🫠 This Week in Psychedelics

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that’s got nothing to hide. Except our screen time report. That we’re taking to our grave. ☠️

Here’s what we got this week.

PsyCon Denver is eight days away.

If you’re still on the fence, just peep the speaker lineup.

There’s a dude who ran 100 miles on psychedelics, a psychiatrist weaving spirituality into mental health, several regulators behind Colorado’s natural medicine program, and a whole track on the business side of building in this space.

Our very own Niko Skievaski, CEO of Althea, is speaking, too. We may be biased, but we think he’s pretty cool.

Once you get to Denver for the show, make sure to pop by our booth and say hey. Maybe Niko will sign your t-shirt.

Size matters: A meta-analysis of six randomized controlled trials found psilocybin beat controls on depression, but only at full doses.
Flex appeal: Occasional psychedelic users scored better on cognitive flexibility tests than non-users.
Queerly beloved: LGBTQ+ participants reported meaningful mental health gains after a seven-day ayahuasca retreat.
Made a mark: A measurable brain shift after ibogaine predicted PTSD recovery in veterans.
SSRI friendly: Intranasal 5-MeO-DMT improved depression in 12 patients who never stopped their antidepressants.

Look the other way: King County, Washington passed a resolution making personal entheogen use its lowest enforcement priority.
Dotting the i's: New Mexico released its first proposed standards for its medical psilocybin program.
We draw the line here: Mississippi's governor vetoed two marijuana bills but signed an ibogaine research measure.
On the bandwagon: Colorado and Kentucky are the latest states to advance ibogaine research bills, joining at least four others.
Full circle: Louisiana approved a bill funding psychedelic therapy trials with opioid settlement dollars.

Big leagues: AtaiBeckley joined major stock indices as Deutsche Bank called the stock “materially undervalued.”
No hard feelings: GH Research published Phase 2b results showing 5-MeO-DMT worked regardless of prior treatment failures.
Heart eyes: Gilgamesh Pharma's post-AbbVie spinout closed a $60M Series A to advance its pipeline, including a “cardio-safe” ibogaine analog.
That’s steep, mate: Australia's MDMA therapy program is showing strong PTSD results, but at $20,000 a session, most can't afford it.
Our guy: Althea CEO Niko Skievaski makes the case that psychedelics are the most important technology of the AI era.

Quantum entanglement: Physicist Jim Al-Khalili explains why time is illusory.
Content is king: Bryan Johnson livestreamed a 5-MeO-DMT megadose for 200,000 people in his quest to live forever.
Realer than real: Psychedelics reveal a truer version of reality.
Meme of the week: You may not like it, but this is the ideal psychedelic integration technique…

It's the first day of your new job.

You wear your “good” shirt, laugh at all the HR lady's jokes, and don't even mention your Tamagotchi collection. Yes, you’re fitting in nicely. No one suspects a thing.

See, that’s pretty much what's happening with methylone (aka MDMC) right now.

Japanese pharma giant Otsuka just agreed to buy Transcend Therapeutics for $700 million upfront and up to $525 million in milestones. Really they’re buying TSND-201, Transcend’s formulation of methylone for PTSD, which earned FDA breakthrough therapy status last year.

But the whole pitch is that it's not psychedelic. Here's why that's a stretch.

Look, we get it. After what happened with Lykos, everyone’s chasing a cleaner regulatory story. But this feels like overkill, especially when you consider who’s buying. Otsuka already owns a piece of Compass Pathways, which is developing psilocybin, a drug that is unambiguously psychedelic.

Also, AbbVie paid Gilgamesh over a billion for bretisilocin, without needing to downplay anything about its tryptamine-ish qualities. Big Pharma is getting more and more comfortable betting on psychedelics.

So go on, methylone. Let your freak flag fly. It’s 2026. You don’t have to save your Hawaiian shirt and jeans for the third Friday of the month. 🫠

Good things come to those who wait, and lord knows veterans have been waiting a while. Last week, Senator Tim Sheehy (R-MT), a former Navy SEAL, filed the Veterans Health Administration Novel Therapeutics Preparedness Act, the third major psychedelics-for-vets bill this year and the most comprehensive yet.

The goal is simple. Get the VA ready before FDA approval, so drug scheduling, reimbursement, and staffing aren’t bottlenecks on day one. The plan is more complex. The bill creates an Office of Novel Therapeutics inside the VA to coordinate across the DEA and HHS, establishes “Centers of Excellence” in each VA regional district, and bans “fail-first” protocols that force vets through older treatments before they can try the shiny new ones.

Now for the tricky part. The Trump administration has spent the last year playing Jenga with the VA, pulling hundreds of specialized mental health providers via budget cuts and hiring freezes. So while the experiment is already live with nine VA facilities running psychedelic trials, the workforce isn’t there for the ramp-up. (Psychedelic therapy usually takes two clinicians per patient for up to eight hours.) Welp, at least someone's adding blocks to the tower.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy has always sold itself on the relationship. It’s not the drug in isolation doing the magic, but the drug plus a trained professional you trust, holding a container you can dissolve into. The “therapeutic alliance” between you and that facilitator is supposedly half the medicine. The other half being, you know, the medicine.

Well, a new study of 79 people with treatment-resistant depression begs to differ. Researchers found that therapeutic alliance had almost no direct effect on clinical outcomes. Psilocybin's antidepressant effects correlated far more strongly with the intensity of the experience itself, especially mystical measures like Oceanic Boundlessness and Emotional Breakthrough. (Also the names of our favorite Enya albums.)

But therapeutic alliance did play an indirect role, the paper says. Patients who felt more connected to their facilitator had more immersive experiences, which in turn moved the needle on depression. For what it’s worth, some researchers argue that's exactly how alliance should work. Hmm, now might be a good time to mention that the study was sponsored by Compass Pathways. As a company that sells the drug, not the therapy, they might be ever so slightly motivated to show it’s the drug that matters.

When therapy and self-care aren’t cutting it, it may be time to step away and go deeper. Soul Reset is a women-only retreat in the heart of Austin with ketamine and 10+ healing modalities. (Day treatments are open to everyone.)

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.