🫠 This Week in Psychedelics

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We're the psychedelics newsletter that quit all our vices cold turkey. All it took was hitting rock bottom (the deli section).

Here’s what we got this week.

Tonight’s the night, Cyclists.

At 7pm ET, we’re going live with three licensed psilocybin facilitators from Oregon and Colorado to ask the questions you can’t google.

We’ll hear how they gauge whether someone is ready, walk through the whole process from prep through integration, and field any other q’s you want to throw at them.

If you've been curious about trying psilocybin in a regulated setting but haven't pulled the trigger, come meet a few of the humans behind the work before you commit.

Register now and we'll shoot you a reminder before we go live.

Rep it out: Combining exercise with psychedelics could be more effective for major depressive disorder than either approach alone.
Gold standards: MDMA and IV ketamine lead the pack on PTSD efficacy among psychedelic therapies evaluated in randomized controlled trials.
Coke problem: Psilocybin and ibogaine both accelerated extinction of cocaine-seeking in rats, but neither prevented relapse when drug cues were reintroduced.
Short circuit: A single dose of DMT reversed depression-like symptoms in mice by repairing disrupted brain circuitry, outperforming a 30-day antidepressant course.
It was never about the science: Prohibition was ideologically driven, per a new analysis, and the public safety harms critics predicted from reform haven't materialized.

At ease: A bipartisan U.S. Senate bill would create psychedelic-focused VA research centers to explore treatments for veterans. (This one has legs.)
Land of 10,000 trips: A bill to legalize psychedelic therapy is moving through the Minnesota legislature, making it one of the more serious state-level efforts this session.
Purple mountain majesty: Colorado lawmakers are exploring a bipartisan ibogaine research pilot program for opioid use disorder and veteran PTSD.
Fast pass: South Dakota will instantly legalize Compass Pathways’ synthetic psilocybin once it’s federally approved.
Lei of the land: Hawaii senators advanced a bill to create a psychedelics task force studying access pathways for psilocybin and MDMA.

Oregon trail: Oregon Psilocybin Services published its Q4 2025 data dashboard, which now covers a full year of program activity.
Going public, eh? Canada-based psychedelics manufacturer Optimi Health has set terms for a $15M IPO.
Shed light: Clearmind Medicine published an international patent for a therapy targeting weight loss and fatty liver disease.
Stems and cap table: Red Light Holland is acquiring Filament Health in an all-stock deal.
Whack-a-shroom: An illegal psilocybin dispensary is making a discreet return to Cambridge, Ontario after more police raids than we can count.

Mercury in gatorade: Scientists think stormy space weather may be garbling messages from aliens.
Road trip: Denver launched a public health campaign warning people not to drive under the influence of psychedelics.
Why tho: The New Yorker asks why mind-altering drugs make people feel better at all.
Objection, your honor: A judge ruled that Elon Musk's ketamine use can't be probed in the OpenAI fraud trial.
Meme of the week: Me: I’m just presenting the objective facts about psychedelics. I’m not biased. Also me…

Smoking’s had one hell of a run.

It survived the Surgeon General, ad bans, grotesque warning labels, and $5 “sin taxes.” Sixty years of public health campaigns later, it’s still the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.

But maybe Big Tobacco has finally met its match. (You knew that was coming.) 

A new Johns Hopkins trial compared nicotine patches to a single psilocybin dose in 82 smokers trying to quit. Everyone also got 13 weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy. At six months, the psilocybin group had more than six times greater odds of being cigarette-free. 

Here's how it played out.

Granted, this was a small study, and results need to be replicated. But a larger NIH-funded trial with a placebo arm is underway, building on another study from more than a decade ago.

Even with limited data, researchers stress it isn’t just the drug working. Pairing psilocybin with intensive therapy, they say, allowed the smokers quitters to harness a temporary boost in neuroplasticity. 

Regardless, if this signal holds, Big Tobacco might have a Big Problem. Somewhere a vape startup just pivoted. 🫠

Psilocybe cubensis is the most consumed and studied magic mushroom on Earth. Yet until recently, we didn’t know where it came from. Researchers just identified its closest known wild relative in sub-Saharan Africa. Initially mistaken for cubensis, Psilocybe ochraceocentrata is now a confirmed, distinct species. Genetic testing shows the two split from a common ancestor about 1.5 million years ago.

That timeline blows up the prevailing theory that cubes hitched a ride to the Americas on cattle introduced by Spanish colonizers in the 1500s. If the split happened 1.5 million years ago, they were already long separated before any cows got on a boat. That leaves us with two leading dispersal theories: dung beetles or atmospheric currents moved spores across the Atlantic. (Yes, feces-eating bugs might be the OG drug mules.)

For researchers, this is more than fun trivia. Cubensis underpins most clinical trials and real-world use, so better genetic baselines mean better science. And Africa is still one of the most undersampled regions for fungal diversity, so more mushies may be out there. (Sound familiar?) Crazy that we've been in a situationship with this mushroom for decades, and we’re just now meeting the relatives.

Guided psilocybin therapy costs hundreds to thousands of dollars, and no insurance covers it. So the people who arguably need it most are priced out. The psychedelic field has been circling this problem for years, with hardly anything to show for it. (Hey, we’re trying!) But New Mexico just changed that and became the first government to use public funds to subsidize psychedelic therapy access for low-income residents.

A week ago today, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed a budget bill allocating $630,000 to the state's Psilocybin Treatment Equity Fund, plus another $300,000 to the University of New Mexico for psilocybin end-of-life anxiety research. The coolest part is, the equity funding wasn't even in the original proposal. A coalition of advocates had to petition lawmakers to get it included. And they succeeded.

New Mexico passed its Medical Psilocybin Act last year, and the program is set to roll out as early as December. That’ll make it the third state to launch a regulated psilocybin program, after Oregon and Colorado, both of which built functional markets but never quite solved access. New Mexico was third to the party but the first to notice who’s still stuck outside.

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.