A sugar pill cannot mimic a psychedelic trip, and that is becoming a serious problem for psychiatry. In psilocybin studies, volunteers usually know within hours whether they got the real drug, which makes it hard to tell how much of the benefit comes from the drug itself and how much comes from expecting to improve.
On Sept. 16, 2026, psychiatrists from UCSF, UC San Diego, and Stanford proposed an unusual fix in JAMA Psychiatry: build the placebo out of several real, approved drugs so it produces an altered state of its own.
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