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The federal government provided funding this fall for researchers to study the therapeutic effects of a classic psychoactive drug. This was the first time that the federal government had granted such funding in 50 years. The National Institutes of Health granted Johns Hopkins Medicine, in collaboration with University of Alabama at Birmingham and New York University, $4 million to investigate if psilocybin — one of the primary psychoactive ingredients in psychedelic mushrooms — can help people quit smoking.
“This is a huge step for really solidifying the science [behind psychedelic research],”Matthew Johnson (Ph.D.), principal investigator and professor of psychiatry & behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University. “NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research not just in the United States, but in the world and, in fact, the majority of the research upon which any pharmaceutical company is operating has been funded largely through NIH.”
We’re now amidst what many are referring to as the “Psychedelic Renaissance.”The flourishing research on psychedelics for therapeutic purposes almost stopped when President Richard Nixon signed into law the Controlled Substances Act in 1970. Then, beginning in the 1990s with a study looking at DMT, and picking up in the 2000s with research at Johns Hopkins University looking at psilocybin for depression and anxiety in terminally ill patients, an abundance of psychedelic research began again — but it’s been funded privately, through philanthropy and investments.
Clinical trials can be expensive. According to a study published by JAMA, the median cost of developing a drug in the United States is $985 million. NIH was a major funder of the early research that showed the promise of psychedelics for mental health decades ago — they once funded more than 130 studies just looking at LSD. NIH stopped funding psychedelics research in the wake of the media and political frenzy around psychedelics. The psychedelic renaissance is now several decades old — and growing exponentially, with a wave of for-profit psychedelic drug development companies now raising millions of dollars to take various psychedelic compounds through the FDA approval process and get them to market.
“A lot of folks say, ‘How do you get past DEA [the Drug Enforcement Administration] and FDA? They’ve been onboard for decades now. If you have your protocols right, the t’s crossed and i’s dotted, they’re going to approve your protocol,”Johnson. “The public still hasn’t gotten that in terms of the government, the funding side of the government has been last to the party.”
Johnson is one of the few researchers who are beginning to see this change. The grant that he and his fellow researchers received came specifically from a pool of money allocated by NIDA — the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which exists under the National Institutes of Health — for novel treatments for substance use. Because his research could identify a treatment for people quitting smoking, he was eligible. However, researchers who want to study psilocybin to treat depression, PTSD, and other indications that psilocybin is promising for would not be eligible.
Dr. Francis Collins, the former director of NIH said that the NIH will continue to support all agencies and programs under its umbrella during a Senate budget hearing. “want to have a hard look”The promise of psychedelic substances for mental health. “I think as we’ve learned more about how the brain works, we began to realize that these are potential tools for research purposes and might be clinically beneficial,” Collins said, acknowledging that for a long time psychedelics weren’t considered a legitimate research subject. Johnson was also told by NIDA when he applied to the grant that they are open for funding research on psychoactive substances.
“I told them ‘If I’m wasting my time and you just don’t think it’s feasible to conduct a study looking at the therapeutic potential of a psychedelic, I’d appreciate it a lot if you’d let me know,”Johnson. “I was told that it wasn’t going to be rejected just on principle for involving a psychedelic. That it wasn’t going to be a simplistic political reaction like that.”
There’s been some movement in Congress, too. Melissa Lavasani is the founder and executive director of Plant Medicine Coalition. This non-profit advocacy group, which is women-led, advocates for psychedelic legislation at the federal level made it her goal to secure $100 million in federal funding specifically for psychedelic research. She believes federal funding is one of the most crucial components in the advancement of the psychedelic community. She and her team at the Plant Medicine Coalition didn’t succeed in getting the funding this year — they were competing with too many other big items in Congress, she says, such as President Joseph Biden’s $550 billion infrastructure bill. But they made significant progress: They met more than 100 Congressional officials and laid the foundation for the first ever psychedelic caucus. This would be located in the House and will help to get funding approved in future.
Lavasani says that funding is more than just securing funds to study psychedelics for the mental health. Federally funded research can help drug companies bring these treatments to market. Johnson has actually partnered with Mydecine, a drug development firm, who is interested in using federally funded research to help them get psilocybin onto the market for addiction to tobacco. Lavasani says that relying on drug companies for research can be a mistake. “really limiting” as they’re focused on studying particular compounds for particular indications (such as psilocybin for depression), and, if they’re funded by investors, must typically also take the potential for profit into account. However, small studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that psychedelics can be used to treat physical conditions such as neurodegeneration or inflammation. This is something worth investigating.
“If we want to see psychedelics as a part of our healthcare system, we need to have much broader research and we need to do it in the pursuit of a good and positive societal impact,”Lavasani, who was also the leader of the initiative that successfully decriminalized natural psychoactive drugs in Washington, D.C., last November, said: “When policymakers are looking at research, they want to look at federally-funded research.”
The problem is that it can be very difficult to receive a grant form the federal government. Many grants can be hundreds of pages long. “You have to be very competent, very intelligent, you have to have a track record in research,”Jeffrey Becker, co-founder of Bexson Biomedical which develops a unique ketamine formulation for acute and chronic pain disorders, says, “Even if a grant fund is perfect, you might not get funded for six months and then the money might not even reach your department for two months.”
Johns Hopkins Medicine had to wait for their grant to be approved for nearly two years. At first, NIH demanded that they make some changes and resubmit the grant. After reviewing it twice, it took a little over a year for NIH again to approve it. Then, NIH declared that it looked great but was out of funds for the time being. This is all to say that it’s not as though the federal coffers have been opened for psychedelics per se. But in addition to the importance of the funds for furthering research, they’re symbolically important, too.
Federally-funded research is not only important for politicians to perceive psychedelics as legitimate, they’re also hugely important to garner the support of researchers and academic institutions. “A lot of researchers left psychedelics willingly cause they were seen as potential career suicide,” says Becker.
Johnson had experienced this. Johnson was just a young researcher when he shared his interest in studying psychedelics with colleagues. He was ridiculed. “good luck” and that, in order to have a chance at becoming a full professor at a university and working at a research institute, he’d need to get NIH funding, which didn’t seem possible at the time. “That was the thing that really killed the work,”He mentions the decades-long slowing in psychedelic drug research. “The idea that it was a career killer.”
All these years later, he’s hopeful about what this grant signifies, not only for the psychedelic movement, but also for aspiring researchers, who are where he once was. “It means a lot to academics,”He said. “Just to have the potential of NIH funding there tells young researchers that they can have a career in this.”