Psychedelics’ Trip to Mainstream Medicine Comes With Risk

The White House directive to put psychedelics on a regulatory fast track is at once welcome and worrisome. The attention to psychedelics is overdue, and there’s a real opportunity to build a stronger scientific base for a promising field. Yet this area of medicine also demands extra care — or the US risks unleashing complex therapies into an infrastructure unprepared to support them. Americans have already seen what happens when a promising therapy outpaces oversight.

Once on the fringes, psychedelics are drawing in a larger swath of Americans seeking relief from their mental health struggles. One analysis found that nearly 5% of American adults had used at least one psychedelic substance in 2023. And a new survey from RAND found a sizable chunk of psychedelics users are “microdosing” psilocybin, MDMA or LSD.