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Psilocybin remains prohibited in most jurisdictions, but Switzerland, Canada, and Australia have established tightly regulated clinical access pathways. In this developing landscape, prescribers are pivotal to safe access and must navigate conflicting guidance, uncertainty, and legal risk. Clarifying how current regulations define prescribers’ roles is therefore important for understanding how regulated clinical access pathways operate in practice.

I have Bipolar II disorder, and in the fall of 2025 I was in a longer spell of apathy and depression. I was fed up with the monotony of life, the greyness and predictability of it all. For months I had been going through the motions, waking, sighing, wishing I didn't have to get up and go to work or do whatever it was I needed to do.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists issued a position statement at the end of August highlighting the need for improved care and systems to address the impact of non-recent child sexual abuse (CSA) on the mental health of adults. Like other forms of trauma, the report noted how CSA is alarmingly prevalent and has enduring consequences for health and wellbeing but lacks adequate, effective treatment. The immediate past President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Dr Lade Sm

Psychosis is a severe and debilitating condition with relatively few effective treatments. For this reason, there is ongoing interest in identifying factors that may make someone more likely to develop psychosis, with the aim of developing intervention and prevention strategies. A recent meta-analysis by Carly Stevens and colleagues examined the associations between the age of first cannabis use and the age of onset of psychosis. Several aspects of the findings deserve furthe

Nutt et al. recently proposed a common lexicon for psychedelic science including dosing categories for different forms of psychedelic use across multiple substances.

Of all the psychedelic treatments now under investigation, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy is among the most advanced. Two Phase III trials have supported its efficacy and safety for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and by the usual standards it met or exceeded the bar for a treatment to be considered empirically supported. Even so, in 2024 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declined to approve it, citing a range of limitations.

Australia approved the use of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression in 2023, becoming the first nation to formally integrate the drug into clinical practice. New Zealand, by contrast, kept psilocybin as a Class A controlled drug and confined it almost entirely to research until mid-2025, when it opened a single, tightly bounded route to clinical prescribing without changing the drug’s legal status.

We're proud to release updated MDMA and psilocybin educational modules, developed with Norrsken Mind and Mind Medicine Australia, bringing pharmacology, history, and law fully up to date.

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who discovered LSD, lived to the remarkable age of 102. Was that simply the result of good genes, a good diet or a healthy lifestyle, or is there more to the story? No one knows the answer. But researchers are beginning to ask an intriguing question: Could psychedelics help people live longer and stay healthier as they age?

In the coming months, Drug Science will be taking a more active role in lobbying for scientifically backed drug policy. To achieve this, we are teaming up with Liam Hackett of the HALI Foundation to give the public the tools they need to become politically engaged and take the conversation to their local MPs.

New framework will establish rigorous clinical and ethical baselines for non-clinical practitioner assessment.

The University of Exeter's newly launched Psychedelic Interdisciplinary Centre (EPIC) is asking a question the field has largely avoided: what if psychedelics are not only medical tools, but cultural, philosophical, and ecological phenomena?

Jurisdictions that have implemented formalised regulatory pathways integrating psilocybin into supervised clinical practice include...

The Czech Republic has quietly produced one of the most practical and credible frameworks for therapeutic psilocybin to date. This article walks through its key provisions and asks what a comparable NHS programme might actually look like.

In the year 2000, psychiatry experienced one of the most important breakthroughs in decades: researchers showed that ketamine, a widely used anesthetic, could produce a powerful antidepressant effect within hours.

A year ago, Tadeusz Hawrot wrote about the beginnings of a promising development in drug policy; the potential rescheduling of psychedelics in Ukraine.

On Saturday, Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at accelerating clinical research into psychedelic drugs. The order focuses on expanding federal funding, reducing bureaucratic barriers, and speeding up regulatory timelines. The move signals a notable shift in U.S. federal posture toward psychedelics—distinct from ongoing developments at the state level—and arguably represents one of the most significant federal actions on psychedelic research and access to date.

Psychedelic policy in the US is shifting fast, but is public opinion keeping pace? A landmark 2025 RAND survey of over 10,000 Americans explored which psychedelics the public supports legalising, why psilocybin leads the pack, and what the road to reform might actually look like.

Drawing on archival research from the UN, Sweden, and the United States, a recent publication traces how psychedelics were swept into the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances through moral panic, Cold War politics, and the absence of any powerful lobby to defend them.

A new meta-analysis challenges the narrative that psychedelic therapy outperforms antidepressants, showing comparable effectiveness when trials are evaluated under similar conditions.

A landmark training programme will give healthcare professionals in Aotearoa the skills, along with the pathway, to legally prescribe psilocybin.