This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 10th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

As states and even some regulatory bodies begin to recognize the potential benefits of psychedelics as medical treatments, there

are some big risks ahead.

William Leonard Pickard is a psychedelic researcher.

We discuss the regulatory and political pitfalls that may lie ahead for the attempt to move

psychedelics into mainstream medicine.

Let's begin here and we'll get some of the backstory in a bit, but what do you see as the opportunity in psychedelic

research and medical treatment today.

The opportunity for psychedelic treatment today would be to ensure that clinical trials are not only efficacious, truly efficacious, to overcome FDA barriers, but that there are no untoward events from improper vetting of patients,

patients who clinically present to or perhaps should not be there that they are a proper fit for the drug and the mode of treatment.

So what stands in the way?

Our ignorance presently because of the long dark period

of no government funded research for the last 40 years.

Little is known but other than anecdotal reports from the underground and of course

the great work at Hopkins by Roland Griffith and Matt Johnson and colleagues there established a standard of great value published in the journal of psychopharmacology and well vetted by

distinguished colleagues and that established and really launched the entire field.

One of the problems that people identify about various drugs that could be useful clinically

is that so many of these drugs aren't owned.

That is to say, the chemical structures, they exist,

and they've existed for a long time.

And so it's hard for a so they don't fund the research. They look for something that they can derive exclusive

...