A Vision For The Future Of Psychedelic Therapies

We will be seeing, I think, much more use of psychedelics, initially as medicines. Drug policy reform is also moving forward in that area.

I started MAPS in 1986. Now, 35 years later, we have raised more than $130 million in grants and donations. We have no investors, and we have about 125 people on our team.

We have completed one successful phase 3 study of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, which we published in Nature Medicine. We are in the midst of our second phase 3 study.

We anticipate that by the end of 2022, we will finish the second phase 3 study, and that by the end of 2023, MDMA will be approved by the FDA.

We think psilocybin will be approved by others a year or so after that. We also believe MDMA will be approved in Europe, allowing us to begin globalizing the healing potential of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.

This will lead to psychedelic clinics. We already have hundreds of ketamine clinics, and eventually they will be administering ketamine, MDMA, psilocybin, 5-MeO-DMT and other drugs that come through the research pipeline.

At the same time, we will see increasing access for people outside medical settings and beyond religious-freedom frameworks.

The goal, of course, is to spiritualize humanity and help people deepen their spiritual lives.

Many people have clinical diagnoses, particularly those who are depressed or anxious about dying. But even more people experience lower-level anxiety simply from reading the newspaper or thinking about what is happening in the world.

They may not fit within a medical or religious framework.

We need to help all kinds of people gain legal access to psychedelics in safe, supervised settings, while also allowing for unsupervised use by people who want to explore their own consciousness.