Strong Bipartisan Support for Controlled Psilocybin Use as Treatment or Enhancement in a Representative Sample of US Americans: Need for Caution in Public Policy Persists

Abstract

The psychedelic psilocybin has shown promise both as treatment for psychiatric conditions and as a means of improving well-being in healthy individuals. In some jurisdictions (e.g., Oregon, USA), psilocybin use for both purposes is or will soon be allowed and yet, public attitudes toward this shift are understudied. We asked a nationally representative sample of 795 US Americans to evaluate the moral status of psilocybin use in an appropriately licensed setting for either treatment of a psychiatric condition or well-being enhancement. Showing strong bipartisan support, participants rated the individual’s decision as morally positive in both contexts. These results can inform effective policy-making decisions around supervised psilocybin use, given robust public attitudes as elicited in the context of an innovative regulatory model. We did not explore attitudes to psilocybin use in unsupervised or non-licensed community or social settings.

Keywords:

• treatment
• enhancement
• mental health
• psychedelics
• policy

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

KJ, BDE, and MG conceptualized the project and designed the experiment. Investigation and data analysis were performed by KJ, MG, and IRH. IRH visualized the data. KJ acquired funding for data collection. BDE and JS administrated the project, and BDE, MG, and IRH provided supervision. JDS and KJ wrote the original draft. All authors helped review and edit the original draft. JDS and KJ are equal contributors listed as first coauthors. BDE and IRH are equal contributors listed as senior coauthors. BDE is the corresponding author.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

JDS, KJ, MG, and IRH have no disclosures or conflicts of interest to declare. JS is a Partner Investigator on an Australian Research Council grant LP190100841 which involves industry partnership from Illumina. He does not personally receive any funds from Illumina. JS is also a Bioethics Committee consultant for Bayer. BDE provided short-term unremunerated ethical guidance on harm reduction to Gather Well Psychedelics during the period in which the manuscript was being finalized. Support for DBY through the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research was provided by Tim Ferriss, Matt Mullenweg, Blake Mycoskie, Craig Nerenberg, and the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

This study was approved by the Yale Institutional Review Board [2000029432]. Pre-registration of the design and analysis plan can be found at: https://aspredicted.org/e43yz.pdf. Anonymized data and analysis scripts are available on the Open Science Framework at: osf.io/e95cg/.

Notes

1 Although the data on benefits and risks from such use in the context of recent scientific studies may not translate directly to non-medical supervised use, as in the Oregon model, what little data there is on potential benefits and risks in a roughly comparable setting (e.g., a legal “psilocybin truffle retreat” in the Netherlands), suggests that “integration challenges”—such as a feeling of disconnection from one’s community—may occur in a minority of participants; however, such “challenges were transient; they occurred immediately after the psilocybin experience (once the main psychedelic effects had worn off) and in the days and weeks following the retreat, and resolved with time [and] were also correlated with positive after-effects including long-term remission of significant health conditions” (Lutkajtis and Evans 2023, 211).

Additional information

Funding

Funding for data collection was received through the Pauli Murray College Richter Award from Yale University (KJ).