Red tape causing frustations for NZ psychedelic therapy researchers
Professor Paul Glue: the Misuse of Drugs Act is “hopelessly out of date”. Photo / Supplied
New Zealand followed the US in criminalising the use and possession of LSD in 1967, not only banning its cultural use, but also curtailing decades of research since it was synthesised in 1938. The return of psychedelic research to the mainstream over the past decade has produced an intriguing picture of science, shamanism – and money. Potentially, lots of money.
An article in the journal JAMA Psychiatry last year projected that the American market for “psychedelic substances” would grow to US$10.7 billion by 2027, “a growth rate that may even outpace the legal US cannabis market”. Some of that money is coming to New Zealand.
Berlin-based Atai Life Sciences has been trialling its proprietary version of DMT (a powerful, short-acting psychedelic) on healthy volunteers in New Zealand and also has a trial underway in Auckland of its variant of the popular party drug MDMA, with a view to treatments for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder respectively.
In either case, proving the efficacy of a particular formulation and a protocol to go with it could be very profitable.
Australian-based MindBio Therapeutics, which is helping to fund the Auckland LSD microdosing trials, is also supporting a pending trial of microdosed LSD in advanced cancer patients, developed by Dr Lisa Reynolds of the University of Auckland, who has a background in the psychology of cancer.
The organisation that has done more than any other to rekindle interest in the potential of psychedelics, the US-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), has also reached out to New Zealand.
MAPS, whose MDMA protocol is edging towards Federal Drug Administration approval in the US as a therapy for PTSD, has donated the drugs for a joint New Zealand trial by Otago and Auckland universities to explore the potential of MDMA to treat end-of-life depression and anxiety.
MAPS will also fund the training of about a dozen therapists for the trial. Even then, the New Zealand trial design has pared back the MAPS protocol to one dose instead of three and two psychotherapy sessions instead of three, because of the costs.
University of Otago professor of psychiatry Paul Glue, who is overseeing the MDMA trial, thinks ACC, which currently funds ongoing counselling for PTSD patients, may see a case for funding an intervention that could eliminate the need for further therapy.
His co-investigator, Dr Will Evans, is also the physician on the Auckland LSD microdosing trials – and something of a bridge between the emerging medical sphere and what might be called the psychedelic community. Both agree the MAPS therapeutic manual, which draws heavily on the work of the Freudian psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, will not be the answer everywhere.