Have a Trippy Christmas!
Happy Holidays! Welcome to a Christmas edition of Tripping with Nate, a little stocking stuffer for your inbox. It’s too late to get a delivery from Amazon, so hopefully you are all set to take a couple of minutes for a brief psychedelic sojourn…
An early Christmas present came last week, for those of us very concerned with ensuring that psychedelics are mainstreamed with values of access, affordability and decentralized control. The news revolves around the psychedelic pharmaceutical company (!!!???!!!) Compass Pathways.
Compass Pathways has become a billion dollar company in only five years of existence. If this rise seems meteoric, it is yet more surprising when you consider that their entire business is at this point premised on the use of psychedelics to treat depression and other mental health disorders. ALL of the currently known, useful psychedelics are currently heavily prohibited all over the world for purposes other than clinical and scientific research. How do you build a billion dollar company around an illegal activity?
You must convince investors that it will not remain illegal, that when it becomes legal there will be a huge demand, and that when that happens, you will be the entity best positioned to meet that demand. To do this, you have to make a lot of promises, you must use investor cash to fund research neccesary to make the drugs become legal for medical use, and you need to own... something. In the world of pharmaceuticals, you must own intellectual property. If you have a patent on a particular IP, you own exclusive rights to market that product.
Compass is running that playbook, making all kinds of promises to investors and the public at large, plainly extending beyond any reasonable look at the actual evidence. They are funding research, though it is specifically the kind of research designed around bureaucratic check boxes rather than creating useful knowledge, and they are aggressively pursuing patents on a variety of psychedelic substances.
Among patents they have been granted, one is a crystalline form of psilocybin that they claim meets the patentable standard of being a new and unique development. The patent office agreed and granted them a patent for their formulation, COMP360. What this means is that they can sell their product for a price that is protected from competition by force of law.
Zooming out, we can see the way that prohibition has distorted public behavior to the point of absurdity. Because the substance is illegal, it must run through expensive and time consuming studies that can be funded only by an entity with deep pockets. Those pockets are deep because the entity in question has made promises that they can only keep by securing exclusive rights to a compound that was previously so abundantly available that the government felt the need to legally control it. The argument, of course, is that COMP360 is a unique and novel invention that differs from both natural mushrooms and previously synthesized versions of psilocybin. Please. This is the type of patent that could only be secured from a patent office that has never before dealt with psychedelic substances on account of...wait for it...prohibition.
Fortunately, there are many others who see the transparent absurdity at play here, including the non-profit organization Freedom to Operate. As the always excellent Shayla Love at Vice reports:
What FTO has been working on all these months was finally made public, in the most rigorous challenge to Compass Pathways’ patents yet: a petition for post-grant review (PGR) filed on December 15. Such petitions are filed by third parties to the Patent and Trademark Office within nine months of a granted patent. They specify which claims in a patent the filers think are invalid and why, and are supported by statements from experts, alongside examples of what has been published about or known before—“prior art.”
Later in the piece we learn that the lengthy process to challenge the patent has taken months and cost about a millions bucks.
To challenge a patent requires meticulous proof. FTO paired up with chemists and crystallographers, performed advanced testing and analysis with x-rays, and gathered evidence from prior publications, all to claim in the petition that the form of psilocybin that Compass’ patents rest on is not actually novel, but has in fact existed—and been known to exist—for at least decades.
A paper has just been published in the journal Structural Chemistry that will surely support the challenge. I’m not even going to pretend to understand the chemistry, but apparently it provides academic support for the contention that Compass’s patent does not represent true innovation over prior public knowledge.
How this plays out will be enormously consequential, and anyone interested in a fair and equitable implementation of psychedelic access should pay close attention to how the patent board rules.
A representative in the New York state assembly, Pat Burke, has introduced a law that purports to legalize psilocybin for medical purposes. Clearly emboldened by the victory of Ballot initiative 109 in Oregon last election, this seems to be a more conservative version designed to go through the interest group sausage-making process of a legislative session.
This year, legislators in California have put forward and then tabled a bill to legalize psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin and psilocybin-containing mushrooms, LSD, DMT, mescaline, ibogaine or MDMA.
There are going to be a lot of proposals come and go over the next few years, so it’s useful to have a sense of some of the important factors to look for. Here are a few questions you should seek to learn about any ballot initiative or legislative proposal seeking to amend current drug laws, particularly in regards to psychedelics.
Does this law involve decriminalization, legalization, or restricted medical use?
Legalization removes all local prohibitions on the drug.
Decriminalization does not make a drug legal, but makes possession of a small amount (as defined by the law) merely a civic (rather than a criminal) offense, similar to a traffic ticket. Selling or possessing large quantities remains a criminal offense.
Medical Use involves the use of the drug for the purposes of treating someone with a defined medical problem. In the case of psychedelics, this seems to always involve supervised use, not dispensary-style “take-home” use. It is not preferable for a law to create medical use without also providing for decriminalization.
If the bill is promoted as proposing “medical use”:
Is supervised use allowed for all adults, or are only adults with approved, diagnosed conditions eligible for use? The latter would restrict access and create a “pay-to-play” situation in which people desiring use for personal growth would be coerced into going through an unnecessary process of medical diagnosis that does nothing to aid public safety.
Are raw forms of the drug approved (e.g. mushrooms) or only the synthesized or extracted form (e.g. psilocybin). Mushrooms grow anywhere and are perfectly safe, and any bill that doesn’t allow for use of plants or fungi in their raw form is misguided.
Who is approved to offer supervised use, and in what settings? If sessions are explicitly marketed for mental health, then mental health professionals should be involved. If participants are simply members of the general population seeking personal growth, service providers merely need to be 1) ethically trustworthy 2) able to make sound decisions and execute a safety plan and 3) hold space for someone without interfering in their experience. This should not require a lot of training, but will require some sort of licensing and ethical supervisory board.
How centralized will the industry be, and will it be just?
How restrictive is the permitting process for being a production or growing facility? A very restrictive process will favor applicants with large amounts of funding.
Are there provisions for equitable allocations of permits? Let’s not repeat the Cannabis industry and end up with a bunch of old white investors getting more wealthy.
Are there provisions for restitution for people that have been convicted in the past of drug infractions?
I think that Oregon-style provisions for adult supervised use (not explicitly medical) PLUS decriminalization is a very good way to go. Undermining prohibition is vital, as prohibition is an unjust and counter-productive attack on liberty and individual flourishing.
There are many, many more questions that are of vital importance. If you have any others that you’d suggest, please let me know to visit the comment section by hitting the button below.
Here are a few other quick hits:
“Microdosing” is a protocol by which a user ingests a small dose of a psychedelic such as LSD or psilocybin, typically once every three days. The “small” dose is generally defined as one that is “subperceptible”, meaning you cannot notice its effects. The idea is that a microdose will still create enough change in the brain to allow for improvements in psychological well-being and/or creativity.
It’s gotten a great deal of hype and attention over the last few years as a way to enjoy the benefits of psychedelics without subjecting one’s self to the rigors of a full psychedelic experience. This is an approach very consistent with a pharmacological perspective, in that the sense that the direct chemical action of the drug on the brain is responsible for any positive effects that may follow.
This contrasts with a more experiential view, in which having a phenomenological experience of “tripping” is entirely the point, as the perspective shift may enable new learning to occur, which is the basis for positive change. It could be that both hold value, although the double-blind, placebo controlled study linked above does throw some cold water on the practice.
Debunking the Myth of Blue Mondays: No evidence of Affect Drop After Taking Clinical MDMA.
A persistently reported after-effect of MDMA (street name: ecstacy) is a significant but temporary drop in mood in the days immediately following use. It has been reported so consistently and by so many people that it is unlikely to be completely fabricated, but this study indicates that whatever the “Blue Monday” phenomenon is, it may be a result of factors other than simply the ingestion of MDMA.
Possible alternative explanations might be that MDMA procured illegally might be impure or adulterated, causing hangover type effects. Also possible is that the common setting, very late nights combined with intense physical activity such as dancing combined with the drug experience may make one much more vulnerable to a bummer few days.
Whatever the explanation, this study does not find any mood disruption after clinical MDMA administration. Which is nice, because who wants that?
Also:
Axios, a DC/Beltway arbiter of what is newsworthy, has called 2021 the “Year that Psychedelics went Mainstream”. Which is kind of wild to think about. Not much to add here.
Henry Whitfield, a podcast guest on Altered States of Context, had a paper published this week, A Spectrum of Selves, a long and excellent paper exploring the self from a contextual behavioral perspective and how the process of integrating various perspectives on the self is an excellent bridge between behavioral science and psychedelic practice. I will discuss this paper at more length in next week’s installment.
Here is a deep dive into “flashbacks”, also known as Hallucinogen Persisting Perceptive Disorder (HPPD). I have yet to read it, but it looks to be a thorough exploration of an important and under-discussed phenomenon. I look forward to having the time to digest it.
Have a Merry Christmas! If you haven’t yet, add yourself to the email list and get weekly updates as this “breakthrough” therapy continues to make major waves. Additionally, if you like what you are reading, please consider forwarding this to a friend or two (or three!)
See you next week.