After decades in the wilderness, psychedelic therapies are making a comeback into clinical research and are poised to re-enter medical care. When used alongside psychotherapy, drugs like psilocybin (found in ‘magic mushrooms’) and MDMA (found in ‘ecstasy’) have shown large, rapid and sustained benefits for a range of addiction and mental health conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, end-of-life distress, alcohol use disorder, and nicotine dependence. While there are some important research limitations associated with these studies, the results have been compelling.
The field of psychedelic research has rapidly expanded, funding is flowing, and public and political sentiment has swung from being largely alarmist or dismissive about these drugs, to hopeful and sometimes hyped. History has shown that some promising treatments can turn out to be underwhelming, unsafe, unfeasible, or unaffordable, and no psychedelic treatment has yet achieved the minimum level of evidence required to be approved as a new medicine. But this may be about to change, and Australia is hurtling towards the likely availability of psychedelic therapies within the next two years.
Only a few years ago, there was no psychedelic research being conducted in Australia. The first psychedelic study in Australia — psilocybin-assisted therapy for end-of-life distress at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, was approved in 2019. In 2020, researcher Paul Liknaitzky established Australia’s first clinical psychedelic research Lab at Monash University. In 2023, more than 15 clinical psychedelic trials will be active around the country. And by 2024, there is a reasonable chance that MDMA-assisted therapy will be approved as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder in Australia. This rapid emergence of a new type of treatment — notably different from any approved medication — may bring new hope to many people.
