🫠 This Week in Psychedelics

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that couldn’t put a price on quality info. Forward this email to two friends and we’ll call it even. 🤝

Here’s what we got this week.

5,000+ legal psilocybin sessions have happened through Althea. (We’ve been busy.)

Across all those journeys, 97% of participants rated their experience as beneficial, and <1% had a serious adverse event.

Maybe the reason those numbers are so strong is that we only work with vetted, licensed providers in Oregon and Colorado’s state-regulated programs.

This modality changes lives. And it doesn’t have to cost a fortune. Our small-group experiences come in well below market rates.

Answer a few questions, book a call, and our care navigators will help you figure out your next step.

The female gaze: LSD microdosing may improve sustained attention in women more than in men.
Protocol problems: There’s still no consensus around the best way to provide psychotherapy alongside psychedelics.
Sound check: Playlist curation in psychedelic therapy today rarely follows theoretical best practices.
Purge and surge: While most acute adverse reactions to psychedelics predict negative outcomes, vomiting does the opposite.
Measure twice, trip once: Together, three recently published datasets show that psilocybin safety estimates depend on how harms are measured.

Conditional love: The FDA may soon approve its first psychedelic drug. But first, it needs to define the rules on who can take and administer them.
Weed agree: A co-chair of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus is calling for a broad review of federal drug policy governing psychedelics and other drugs.
Triggered: Advocates in New York are pushing lawmakers to modernize the state’s approval process for innovative mental health treatments.
You win some: Iowa’s Department of Inspections, Appeals, and Licensing approved an agreement with an entheogenic church to allow the ceremonial use of ayahuasca.
You lose some: The 10th Circuit cleared the state of Utah to continue its prosecution of a man using psilocybin mushrooms in a religious setting. (See previous coverage.)

Gym, tan, mushrooms: Compass Pathways is moving its U.S. headquarters to New Jersey.
Roll it out: Rua Bioscence signed a deal to supply MDMA to prescribers in New Zealand. (See previous coverage.)
Howdy-boga: Psyence BioMed is partnering with Benuvia Operations to manufacture ibogaine in Round Rock, Texas.
There’s more to the mushroom: Luminous Mind secured a patent on the production of psilocybin-free psychedelic fungi.
Taper tantrum: Outro raised $7 million to extend its “deprescribing” model from antidepressants to other drug classes.

Binge watch: Adult Swim’s fungi-forward animated thriller, Common Side Effects, is coming back for a second season.
Not fun at all: The Cornell 7 case raises questions about the rise of ketamine in sexual assaults.
The holy children: Did magic mushrooms make us religious?
Meme of the week: When your cat mistakes your dried mushrooms for kibble…

Any overthinkers in the house?

Conventional wisdom says rumination sits underneath depression. (That’s when you have the same thoughts looping in your head ad nauseam.) The theory makes sense and has evidence to support it.

Now, hear us out. What if depressed brains are actually under-thinking?

Sounds blasphemous (especially if you’ve ever lied awake at night replaying the time you called your math teacher “mom”). But it may be plausible.

This week, we saw a new LSD study that raised the question, and now guess what we’re doing? Overthinking overthinking. Classic.

Here’s what the study showed.

Stranger still, the patients whose brain activity rose the most weren’t the ones whose depression improved the most. The two were uncorrelated.

So, here’s where we’re at. Either A) The depressed brains weren’t overactive after all; they were idling, and LSD woke ‘em up. B) Psychedelics tune cognition separately from mood. Or C) We have no idea what we’re talking about.

Frankly, B seems more likely, but this study isn’t robust enough to prove it or rule out A, so we’ll settle for C. Good attitude to have toward life, generally speaking.

Beginner’s mind, ya know? 🫠

Well, if we’re talking pharmaceuticals, usually an incoherent garble of capital letters. And apparently, two leading psychedelic drug developers plan to keep that tradition alive. Trademark filings spotted by Psychedelic Alpha hint at a few possible brand names for the first FDA-approved psychedelics. How’d you like to turn on, tune in, and drop out with a tab(let) of ADLIZA®, NEUPLIXO®, or NUEVDI®? Hmm?

Let’s take a moment to appreciate that somewhere a consultant was paid handsomely to determine that “EMPAQUIST” sounds soothing. (Actually, that one goes kinda hard…) Anyway, what’s far less likely to settle your nervous system is the price tag for Compass’s synthetic psilocybin. The company recently told investors a year of treatment could cost 50 to 65 grand. Assuming patients get three doses a year, that works out to somewhere between $16,700 and $21,700 a dose.

To address the sticker shock… yeah, valid. But respectfully, these numbers should come as no surprise. What happens when you spend hundreds of millions on R&D? Gotta recoup that investment. Of course, nobody’s paying out-of-pocket at these rates. Insurers will have to pick up the tab. But shoot, suddenly a $750 session in Colorado looks like a steal.

Uh oh. Gabon, the ancestral home of iboga, is temporarily shutting down all exports of the shrub and its derivatives. Not only that. The Gabonese government has also made it clear it won’t stand for thankless extraction. They want a cut of whatever the rest of the world builds off their precious plant medicine (patents, synthetics, even clinic fees) pooled into a national fund.

Smart move, if you ask us. The ibogaine gold rush is very much on. Ever since Trump’s April executive order on psychedelic medicine, Gabon has been watching the demand curve bend. Iboga seedling prices have already more than quadrupled. Why shouldn’t the Gabonese benefit?

See, it’s easy to “celebrate” the Bwiti heritage of iboga. Gabon would like the burgeoning ibogaine industry to put their money where their mouth is. And so far, they have reason to be skeptical. When Gabon finally did strike a benefit-sharing deal in 2023, a village got paid for its iboga bark, but the promised cut of clinic revenue never showed up. No wonder they’re tightening the rules.

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.