Conservative drug reformers and leading psychiatrists are urging ministers to reclassify the psychedelic compound psilocybin so that researchers can explore its potential as a medicine.
The same demand is being made by people suffering from cluster headaches – which involve severe pain that existing drugs do little to relieve – amid evidence that psilocybin can help reduce both the condition’s physical and mental impact.
Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, is currently a schedule one drug – the most tightly controlled – under the Misuse of Drugs Act. Campaigners want it downgraded to schedule two to facilitate more studies into its efficacy as a treatment for cluster headaches.
Three world-renowned British psychiatrists have written to Sajid Javid, the health secretary, and Kit Malthouse, the crime and policing minister at the Home Office, urging a rethink.
Prof Allan Young, Prof Karl Friston and Prof Simon Wessely want the ministers to commission Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, “to assess the evidence for the harms and utility of psilocybin with a view to rescheduling this promising medicine and experimentally useful compound at the earliest opportunity”.
Wessely has advised the government on mental health policy and led an independent review, commissioned by then prime minister Theresa May, into the Mental Health Act.
A recent study yielded “impressive results” showing that psilocybin can help reduce the symptoms of treatment-resistant depression, they say. The compound is also being investigated for its potential benefits for those with anorexia, obesity and post-traumatic stress disorder as well as alcohol, cocaine and tobacco addiction, they add.
“There has been no recent review of the evidence for psilocybin’s current scheduling [and] there is not and never has been an evidential basis for psilocybin’s current scheduling.”
They argue that the Home Office’s refusal to downgrade the compound “is inconsistent with the precedent set by cannabis-based products for medicinal use in 2018”, they said.
Ainslie Course, a director of the cluster headaches charity ClusterBusters UK, and 160 other people with the debilitating condition have also written to Javid and Malthouse seeking a relaxation.
“The brutality and severity of the pain … wreaks havoc on relationships, family life, employment and friendships. Our condition carries a suicide rate 20 times the national average,” she writes. Most sufferers are breaking the law by buying the drug online to medicate themselves, she adds.
The bid to get psilocybin reclassified is supported by the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group, whose members include Tory MP Crispin Blunt, an ex-justice minister.
Boris Johnson agreed to reschedule psilocybin and other psychedelic substances in order to allow research into them in a meeting with him last May, Blunt said. However, nothing has changed in the 10 months since.
Blunt said: “Cluster headache sufferers hold guns to their heads routinely as they weather attacks of this ill-understood condition. Those who do know about it know all too well the pain that causes these to be known as ‘suicide headaches’.
“To keep in place the red tape that precludes further clinical knowledge of how this pain can be alleviated with psilocybin is to cement thousands in the UK between a rock and a hard place. Do they break the law to access a medicine that seems to work, or do they accept that the Home Office has consigned them to a life of suffering further preventable attacks?”
A government spokesperson said: “We sympathise with the often-debilitating pain faced by people who suffer from cluster headaches.
“Medicines involving controlled drugs must go through a licensing process to ensure their safety, quality and efficacy. No medicine based on psilocybin has yet been licensed by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.
“However, we are working with the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to consider whether barriers to legitimate research on controlled drugs – including psilocybin – could be removed.”
