Being guided through your trip by a psychedelic veteran might not be the same as receiving the drug from your born-again oncologist in the Bible Belt.

 

The problem is that the trials required by the FDA fail to control for the impact of different subcultures and their psychotherapeutic practices on treatment outcomes. Being so close to making psychedelics part of mainstream medicine, this might not be the right moment for MAPS and Heffter to initiate a paradigm shift beyond placebo-controlled trials. If training programmes and treatment handbooks can acculturate psychedelically naive doctors and therapists enough to repeat recent therapeutic achievements, it is possible that placebo-controlled trials will get MDMA and psilocybin through the FDA approval process. But should these drugs really become part of medicine cabinets from San Francisco to America’s heartland, it will be high time to develop drug tests that control for the cultural diversity of this country’s doctors and patients. Such an expansion of psychopharmacologists’ and drug regulators’ minds would crown the psychedelic revival with a genuine scientific revolution.

 

From: Psychedelics can’t be tested using conventional clinical trials