Psychedelic News of the Week
Britons are flying abroad for psychedelic therapy they can’t get at home
A new BBC report follows a growing number of people in the UK travelling overseas for psychedelic therapy. Psilocybin and ayahuasca are both illegal under UK law, so people seeking help for their mental health are going to countries where the treatments are allowed, even as British researchers run clinical trials to test whether the same care could one day be offered at home. Campaigners argue it could transform mental health treatment, though the evidence base is still being built and significant regulatory hurdles remain.
A hit memoir’s MDMA “recovered memories” head to court
New York Magazine’s The Cut went deep this week on the fight over “The Tell,” the 2025 bestselling memoir in which venture capitalist Amy Griffin writes that MDMA therapy surfaced repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. A former school classmate alleges in a lawsuit that Griffin took her abuse story and presented it as her own, and Griffin denies it and has countersued for defamation. Beyond the personal drama, the case has become the most public test yet of an unresolved scientific question: how far can a memory that first surfaces on MDMA be trusted? Every claim remains an allegation in active litigation.
The questionnaire psychedelic science trusted for decades was never validated
A team led by Johns Hopkins researcher David Yaden published a paper this week arguing that the Persisting Effects Questionnaire, the survey used since the 1960s1 to measure the lasting effects of a psychedelic experience, has never been formally validated2, meaning no one had confirmed it measures what it claims to. The researchers propose a shorter replacement and tested it against more than 750 responses from people who had used psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, ayahuasca, DMT or 5-MeO-DMT. It is quiet, methodological housekeeping, but it lands as regulators weigh how these treatments should be judged, with the field’s basic measuring tools finally getting checked themselves.
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Americans are turning to psychedelics in search of the divine
Rolling Stone published a wide feature this week on what it calls a new psychedelic awakening: Americans reaching for psilocybin, ayahuasca, ibogaine and MDMA less for recreation than for spiritual meaning. The piece estimates there are now around 700 psychedelic churches in the country, from congregations of a few dozen to a few thousand, and cites survey data showing spiritual and religious motives rank among the top reasons North Americans use these substances. It is a reminder that the psychedelic story was never only clinical. For a large and growing group, the point was meaning, and that shapes how these drugs get framed, regulated and sold.
How psilocybin therapy actually plans to reach the clinic
Compass Pathways, the London-based company with the most advanced psilocybin programme, told BioPharma Dive this week how it intends to bring its treatment to market if it wins FDA approval. The blueprint is Spravato, the ketamine-derived nasal spray Johnson & Johnson built into a blockbuster through supervised in-clinic dosing, certified sites and monitoring, and Compass wants to reuse that infrastructure for COMP360, its synthetic psilocybin. The detail matters because it answers the question hype tends to skip: how a supervised, hours-long session becomes something a clinic can schedule, a payer can reimburse, and a regulator can trust.
Psychedelic companies are spending record sums lobbying Washington
New second-quarter figures compiled this week show psychedelic companies’ federal lobbying spending hit a new high in 2026, coming in just under 350,000 dollars, led largely by Compass Pathways and Definium Therapeutics. In absolute terms, it stays modest, a rounding error beside the wider pharmaceutical sector. The direction of travel is the story: an industry that spent years presenting itself as a mission rather than a market is now doing what maturing industries do, hiring lobbyists and working the corridors. As approvals edge closer, expect that figure to climb.
