- Psychedelics, Chloroquine for the Climate Pandemic? - November 14, 2025
- Back to the Roots: Psychedelic Science Rebuilds After MDMA Denial - July 14, 2025
- Jonathan Ott, apostle for jurema and entheogens, dies at 76 - July 8, 2025
Largest Psychedelic Science Conference Rekindles Hopes of Therapeutic Success
The Psychedelic Science 2025 conference in Denver, June 17-21, began with the acknowledgment that the Colorado capital was once Cheyenne and Arapaho territory. The charged atmosphere of the meeting was captured by Rick Williams, of the organization People of the Sacred Land, who offered a prayer and summoned thousands of people at the Bellco Theater at the city’s convention center: “Listen, can you hear it? Listen. The spirits are watching.”
“All of your actions with these medicines must be done with ceremonies and prayers. And asking the spirit of that plant to help you. Without it there could be trouble. Do not abuse these gifts from the creator, they must be respected in every way.”
“All of your actions with these medicines must be done with ceremonies and prayers. And asking the spirit of that plant to help you. Without it there could be trouble. Do not abuse these gifts from the creator, they must be respected in every way.”
Rick Williams, People of the Sacred Land
The Indigenous omen sounded almost retroactive, given the contrast between the prevailing climate and that of two years earlier. In 2023, more than 12,000 participants had flocked to the largest scientific-psychedelic event ever, drawn by the prospect of consecrating MDMA-supported psychotherapy (ecstasy) for post-traumatic stress disorder. Trouble had indeed happened, and the attendance shrank this year to about 8,000 participants.
The setback was soon after acknowledged by Rick Doblin, leader of the movement that gave rise to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)and the phase III clinical trials with MDMA that failed to gain FDA approval in August 2024.
He even tried to make fun of his own outfit: at PS2023, he triumphantly took the stage all in white, and this year he added some “black and blue” (pants and shirt), keeping only his blazer and white sneakers.
To a standing ovation in the partially packed theater, Doblin said he was crushed by the regulatory agency’s unfavorable decision on the application of Lykos, a company created from a MAPS spinoff. He lamented the recent deaths of two leading figures in psychedelic science, Amanda Feilding (1943-2025) and Roland Griffiths (1946-2023). He concluded with another failure: the 2024 Massachusetts referendum rejection of a law that would have decriminalized several psychedelic compounds.
The former hippie who founded MAPS in 1986, just a year after MDMA was banned in the United States, has not given up. He has faith that the phoenix will rise from the ashes and that Lykos will prevail, sooner or later.
He listed good news, such as liberalizing legislation in New Mexico and the Czech Republic. He welcomed the support for the cause from politicians like Republican Rick Perry, former governor of Texas, and Democrat Jared Polis, current governor of Colorado—who announced at the conference a pardon for prisoners convicted of possession of psilocybin (from “magic” mushrooms), a substance legalized in the state in 2022.
In Oregon, 10,000 people have already legally used psilocybin. The Texas government is allocating $50 million to research on ibogaine for addiction. Australia, Canada, and Switzerland already allow exceptional prescriptions of MDMA or psilocybin, and New Zealand is moving toward the same.
The Pentagon announced in March $9.8 million in psychedelic studies for psychological disorders affecting war veterans. These disorders account for 18 suicides among veterans every day.
Phase III studies of psilocybin for depression by Compass Pathways and the Usona Institute continue. Compass, represented on one of the conference panels, did not provide further details of the results it would release three days later regarding one arm of its clinical trial: an average reduction of 3.6 points with 258 volunteers whose depression was measured on the MADRS scale (maximum total of 60 points).
At first glance, this seems like a slight improvement, but it is similar to the 3.4-point symptom reduction that led to the approval of Spravato, an intranasal esketamine (a variant of ketamine) from Janssen Pharmaceuticals. Compass’s larger arm, with 568 patients, will only have data announced in the second half of 2026.
In addition to Phase III trials, preliminary stages and basic research also advanced amid the anticlimax created by the FDA. Dráulio de Araújo, a Brazilian neuroscientist who acted as a reviewer for papers submitted to PS2025, heard from organizers that the number of abstracts submitted has doubled in the past two years.
His own group at the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (ICe-UFRN) presented data on two congress panels about the safety of the psychedelic dimethyltryptamine (DMT) from jurema-preta (Mimosa tenuiflora). In this case, the psychedelic was administered by inhalation (60 mg) and compared with an active placebo (0.6 mg of DMT) in a group of 25 healthy, depression-free volunteers.
At one of the ICe-UFRN panels, the article published in the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology was presented by the last author, Fernanda Palhano-Fontes. At the other, with the theme “Charting the Path of DMT Science in Brazil: Historical Roots and Future Directions,” I was the moderator and presented an overview of the book A Ciência Encantada de Jurema (the enchanted science of jurema), recently released in Brazil by Fósforo Editora (I was also interviewed by Chacruna’s head, anthropologist Bia Labate about the book).
Araújo concluded the panel by recounting how his participation in the Seminar Ancestral Medicines: Jurema, a few weeks earlier, had motivated him to initiate an equal dialogue with the “science of Jurema” practiced by Indigenous peoples of Brazil’s Northeastern semiarid biome known as Caatinga. He was warmly applauded.’
Discover the Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative of the Americas
There is also an unresolved conflict between the psychedelic research sector and the traditional peoples who, for centuries or millennia, have developed technologies for using so-called master plants, such as those used in ayahuasca (Amazon) and jurema wine (Caatinga). They demand respect for the sacred nature of these plants and for Indigenous spirituality itself, which they see as threatened by the enthusiasm surrounding the rediscovery of psychedelics in medicine.
All the hype, they fear, could lead to the indiscriminate extraction of these plants from nature, the disruption of community life in villages with the influx of shamanic tourism, and an increase in serious cases of adverse effects. Their criticisms are often harsh, if not aggressive, as was evident at the Jurema seminar and, even more so, at the V Indigenous Ayahuasca Conference held in January in the Brazilian state of Acre. At the psychedelic science conference in Denver, though, there was far less animosity.
Nixiwaka, the Yawanawa chief who hosted the Indigenous conference in Acre, addressed a conciliatory message to researchers at the opening in Denver. “I invite the scientific community to enter our home through the front door, not through the window,” he said at the Bellco Theater, using a euphemism used for thieves. Perhaps referring to the creation of a Council of Indigenous Spiritual Leadership in January, he warned: “We are ready for this dialogue. Science is very important for the future of humanity.”
At the closing of Psychedelic Science 2025, it was the turn of human rights scholar and visual artist Daiara Tukano, who was also present at the Indigenous conference in Acre, to extend a hand to academic interlocutors. “We’ve been trying to have a dialogue for 500 years. The time has come to tell scientists that we, too, have science,” she argued. “To acknowledge illusions, so that we can learn to walk in truth. Without leaving marks or trash behind.”
“We’ve been trying to have a dialogue for 500 years. The time has come to tell scientists that we, too, have science … To acknowledge illusions, so that we can learn to walk in truth. Without leaving marks or trash behind.”
Daiara Tukano
Reestablishing diplomatic relations and even partnerships with Indigenous peoples is nothing less than a return to the roots of psychedelic science. After all, it was driven by researchers who had contact with mescaline from the peyote cactus, psilocybin from Psilocybe mushrooms, and dimethyltryptamine from ayahuasca and jurema wine, all of which have been used for centuries by Indigenous communities.
Beyond a condescending and politically correct gesture, what is referred to as tokenism, this attempt to connect with traditional knowledge can also be seen as one of the symptoms manifested in Denver that the psychedelic field is seeking to immunize itself against: the medicalizing infection that prostrated it in the clash with the FDA.
The most feverish sign of this reaction came in the emphatic defense of psychotherapy as the heart of the healing process for mental disorders left unresolved by Big Pharma pills and fueled by climate, geopolitical, and workplace insecurity. Some researchers and many companies began to downplay the importance of psychotherapy after the FDA isolated it as a loose wire in the evidence-based medicine circuit, a variable deemed uncontrollable due to the lack of standardization and the interference of subjective expectations.
Two strategies emerged that hope to circumvent the agency’s double blindness. On the one hand, companies like Compass began to dismiss as mere psychological support in dosing sessions what in the MAPS/Lykos protocol was an inseparable component: consultations with psychotherapists. They contended that these consultations are important, firstly, to prepare for the psychedelic experience, and secondly, to integrate the content and affects that the experience triggered.
On the other hand, researchers like David Olson of the University of California, Davis, are betting on molecular modeling of psychedelic-like compounds that would dispense with consciousness alteration. In other words, they’re refining molecules so that they retain their power to induce neuroplasticity—the formation of new neural connections that would explain the therapeutic effect—and lose their ability to induce psychedelic trips, transmuted into what have been conventionally called psychoplastogens or neuroplastogens.
Pills for daily use, alas, perhaps liminally effective against depression and other disorders, but incapable of leading patients to transformative experiences. One of the first to speak out against the elimination of the psychotherapeutic component of psychedelic therapies was Rachel Yehuda of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York:
“I don’t think the FDA should regulate therapy; they need to understand the process,” she said. “We have an ethical obligation to explain the elements we believe should be present.” With experience in treating war veterans, she spared no words in comparing psychedelic therapy without psychotherapy to surgery without anesthesia.
“I don’t think the FDA should regulate therapy; they need to understand the process … We have an ethical obligation to explain the elements we believe should be present.”
Rachel Yehuda, Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Already in the opening session of the conference, Rick Doblin had deplored this dehydration of psychedelic-assisted therapies. He and Yehuda were joined by prominent voices in the psychedelic field, such as Marcela Ot’alora and Robin Carhart-Harris.
Among those most grounded in original research was the position of Gül Dölen of Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley. Already in 2023, she had electrified the audience with her lecture on how psychedelics reopen learning windows in adult animals, a peculiar form of plasticity that appears to restore humans’ ability to reinterpret or rewrite their own traumas and ruminations.
Dölen began by noting that not all neuroplasticity is positive, giving the example of cocaine, in which the formation or strengthening of neural connections participates in the mechanism of addiction. After stressing this caveat, she launched into a defense of the psychedelic experience: “My guess is that it won’t be possible to reopen the critical period [learning window] without the altered state of consciousness. They could essentially be doing something similar with cocaine.”
Speaking in favor not only of cocaine, but of any psychoactive drugs, Carl Hart spoke out, criticizing with a few expletives the “psychedelic exceptionalism that is killing us,” the title of his lecture. The neuroscientist from Columbia University maintains that there are no good or bad drugs, a dichotomy created without evidence that serves to stigmatize compounds like heroin—of which, incidentally, he has already declared himself a user.
Hart projected slides showing how the reviled methamphetamine is chemically similar to the deified MDMA. He asserted that the dissociation between them is artificial and serves a political purpose incompatible with individual autonomy and the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the US Constitution. “Exceptionalism is an important weapon in the war on drugs,” he asserted.
He denounced as unreliable the statistics on opioid overdoses, which would have resulted in 111,422 deaths in the US in 2023. They are based on death certificates completed by medically unqualified coroners, he charged, with a margin of error of 20% to 30%. Even with the decriminalization of marijuana and the rehabilitation of psychedelics, he reflected, the number of drug arrests hasn’t dropped—and the police continue to incarcerate Black people like him.
There’s no shortage of ambiguity in the psychedelic renaissance.
There’s no shortage of ambiguity in the psychedelic renaissance. Rick Doblin, who campaigned against the Vietnam War, now allies with Republican politicians to promote psychedelic treatments for veterans and includes in MAPS’s educational mission to bring MDMA to traumatized places like Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Bosnia, and Somalia—initiatives that could well be interpreted as an adaptive panacea to keep war machines greased and fueled.
After losing MDMA to Lykos and the FDA, MAPS is now funding a phase II study to treat veterans with marijuana—which is another step back in time, sometimes the only available resource for those whose march forward was aborted. Not everything is backward, however. Doblin and his fellow fighters have reason for some optimism on the psychedelic front.
In addition to the possible resurrection of psychedelics at the FDA with the growing accumulation of data in favor of mind altering treatments, the political movement on the right and left in favor of legislative changes, advances in countries less problematic than the US, and the revived alliance with Indigenous peoples, the leader of Psychedelic Science 2025 welcomed the phenomenon of the proliferation of psychedelic churches. Their adherents seek and, in some cases, obtain legal authorization to consume substances rebranded as entheogens, such as the Church of the Eagle and the Condor.
The divine stratagem to justify the use and access to psychedelics also has a touch of going back to the roots. When science proves powerless or shortsighted, and when technologies born from it contribute to the permanent disorientation of a planet in crisis, original beliefs can help keep the flag high.
Art by Mulinga.
Note: Journalist Marcelo Leite traveled to Denver at the invitation of Maps and the Chacruna Institute
A version of this story appeared originally in Portuguese in the blog Virada Psicodélica published by the Brazilian daily newspaper Folha de S.Paulo and can be found here.
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed here are by Leite, and not Chacruna. Leite sits on the advisory board of Chacruna.
Shop Our Latest T-Shirt Design, “Protecting Sacred Plants.”
Take a minute to browse our stock:
Did you enjoy reading this article?
Please support Chacruna's work by donating to us. We are an independent organization and we offer free education and advocacy for psychedelic plant medicines. We are a team of dedicated volunteers!
Can you help Chacruna advance cultural understanding around these substances?
Become a Chacruna Member
To make a direct donation click the button below:
