UC Berkeley Launches New Center for Psychedelic Science and Education

Yasmin Anwar, writing for Berkeley News:

Fifty years after political and cultural winds slammed shut the doors on psychedelic research, UC Berkeley is making up for lost time by launching the campus’s first center for psychedelic science and public education.

With $1.25 million in seed funding from an anonymous donor, the new UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics will conduct research using psychedelics to investigate cognition, perception and emotion and their biological bases in the human brain.

The center is also developing a program for educating the public about this rapidly advancing field of research. Initial experimental studies will use psilocybin, the principal psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms.

Another psychedelic research center, and this one will also include an educational component.

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Usona Puts New Psilocybin Synthesis Method in the Public Domain

Ann Harrison, writing for Lucid News:

The nonprofit Usona Institute has developed a new technique to synthesize kilograms of pharmaceutical grade psilocybin and placed this information in the public domain where it cannot be patented.

Awesome move by Usona.

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House Postpones Vote on Bill to Federally Legalize Marijuana Until After Election

Kyle Jaeger, writing for Marijuana Moment:

A bill to federally legalize marijuana will no longer receive a previously announced vote in the House of Representatives next week.

In an at least temporary blow to reform advocates, the legislation was not included in a weekly floor schedule posted by the office of Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) on Thursday, though he made a commitment that the body would bring up the bill sometime “later this autumn,” presumably after the November elections. This comes two weeks after Hoyer initially said a vote was being planned for the week of September 21. […]

It appears that the decision was influenced by certain moderate Democrats who’ve expressed concern that voting on a cannabis reform bill while another round of coronavirus relief legislation is still unresolved would be bad optics for their reelection campaigns.

Turns out last month’s news about the House voting on legalizing cannabis federally was a bit short-lived. At least they’re going to do it in November. Hopefully that’ll actually happen.

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Australians Are Working on Rescheduling Psilocybin and MDMA

If you’re a regular reader here at Think Wilder then you might have noticed that I’ve slowed down a bit here on the blog over the past couple weeks, and that’s because I’ve had a lot going on in my personal life. Because of everything going on, I didn’t get around to publishing a link post for this story that broke earlier this month about the effort to reschedule psilocybin and MDMA in Australia to allow for therapeutic use. Psilocybin Alpha had the scoop:

On the 1st of September the nonprofit Mind Medicine Australia submitted a proposal to the Australian Therapeutic Goods Association (TGA), the regulatory body in charge of the island country’s drug scheduling. This proposal was submitted in hopes of reclassifying psilocybin and MDMA from prohibited substances to controlled medicines.

If this proposal is successful, Australia will become the first country in the world to reschedule these substances for therapeutic purposes, potentially giving thousands of people access to life-saving treatments, and setting a precedent that has the potential to influence global policy and attitudes towards psychedelics.

Mind Medicine Australia is requesting that people contact the TGA by September 28th to show their support. An interim decision on the proposal will be announced in February 2021 with a final decision occurring next April.

It would be pretty impressive if Australia ended up being the first country to legalize currently-illegal psychedelics like psilocybin and MDMA for therapeutic use. I certainly wasn’t expecting this—were you?

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Revive Therapeutics Will Study Psilocybin for Methamphetamine Use Disorder

Psilocybin Alpha:

Revive Therapeutics Ltd. (“Revive” or the “Company”) (CSE: RVV, USA: RVVTF), a specialty life sciences company focused on the research and development of therapeutics for medical needs and rare disorders, is pleased to announce that the Company has entered into a Clinical Trial Agreement (CTA), dated August 28, 2020, with the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System (UWS) to conduct a clinical study entitled, “Phase I Study of the Safety and Feasibility of Psilocybin in Adults with Methamphetamine Use Disorder.” Under the terms of the CTA, the Company has an exclusive option to obtain an exclusive, worldwide, royalty-bearing commercialization license to all rights, title and interest that UWS may have or obtain in any invention that results from the clinical study.

Another potential application for psilocybin and/or psychedelics as a whole. It will be interesting to see if methamphetamine use disorder can be successfully treated with psychedelics, and lord knows the people suffering from it could really use the help. I’m hoping that we see some good results coming out of this study.

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