In its efforts to mainstream psychedelics, the biomedical model runs the risk of proclaiming and defending particular dogmas and orthodoxies. These raise the risk of stifling inquiry into the full psychedelic experience: its mechanisms, meaning, and optimal applications. In this week’s post, I discuss the state of this mainstreaming effort, and suggest how to prevent its successes from prematurely closing the psychedelic mind. The biomedical research model has been extraordinarily successful in re-introducing psychedelic drugs to the larger scientific community and popular culture. Moderate doses, strict attention to non-drug factors, and a modest relationship with the media all have contributed...

“Myth,” “arguably bullshit,” and “deserving a decent burial.” These are some of the published statements by reputable scientists reacting to various claims made about DMT. Usually, these words are used to attack “pseudoscience,” the kiss of death for scientific theories that lack merit, are patently false, and objectively falsifiable. Several theories about DMT have aroused these strong reactions. In this week’s post, I suggest that some of these reactions are appropriate whereas others are not. The psychedelic theory of schizophrenia’s decent burial, 1976 After DMT’s discovery in mammalian lung in the 1960s, psychiatric researchers sought a relationship between endogenous DMT...

Creating a field of psychedelic medicine opens the window to potential benefits and risks by increasing their accessibility. Rescheduling psychedelics out of the highly restrictive Schedule I is necessary for this to occur. Additional issues of public health policy must be determined, and who takes the lead in shaping these policies requires careful attention. Momentum is building to carry outside of the ivory tower biomedical research’s positive and measured, yet preliminary, findings of psychedelics’ benefit for a number of conditions. This goal is generally referred to as creating “psychedelic medicine” or establishing “psychedelics as medicine.” Medicine, more-or-less different than, but...

Backlash against the wider biomedical availability of psychedelic drugs is likely at some point. However, we may take steps that minimize causes of a potential backlash. One of these steps is to avoid overreaching. Any failure to maintain intellectual rigor and honesty in such a highly controversial field will not serve the research community well when media coverage turns negative for any reason. The worst thing we can hear is: “You were not honest in portraying benefit and risk.” I see at least three phenomena related to the biomedicalization of psychedelic drugs where overreach could come back to haunt us....