🫠 This Week in Psychedelics

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that liked it, so we put a mushroom fairy ring on it. 🧚

Here’s what we got this week.

This experience is designed to reach the people who haven't yet been able to access legal psilocybin services because of price. For $500, Althea's Pick includes preparation, a facilitated psilocybin session, and integration support. To keep the cost low, Althea's care navigation team matches you with a vetted provider based on your goals and availability, rather than having you choose your own.

Staying power: The largest psychedelic trial yet found that one or two doses of psilocybin with psychotherapy produced antidepressant effects for up to a year.
Force multiplier: Buprenorphine enhances the anti-suicidal effects of ketamine in patients with major depression.
You sound sparkly: Speech (both word choice and acoustic features) can predict and track psychological transformation through the 5-MeO-DMT experience.
Real talk: A new theory paper argues that under one model of consciousness, DMT entities are no less real than anything else we perceive.
Back to school: A landscape analysis of psychedelic facilitator trainings identified several gaps in education standards the field should fill.

Joining forces: A new Michigan bill would create an ibogaine research grant program and require the state to participate in a multi-state consortium working toward FDA approval.
One signature away: Louisiana lawmakers sent a bill to create a psychedelic-assisted therapy pilot program, funded by opioid settlement dollars, to the governor.
By the books: Georgia signed a bill into law that directs a medical board to set regulations for psychedelic-assisted therapy in the state.
Scarcity mindset: According to the head of the VA, sourcing may be the bottleneck for ibogaine research.
Take it easy, mate, but take it: The TGA is recommending rule changes that will make it easier and less expensive for Australian patients to access psychedelic therapy.

Bullish: Bloomberg drilled down on PSIL, the ETF that lets investors bet on the psychedelic drug sector in a single trade.
Sharing is caring: AtaiBeckley launched a grant program for non-profits improving mental health outcomes for patients.
Cup runneth over: Psilera closed an oversubscribed $8.8 million seed funding round to advance its lead asset into clinical trials.
Show and tell: Breathe Life Sciences, one of Australia’s MDMA and psilocybin manufacturers, opened its vault to the media.
Lead in: Approval may be near, but experts caution our healthcare system isn't remotely ready to deliver psychedelic therapy at scale.

Making the magic: This is what professional psilocybin mushroom cultivation looks like, from grain to harvest.
Juiced and confused: Only one world record was broken at Christian Angermayer’s PED-friendly Enhanced Games, and three clean athletes took gold.
Grof approved: Johns Hopkins is launching a study on Holotropic Breathwork for PTSD.
The cosmic joke: To integrate a psychedelic experience, you need a sense of humor.
Meme of the week: Trying to surrender to the experience…

Raise your hand if you enjoy being in a great mood.

How about having unlimited energy? Or thinking knowing that anything is possible?

Sounds amazing, right? It is. Until it’s 4am and you’ve reorganized your fridge three times, texted everyone in your phone, and put a down payment on a boat.

This is mania. And if you've ever wondered if psychedelics could cause it, congrats. A lot of researchers wondered too.

A new meta-analysis pooled the human evidence on whether serotonergic psychedelics and MDMA trigger hypomania or mania. Here's what shook out from a review of 23 qualifying studies.

We can all breathe a sigh of relief that the researchers found no evidence that psychedelics conjure bipolar disorder out of thin air.

That doesn’t mean the risk isn’t real though, especially for people who are already vulnerable.

And that gap between the 5.8% and 30% might look like a tidy case for set and setting, but careful screening is a factor, too. (Clinical trials are notoriously picky about who gets in.)

So go ahead and enjoy the good mood. Just, uhh, take a beat if you catch yourself shopping for watercraft. 🫠

Hello, fellow quantified selves. In the off-chance your smartwatch hasn’t already notified you, a Denver startup just landed $4 million in federal funding to study psychedelic therapy for veterans. But unlike everyone else, INVI MindHealth isn't researching the drugs (or protocols) themselves. They’re building tech that measures what psychedelics do to you.

Founded by a retired Navy SEAL, INVI has created an app that pulls biometric data from off-the-shelf wearables and uses it to assess your mental state. For their first study, fifty veterans will wear an Oura Ring for a month to set a baseline, then travel to Mexico for a psilocybin or ibogaine journey. During and afterward, INVI will capture their physiological changes (e.g., heart rate, HRV, sleep scores, everything your biohacker friend compulsively posts on Instagram), while partner researchers at Baylor crunch the numbers.

The data story is what won over ARPA-H, the federal health-research agency funding the effort. Its goal is to identify the quantifiable biomarkers that predict who responds to psychedelic therapy. Deep down, we all knew our devices were already reading our minds. At least now it’s for a good cause.

The VA wants you to know it just launched a shiny new MDMA trial. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced last week that it's testing MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD and alcohol use disorder, conveniently pinning the news to President Trump's recent executive order on psychedelic research.

Thing is, this trial isn’t exactly new. The agency first secured funding for it back in December 2024, when they hailed it as the first VA-backed psychedelic study since the 1960s. What is new is that the trial has started recruiting, and we got some study design deets. It'll enroll roughly 80 veterans across Rhode Island and Connecticut, and dose them with either 180 mg of MDMA across three sessions or an “active placebo” (40 mg of MDMA, certainly not nothing), alongside “inner-directive psychotherapy.”

Psychedelic Alpha was quick to point out that's an 18-month gap between getting funded and getting to work. The apparent dilly-dallying stings because the VA could be the single biggest gateway to legal psychedelic therapy in the country, and every month it dawdles is another month vets wait on treatments that could help. Nobody's asking the VA to speedrun it. Just, you know, jog.

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.