🫠 This Week in Psychedelics

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that experimented in our youth but swears we didn’t inhale. 😶‍🌫️

Here’s what we got this week.

You don't need a diagnosis to want to feel more like yourself.

That's the whole idea behind Althea, and why we aren’t waiting for FDA approval to help people have life-changing psilocybin experiences.

People come to us to process grief, gain clarity, get unstuck, and yes, work through difficult conditions, including those that haven’t yielded to conventional healthcare.

We’ve touched more than 5,000 real-world journeys in the legal, regulated frameworks of Oregon and Colorado. So we know what’s possible in this model.

97% of Althea participants rated their experience as beneficial.

Vine and dandy: Regular ayahuasca use (even outside the traditional context) is linked to reduced symptoms of depression.
Shields up: Psychedelics may prime the nervous system to resist future damage.
Attitude adjustment: A clinical trial at UMass is investigating whether 4-OH-DiPT can improve symptoms of adjustment disorder in people with cancer and other diagnoses.
Brain gains: Psilocybin reverses depressive behaviors and triggers neurogenesis in stressed rats.
Inside job: Psychedelics and their non-hallucinogenic analogs differ at the level of intracellular signaling.

Decriminalize nature: Nevada City, CA made personal use of entheogenic plants and fungi by adults 21+ the city’s lowest law enforcement priority.
Speak now: Oregon Psilocybin Services is now soliciting public comments on proposed rule changes, including significant increases to license fees. (See previous coverage.)
Rooting for ya: A Congresswoman from Colorado introduced a bill that would support the development of botanical drugs and plant-based medicines, while maintaining a rigorous FDA review process.
Blast from the past: MAPS provided the first outside funding for the University of Miami’s ibogaine research program in the 1990s, which resulted in the IND recently gifted to HHS.

No place like home: Responding to a New York Times article on the risks of psychedelic clinics abroad, Althea’s Niko Skievaski highlights the safety of U.S. psilocybin programs.
Herd mentality: Elephant Gate, a psychedelic venture accelerator, announced the six companies selected for its inaugural cohort.
Ouch: Jupiter Neurosciences priced a $2 million stock offering. Six days later, Nasdaq told the company it's getting delisted.
Special delivery: Rhelion’s subsidiary Filament Health is supplying botanical psilocybin for a Phase 2a clinical trial testing a group retreat model for cancer-related anxiety.
Sweat the details: Optimi’s CEO explains why reliable manufacturing will become increasingly important as psychedelic regulations evolve.

Garden variety: Behold ten powerful, mind-altering plants, some familiar and some less so.
Bulletproof: Dave Asprey, father of the biohacking movement, says all that optimization is a Trojan horse for consciousness.
Be here now: Psilocybin might make your brain live in the moment.
Meme of the week: I wouldn’t announce if I owned an eight-figure microdosing brand, but there would be signs…

Raise your hand if you’ve ever taken a weed gummy and gotten more than you bargained for.

Rookie mistake.

Jk, don’t be too hard on yourself. Now we have science from one of the nation’s leading psychedelic research institutions that proves you’re not alone.

In a new pilot study out of Johns Hopkins, four healthy adults took psilocybin, THC, and placebo one by one. For each session, they followed the classic psychedelic trial protocol, complete with eyeshades, a curated playlist, two facilitators present, and instructions to “turn inward and be present for whatever arises.”

And apparently, enough THC (with the right set and setting) can feel a helluva lot like tripping on mushrooms.

Here’s what happened.

So what does all this tell us? Well, if we are to take a n=4 study at face value… first, cannabis can be approached with the same level of intentionality as mushrooms, to great effect.

Do with that info what you will.

Beyond that, though, this finding may have implications for clinical trials.

You see, if THC can convincingly pass as a psychedelic, it could finally give researchers a workable active placebo, which could solve the field's long-standing “functional unblinding” problem.

Just don’t bite off more than you can chew. 🫠

Wake up babe. A new mouse study just dropped that challenges consensus views on psilocybin therapy. First of all, it found psilocybin boosts sociability in mice bred to model autism. Pretty neat. But maybe more interesting is the fact that the pro-social effect held up even when the mice were unconscious for the whole trip.

Researchers gave Cntnap2-knockout mice (a well-established autism model) a single dose of psilocybin, and then tested their sociability at three points over the next two weeks. Some of those mice were under anesthesia and slept through the drug’s acute effects, while the rest (we assume) had a profoundly mousey journey. But both groups had the same bump in friendliness.

We humans have to be careful about reading too much into rodent studies. Still, it’s an interesting data point in the long-running debate over whether you need the trip to benefit from psychedelics… or psychoplastogens. Who could forget that viral case report with the non-verbal Alzheimer's patient who slept through a heroic dose of mushrooms and started talking when she woke up 19 hours later? You know, sleep-assisted therapy sounds pretty nice right now actually.

Well, would you look at that. The federal government is telling states to prepare for the rollout of psychedelic-assisted therapy. A new report this week from SAMHSA (an agency within HHS) says psychedelics are moving from research to clinical practice faster than anyone expected five years ago, so state officials better get their act together before FDA starts stamping approvals.

The report lays out five recommendations. 1) Plan for the legal and fiscal fallout of approval. 2) Fund research on the real-world people state systems like Medicaid will serve. 3) Build oversight frameworks (e.g., credentialing, safety protocols, complaint systems). 4) Monitor unregulated use and create educational materials for providers and patients. 5) Watch federal regulatory progress so you’re not caught flat-footed. In other words, do your homework now or scramble later.

This report was probably catalyzed by Trump's executive order on psychedelics in April. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out (for the gajillionth time) that this stuff isn’t hypothetical. Oregon and Colorado already run state-regulated psilocybin programs, and New Mexico is aiming to go live by the end of the year. In some ways, the rest of the U.S. is playing catchup.

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.