They’re billed as a miracle cure for mental illness – but do psychedelic drugs live up to the hype?
When Prince Harry sat down for an interview with psychiatrist Gabor Maté in March, he said something that once would have caused outrage.
Taking magic mushrooms, he told the world, was a “fundamental” part of his new life; something that had “changed” him and helped him “deal with the traumas and the pains” of his past. “They’re unlocking so much of what we’ve suppressed,” he enthused.
Harry is not alone. Britain, and much of the rest of the Anglosphere, is in the grip of a psychedelic mania we have not seen since 1968. But this time round it’s weirdly respectable.
Esteemed scientists, raised in the 1960s and 70s on Woodstock and hemp, are back experimenting with LSD – some finding that it works on their patients almost as well as electric shock treatment.
The BBC and other media are full of case studies about formerly depressed people who, like Harry, have seen the light after a trip. It’s even possible to buy “functional mushroom” capsules from the shelves in Holland & Barrett.
Not only is it now acceptable to undergo a psychedelic sojourn, but fashionable. “I took magic mushrooms at 64 and the fog I’ve lived under my whole life lifted,” an enthusiast told The Telegraph in November. “I took magic mushrooms to relieve the stress of motherhood,” read a headline in The Times the other week.
Those championing the new “shroom boom” are a very different breed to their forebears. In the 1960s it was the likes of Jagger, Joplin and Hendrix who played the pied piper. but this time around, it is not so much those who would “stick it to the man” who are leading the way but the man himself.
Step forward Crispin Blunt MP, the honourable member for Reigate in Surrey, a straight-talking sort of chap who was educated not in Carnaby Street or some trendy redbrick sociology department but at Wellington College and then Sandhurst.
On Thursday, Mr Blunt made the latest in a long series of passionate pleas to have psilocybin, the chemical that puts the “magic” in magic mushrooms, put on the road towards legalisation for medical use.
Speaking at a debate in the Commons, which his Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group has long campaigned for, he argued that psilocybin should be bumped from drug Schedule 1 into Schedule 2, meaning that British doctors could prescribe trips to their patients, just as psychiatrists in Australia will be able to do from July.
A “psychedelic renaissance” was under way and Britain must not be left behind, he told MPs. The UK was “trailing behind Australia, Canada and the United States”, he said, with the Home Office imposing “disadvantage on our prestigious universities and research companies”.
So what’s behind the incredible rise of psychedelic therapies; are these drugs which once caused a few hippies to “see the light” (and others fall from windows) really poised to set us free and ease Britain’s mental health crisis? Or might there be something else going on?
And, if so, might an investment fund called “Psych Capital Plc” have anything to do with it?
Most aspiring fast moving consumer products have a “backstory” and hallucinogens are no different. In the House of Commons, Mr Blunt told the powerful (and well rehearsed) story of their renaissance. It’s not so much rags to riches as overdose to cure.
Magic mushrooms and LSD first exploded into American counterculture in the middle of the last century. Scientists immediately recognised their potential to unlock the secrets of the mind, but their efforts were cut short when, in 1971, President Richard Nixon declared drug use to be “public enemy number one”, effectively banning research and marking the start of the war on drugs.
Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign followed a decade later. Mr Blunt sees drug prohibition as one of the “greatest policy failures of the last 50 years”. It’s a cause he says he decided to champion while he was David Cameron’s prisons minister, having seen the number of Brits incarcerated for relatively minor drug-related offences rise enormously. “The issue is absolutely massive,” he laments. “People aren’t dying of drugs, they’re dying of drug policy.”
When Mr Blunt formed the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group in 2019, its main goal was to reform the regulations around cannabis – now a legal industry worth billions in its own right (of which more later). Since then, the group has flipped to focus on the right for patients suffering from depression and other mental illnesses to access psilocybin.
The reason for this is what the group and its backers believe is the untapped potential psychedelic drugs hold as mental health treatments. Mind bending substances like psilocybin are a “missed opportunity” that “will help address the miserable dependence of too many” on antidepressants, he told the House of Commons in March.
The same message is being disseminated globally. “These drugs literally save lives and are some of the most promising treatments we have for PTSD, anxiety, depression and addiction,” California senator Scott Wiener has said.
Australia’s former trade minister, Andrew Robb, who has spoken openly about taking psychedelics to treat his own depression, paints a similar picture. “At best, 30 per cent of people in Australia will respond to the antidepressants. So you get 70 per cent who are not responding, and we need to have alternatives,” he told ABC news in March.
Joanna Moncrieff, a professor of critical psychiatry at University College London, notes that the hype around psychedelic therapy comes as the star of antidepressants such as valium (“mother’s little helper”) and modern selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) has faded.
Faith in pharmaceutical products – so beloved of those raised in the whitehot technical revolution of the postwar years – appears to be giving way to something that can be packaged (rightly or wrongly) as au naturel for the hippy-inspired late boomer generation.
“The idea that emotional problems could be treated with pills [first] came about in the sixties, with the anti-anxiety drug valium,” says Moncrieff. SSRIs boomed in the 1990s with almost one in five Britons now taking them, but they too have failed to provide a cure. Recent research suggests they only make a significant difference to patients’ symptoms in 15 per cent of cases.
The public turned against valium when it became clear that the pills were essentially doping people, says Moncrieff. Modern antidepressants may go the same way, she warns, allowing experimental psychedelic therapies to fill the gap.
To make her point, Moncrieff points to the boom in “ketamine-assisted therapy” in America – ketamine being a legal anaesthetic, but one that induces mind-bending dissociative trips when taken in large doses. There are hundreds of ketamine therapy clinics across America, and now a handful in the UK, too, with the practice of “off-label prescribing” making the treatment hard to track and regulate.
“In the US, ketamine clinics have become places where people go to get a ketamine hit, because the therapy part is just too expensive,” she says. “Companies will end up just giving out psychedelics to people who want to have psychedelic experiences. This is what I expect would happen in the UK, with ketamine and psilocybin and all the rest.”
Psilocybin is a very different substance to ketamine. The push to allow its prescription is driven by the idea that it takes just one trip to help people overcome their illness, rather than having to rely on antidepressants for years.
But Moncrieff isn’t convinced. “What concerns me most is the selling of these drugs as a false hope, as a magic cure,” she says. “The truth is there is no quick fix”.
The legends surrounding psychedelic drugs have always been powerful. The hippies liked to cite the Aztecs and adventures of Don Quixote. More recently, Paul McCartney credited an acid trip with explaining “the mystery of life” and helping him write Beatles tracks.
The former Apple CEO Steve Jobs also attributed part of his success to taking LSD. Stories are one thing but they are not facts. Psychedelic medicine’s advocates claim science is on their side but are they right – is there really any evidence for psychedelics improving our mental health and, if so, how solid is it?
“A lot of clinicians and academics are becoming curious about the promise these drugs have,” says Dr David Erritzoe, clinical director at Imperial College’s state-of-the-art psychedelic research lab in Ladbroke Grove, London. “I’m much more convinced that these drugs are valuable now than I was when I first got involved.”
One 2016 study in which subjects were given psilocybin reported a statistically significant decrease in depressive symptoms up to three months “post-trip” in patients who hadn’t been helped by traditional treatments. Another study run by a biotech startup and led by Dr Erritzoe suggested a single dose of DMT, the active chemical in the psychoactive ayahuasca brew, had a “significant antidepressant effect that was rapid and durable”.
Yet these studies are small – the psilocybin study, hailed as so promising, had just 12 participants. Others note it is almost impossible to “blind” such trials as you can’t keep participants from knowing if they are getting a real trip or just a placebo.
And even then, not all trials with psychoactive drugs have reported positive results. Compared with the antidepressant escitalopram, psilocybin was found not to be a significantly more effective treatment in one 2021 trial, for example – though it did show higher remission rates. Then there was a huge study examining “microdosing” (where only a very small dose is taken) which found that any benefits could largely be put down to the placebo effect.
But Dr Erritzoe added: “What psychedelic therapy [may] offer is a new route towards what you might call interventional psychiatry, where people come into a carefully designed setting for intense treatment over a limited period of time.
“Maybe that’s psilocybin or a different drug, maybe that’s non-invasive brain stimulation, maybe the two could be used in combination. Maybe it’s something else entirely. The point is that we hope people can be offered alternatives to prescriptions that they’re stuck with for years at a time.”
Despite the evidence base for the medicinal use of psychedelic drugs being in its infancy and many of the dangers of recreational use of such drugs being well known, investors remain bullish – and with good reason. The global psychedelic drugs market size is projected to reach $10.75 billion (£8.65 billion) by 2027, up from $4.75 billion in 2020, according to Research and Markets. The Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group has raised more than £2 million in funding, largely from companies that have some skin in the game.
Mr Blunt’s role as chair of the group is unremunerated but he has joined the Medical Psychedelic Technical Advisory Board of Psych Capital PLC, the investment fund mentioned earlier. Psych Capital is one of the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group’s biggest backers, donating £25,000 last year.
Although Mr Blunt is not paid by Psych Capital, the company itself is very much a for-profit business, whose mission is to “support a new wave of innovators who challenge the status quo and revolutionise how society deals with mental health conditions”.
“I think having a voice in trying to change regulation is certainly important,” Stephen Murphy, Psych Capital’s co-founder and executive director, told The Telegraph. “Engaging key stakeholders to help them understand the potential of these drugs, and the research that is out there, is key to helping people access psychedelic-assisted therapy.”
Another, somewhat counter-initiative, reason for the sector’s bullishness is that psychedelic drugs don’t actually need to work as a treatment for mental health disorders for the industry to make a killing. It is true that psilocybin, and other drugs, may one day provide science with a cure for depression but what really matters on the financial side is the perception that there’s something magical going down.
This melon-twisting logic explains how the legal cannabis market has exploded and now provides the blueprint for psychedelics. The total value of the global cannabis market is thought to now exceed $20 billion but only about half of that is made up of sales of actual cannabis which gets you high. Its licence for medical use in the UK is limited to an extremely rare form of childhood epilepsy.
The rest of this vast market is made up of everyday products ranging from massage oils to snacks that are said to be “infused” with CBD, a compound from cannabis that has no obviously psychoactive properties whatsoever. There is some evidence it may have health benefits, but no one really knows.
Similarly, those mushrooms from Holland & Barrett are sold as “functional”, but contain nothing remotely hallucinogenic and are of a completely different variety to magic mushrooms. Even their functional claims are limited to things such as “Feel more calm”.
Ultimately then, the story of the new “shroom boom” on the financial side may be as much about placebo as anything else. It’s not the real drug that many seem to crave but a shadow of it. One might, in fact, call it a new form of homoeopathy for boomers.
The £8bn boom in magic mushrooms that's sweeping Britain – The Telegraph
