My Take on Psychedelics as Medicine Conference in Iceland

2023-01-21

Last week, I was at the psychedelics as medicine conference, in Iceland. Here's what I learned:

One key message from many of the talks was that if psychedelics are to be used as medicine to "cure" mental conditions, they need to be given to patients in conjunction with therapy. Patients in all clinical trials were prepared with therapy before and after their psychedelic experience. These drugs (although perfectly capable of creating a magical experience) are not magic. The unsexy work of therapy has to be done before and after to get the full curative benefit.

A question that kept coming to me was if psychedelics do in fact get approved (which is a real possibility in the near future), how will it fit in the current business model of the pharma industry? Companies make an income if the patients take drugs every day/week/month. Psychedelics are not meant to be prescribed this way. And they need to be given together with several therapy sessions, which is costly and laborious. This is a conundrum that was also pointed out by Micheal Pollan during the last session of the conference. And I wonder how it will get resolved.

One interesting piece of data was shown in a microdosing study. In short (and I am paraphrasing), people who expected to be given the microdose of psychedelics, and not the placebo, where the ones who experienced benefit. The ones who expected to be given placebo, and in fact got psychedelics, did not experience anything. This implies any benefit that is to be reaped from microdosing, is possibly nothing but placebo effect.

Iceland is beautiful. You can even catch the Northern lights in the capital on a clear night.