Politics
Lawmakers in Washington state have been debating two distinct and often conflicting visions for the regulation of psychedelics that reflects national tensions about the future of psychedelic therapies.
The passage of New Jersey Assembly Bill 3852, which creates a psilocybin therapy pilot program, exposed deep rifts between advocates seeking a medicalized pharmaceutical-led model and those supporting a community-based framework to regulate less costly psilocybin mushrooms.
The arrest of Jeremy O. Harris at a Japanese airport for allegedly possessing a small quantity of MDMA in his luggage highlights the country’s stringent drug laws and ongoing uncertainty about whether the playwright will still be indicted on drug charges after his release.
After decades shaping end-of-life law, attorney Kathryn Tucker is taking on federal bureaucracy to make psilocybin a legal medicine for those with no time to wait.
A proposed bill now being considered by the New York State Assembly would reform criminal penalties against psilocybin under state law and create a regulated public-health framework for dispensing psilocybin to adults by licensed providers for medical use.
As new psychedelic reform bills and ballot initiatives sweep the nation, the failure of the Question 4 ballot initiative in Massachusetts last year offers an instructive case study.
After the failure of Question 4 in Massachusetts in 2024 there has been a resurgence of other more focused proposed legislation targeting reform of state laws regulating the use of psychedelics.
After an extensive history of psychedelic research in the 1960s and ’70s, scientists in the Czech Republic are now investigating a range of different psychedelics and their therapeutic applications supported by new legislation legalizing the medical use of psilocybin.
Thanks to organizing from local advocacy organizations, Minnesota has quietly become a hotbed of reform launching a psychedelic task force and deprioritized arrests related to entheogenic plants and fungi.
The future of ibogaine therapy was a central topic at the 2025 Psychedelic Science conference, where it was endorsed by former Texas governor Rick Perry and others. Other states are following suit, but some advocates worry about possible exploitation of the plant medicine.
