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The Petrie-Flom Center staff often posts updates, announcements, and guests posts on behalf of others.
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What Psychedelic Research Can Learn from Science, and What It Can Teach

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By Manoj Doss

As a psychedelic researcher, I find myself increasingly frustrated by the tendency of the field to make lofty claims about the drugs that stray from the realities and limitations of the data.

For example, psychedelic research that uses neuroimaging employs measures of brain function that are, in fact, quite crude. Typically, one signal in a brain scan can mean many things (amygdala activation can occur when one is scared, happy, observing something salient, etc.).

For this reason, cognitive neuroscientists typically constrain mental activity using behavioral tasks in order to make more educated inferences regarding what is happening in the mind. Yet for some reason, psychedelic scientists believe they can infer mental function from the activity of a few tripping brains under task-free conditions. That is, participants are essentially doing whatever they want in the scanner, making the number of possible inferences one could make nearly infinite. And worse, they base their claims on outdated Freudian theory.

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Miami Downtown, FL, USA - MAY 31, 2020: Woman leading a group of demonstrators on road protesting for human rights and against racism.

Understanding the Role of Race in Health: Conclusions from the Symposium

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By Craig Konnoth

In my introductory post to this symposium, I suggested that medicine and health tapped into a discourse of power that had the power to either harm or help. Medicine can trigger benefits in the law — what I call “medical civil rights,” where advocates rely on medicine’s language to trigger both formal legal rights and public advantage. At the same time, I acknowledged that black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), are often left behind.

In a midpoint reflection, I theorized the problem through the lens of a double bind. On one hand, medicine erases the needs of BIPOC and the harms they experience — the health harms experienced by frontline medical workers, or caused by school and residential segregation — so that they cannot access medical civil rights. On the other hand, BIPOC are rendered hypervisible in contexts where medicine continues to oppress. They are used in clinical trials and tarred with xenophobia and narratives of genetic difference. What should be done?

Several authors offer solutions. I separate them into three categories: (1) community reform, (2) social and legal reform, and (3) medical reform. Of course, all of these solutions are interrelated. Legal and policy change drives medicine; medical research drives law, society, and policy — and both are driven through community activism and consciousness.

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What the Study of Religion Can Teach Us About Psychedelics

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By Sam S.B. Shonkoff

If there is one thing that the critical study of religion unveils, it is that every enchanting and revelatory movement in human history — without exception, no matter how luminous the auras — is nonetheless human.

Psychedelics are no exception.

These substances are making a lot of brain scientists and policymakers talk about mysticism. And how could they not? A rapidly expanding body of data confirms that historically sacramental elements can induce altered states of consciousness with significant healing powers.

In contrast to today’s more conventional psychopharmacological techniques, which require regular doses to maintain chemical changes in the body, it appears that psychedelic medicines operate precisely by means of transformative experiences, the effects of which can last for months, if not years. Scholars and psychonauts alike can hardly account for these phenomena without recourse to the lexicon of religious studies.

And yet, strangely, scholars of religion have been largely absent from this discourse.

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abortion protest outside supreme court.

Reproductive Rights vs. Reproductive Justice: Why the Difference Matters in Bioethics

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By Danielle M. Pacia

When conceptualizing the pursuit of reproductive freedom, we must acknowledge the ways that our systems and structures fail Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) populations.

2020 has been a year filled with anxiety and anger over the COVID-19 pandemic’s disproportionate negative effects on BIPOC populations. Black Lives Matter protests after the unjust deaths of Breonna Taylor, Mia Green, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Riah Milton, and many others whose lives ended far too soon have prompted an overdue awakening. This has caused some to reexamine racism on a personal and institutional level. Like many disciplines in our country, the field of bioethics has begun to recognize how the field reinforces racism within its scholarship.

Part of this effort includes a critical examination of the frameworks we employ when analyzing bioethical subjects and events, and how they may exclude the historical contributions and narratives of BIPOC populations. Merely acknowledging racism is not enough.

Here, I will explain the differences in the terms reproductive justice and reproductive rights and advocate use of the reproductive justice framework instead of the reproductive rights framework. Within bioethics and health law policy, there is often a lack of clarity between the terms, which, in turn, leaves their important conceptual and historical differences ignored.

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Law as a Determinant of Police Violence

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By Osagie K. Obasogie

One idea that distinguishes public health from medicine and other health sciences is the social determinants of health. This concept emphasizes the environmental conditions that give rise to health outcomes — poverty, lack of access to resources, exposures to contaminants, etc. — rather than locating disease solely in biological or physiological processes bounded by human bodies. Following this lead, public health interventions are often focused on community practices that can improve the spaces in which people live. The public health approach is refreshingly simple: healthy communities and environments produce healthy people.

A public health framework for understanding how police and policing impact community health outcomes is necessary as we continue to have wide-ranging conversations about excessive use of force. Improving the health of local communities involves rethinking the laws that govern how police interact with the people they serve.

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Private Law Alternatives to the Individual Mandate: Video Preview with Wendy Netter Epstein

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The Health Law Policy, Bioethics, and Biotechnology Workshop provides a forum for discussion of new scholarship in these fields from the world’s leading experts.

The workshop is led by Professor I. Glenn Cohen, and presenters come from a wide range of disciplines and departments.

In this video, Wendy Netter Epstein gives a preview of her paper, “Private Law Alternatives to the Individual Mandate,” which she will present at the Health Law Policy workshop on November 2, 2020. Watch the full video below:

America divided concept, american flag on cracked background.

Can Psychedelics Help Save America?

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By Shelby Hartman

Amid a fractured political landscape, an unprecedented pandemic, and a reckoning with the country’s racist past, psychedelics may offer some hope for healing in the United States. In recent decades, a renaissance of psychedelic drug research has grown at prominent institutions like Johns Hopkins, New York University, and Imperial College London, among others.

Psilocybin, the psychoactive component in psychedelic mushrooms, and MDMA, sometimes confused with its adulterated version, ecstasy, have both been given breakthrough therapy status by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), because they’ve shown so much promise for treating conditions for which we currently have few effective options. Psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression and MDMA for post-traumatic disorder are projected to be legal within the next five years as drugs that will be administered under the supervision of trained therapists.

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Police cars.

The False Promise of City-Wide Psilocybin Decriminalization

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By Kathryn Lucido

While city-wide decriminalization of psilocybin is a positive step toward decreasing the impact of the war on drugs, it also creates a false sense of security and progress.

Citing new research that illustrates the therapeutic promise of the drug, several U.S. cities have decriminalized psilocybin, a psychedelic compound that occurs naturally in some fungi. Though these cities have pledged not to spend resources prosecuting people for psilocybin possession, and, in some cases, limited distribution, the substance remains illegal at the federal, state, and city levels.

Psilocybin remains a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act. This classification means that — at least according to Congress and the Drug Enforcement Administration — psilocybin is a dangerous drug with no currently accepted medical uses and a high risk for abuse.

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Neurodiversity and Psychedelics Decriminalization

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By Dustin Marlan

Following over fifty years of the racist and corrupt war on drugs, drug decriminalization is now a social justice issue. As I explore in Beyond Cannabis: Psychedelic Decriminalization and Social Justice, the decriminalization of psychedelic drugs, in particular, is a matter of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Psychedelics have long been prohibited under Schedule I of the federal Controlled Substances Act. However, after successful efforts in Denver, Oakland, Santa Cruz, and Ann Arbor, there are now attempts underway to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms and other natural psychedelics in over 100 cities across the country, including Washington, D.C., which will vote on Initiative 81 in November 2020.

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Washington, DC – October 16, 2020: One of the many official ballot boxes placed around the city for early voters to place their completed ballots to avoid lines due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Psychedelics Helped Me Reclaim My Life and Push to Change Drug Laws

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By Melissa Lavasani

In December 2019, I proposed a ballot measure, now known as Initiative 81, which would effectively decriminalize natural psychedelics – including psilocybin and ayahuasca, which had helped me overcome postpartum depression – in the District of Columbia.

This would help ensure that other D.C. residents benefiting from natural psychedelics are not targeted by law enforcement. After tumultuous months of hard work including collecting more than 25,400 signatures from voters, Initiative 81 is on the November ballot.

I am not the usual protagonist you’d imagine as an advocate for psychedelics: I am a married mother of two with two graduate degrees and an established career working for the District of Columbia government. But I had a psychedelic experience that changed my life. In 2018, I had taken psychedelics – first psilocybin mushrooms, and then ayahuasca and San Pedro cacti – because I was desperate to overcome severe postpartum depression that came to dominate my life.

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