supervision. Millions of dollars have changed hands.

And yet, until this week, we had basically zero data on whether any of it is working.

Well, Bendable Therapy and Osmind just shared the first systematic study of real-world outcomes from Oregon Psilocybin Services. They tracked 88 participants before and 30 days after their sessions to see what benefits, if any, they actually got.

And?

We regret to inform the haters that, indeed, the mushrooms (and facilitators) are making a big impact. Here's what the study found.

• 📉 Depression dropped: Scores decreased by 4.6 points on average, representing a shift from moderate to mild severity.

• 😅 Anxiety plummeted: A 4.8-point average reduction exceeded the threshold for clinically meaningful change.

• 🕊️ Well-being soared: Participants reported a 10.7-point increase in mood and quality of life.

• ☑️ Safety held up: There were zero reportable adverse events (though 3% noted lingering struggles with anxiety or existential processing).

To be clear, the researchers used validated clinical assessments and proper statistical modeling to analyze these results. This is real science, not fluffy testimonial collection.

Here’s why this matters. Until now, Oregon's been operating in a data vacuum. Skeptics have (reasonably) questioned whether psilocybin services in the real world could ever live up to the extraordinary results we’ve seen in clinical trials.

Now we have the first systematic evidence that yes, supervised psilocybin sessions can significantly improve mental health outcomes outside of controlled research settings.

Keep in mind, other states are watching closely as they consider similar programs. Insurance companies are paying attention, too, since they'll need this kind of evidence before they start cutting checks.

As a wise man once said… First they ignore you; then they laugh at you; then they trip on mushrooms; then you win. 🫠

AFTERGLOW

Genie’s out of the bottle

Remember that time you spilled your guts on Reddit about seeing God in a flower? Congrats. A biotech startup just used your tender moment to design their first drug. After training AI on 70,000+ trip reports, Mindstate Design Labs has wrapped its first human trial of MSD-001, a mild psychedelic they think can be the basis for precision-engineered states of consciousness.

CEO Dillan DiNardo calls their first emotion-in-a-bottle, which was tested in five doses through that Phase 1 study, “tranquil insightful beauty.” All 47 healthy participants experienced heightened emotions, enhanced imagination, and brighter colors, but no full-fledged hallucinations. Although when the “aesthetic perception” effect got dialed up extra high, one participant did say, “The legs of that chair—how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness!” (Yes, that’s an actual quote.)

Mindstate's vision is pretty different from most psychedelic biotechs. Essentially, with MSD-001, they’re trying to give psychiatry a programmable substrate for rendering mental states on demand. DiNardo (whom we interviewed in May) figures we're missing about 98% of potentially therapeutic mental states. If he's right, your future doctor might prescribe wonder or awe as confidently as they prescribe Adderall today.

Mother nature knows best

Exhibit A: she decided that psilocybin was important enough to invent twice. Researchers from Friedrich Schiller University Jena just discovered that two unrelated groups of fungi independently evolved the ability to produce psilocybin, using entirely different biochemical pathways. This is a textbook example of convergent evolution, like how wings evolved separately in birds, bats, and insects.

The team analyzed enzymes from fiber cap mushrooms and found their psilocybin production system has nothing in common with the well-known pathway in Psilocybe species. Thing is, nobody knows why both groups (or either, for that matter) evolved the compound. Some scientists think psilocybin might deter predators, since when these mushrooms are damaged, they bruise blue as psilocybin breaks down. But that's just a hypothesis. (And it certainly hasn’t deterred humans...)

"Nature does nothing without reason," says senior author Dirk Hoffmeister. "So there must be an advantage... we just don't know what it is yet." On the practical side, discovering a second enzymatic process means scientists now have more options for producing psilocybin in bioreactors. The mystery remains, but hey, at least the biotech just got easier.

CYCLISTS’ PICKS

• 🎟️ Giveaway: We’re giving away two free tickets to Global Psychedelic Week. Just reply “GPW” to enter. Or if you’d rather not risk it, you can buy a ticket for 10% off with our link.

• 👕 Drippy tee: As usual, Telluride Mushroom Festival released a fire t-shirt at their 2025 gathering, and as usual, it sold out almost instantly. They’re taking preorders on a second run for everyone who couldn’t snag one.

• 📆 Hybrid conference: Collaborence 2025 is a two-day event promoting education and community expansion around psilocybin therapy. Day 1 focuses on training for facilitators, and Day 2 brings in-person expos to Portland and Boulder. Take 25% off tickets with code TD25.

• 🏃 Race: Shatter the Stigma is a 5k run (or walk, no judgment) raising awareness of and funding for psychedelic therapy for veterans and first responders. Entry fees increase on October 25.

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.