The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) won’t allow magic mushrooms and MDMA to be used as treatments for mental illnesses in a decision that’s been criticised by advocates and psychiatrists as evidence of Australia’s deep-rooted conservatism around drug policy.
In an interim decision published last week, the regulator refused to reschedule psilocybin (the ingredient in magic mushrooms) and MDMA (aka ecstasy or pingers) as controlled medical substances, a classification which would allow doctors to more easily prescribe them for treatment.
The TGA will hand down its final decision in April, and by then Mind Medicine Australia (MMA), the group behind the push to get psychedelics rescheduled, hopes to have changed the regulator’s mind. While that might not be likely, the fact it’s being considered is a sign of slowly shifting attitudes to their use.
Can the drugs work?
In September Mind Medicine Australia applied to the TGA to get MDMA and psilocybin rescheduled. Too many Australians suffer with a chronic mental illness and for many of them conventional treatments like anti-depressants simply do not work.
In the past few years Australia’s first two major clinical trials into the use of psychedelics began. At St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, palliative care patients have been administered doses of psilocybin to ease the anguish of imminent death. One researcher said patients had experienced a sense of inner peace so profound that they were moved to tears.
At Monash University two trials are investigating magic mushrooms as a treatment for anxiety disorders, and MDMA’s effectiveness in treating post-traumatic stress disorder.
But outside of a handful of trial participants, doctors will not be able to use these drugs if the TGA’s final ruling upholds last week’s decision. The regulator conceded there had been “promising” research but given the lack of training for doctors and potential risks of psychosis, there wasn’t enough evidence to reschedule the drugs.
However, in submissions received by the regulator, nearly 98% supported reclassifying psilocybin and MDMA. And with a chance to resubmit before the final submission, MMA hopes to correct the record.
“We believe that the reasons given by the secretary to justify his interim decisions contain a number of significant errors and omissions and we will be working hard over the next few weeks to draw these to his attention in our final submissions,” MMA chairman Peter Hunt said.
Stigma and conservatism
If the TGA had rescheduled the drugs, Australia would have been the first country to recognise them as legitimate medicines. But the decision and the comparative lack of research into psychedelics was a general sign of Australia’s conservatism when it comes to drugs, says The Ethics Centre’s executive director Simon Longstaff, who is also on the MMA’s board.
That conservatism is a product of historical and political factors, Longstaff says. In the 1970s, psychedelics were emerging as a promising sub-field of medical research. But the substances became demonised and thanks to the puritanism of the “war on drugs”, experimentation was relegated to raves and retreats.
Over the past decade psychedelics have been steadily pushing their way back to the mainstream of medical research, and are being investigated at some of the world’s most established institutions. Johns Hopkins University is looking at psilocybin’s potential to help people quit smoking and treat anorexia. Imperial College London launched the world’s first centre for psychedelic research in 2019.
“[But] Australia hasn’t been able to marshal enthusiasm and regulatory will,” Longstaff told Crikey.
“I think we are by many measures a quite conservative society. I think we’ve had conservative governments at a state and territory [level] who’ve tried to run very hard on law and order.”
In New South Wales, for example, the Berejiklian government adamantly refused drug law reforms arising from an inquiry into ice last year. It would rather kids overdose than consider pill-testing.
And while such reasoning doesn’t explain the TGA’s decision, Longstaff says such attitudes have framed the discussion around drugs in Australia.
That said, a regulatory rescheduling is very different from advancing research. And the divided response to last week’s ruling shows how fraught the issue is. Ahead of the decision, psychedelics researchers Stephen Bright and Martin Williams wrote in The Conversation that allowing these drugs to be used for treatment would be premature.
MMA’s proposal was opposed by the Australian Medical Association and the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists. But the latter came under fire from its own members.
For Longstaff though, the biggest tragedy is that while we dither, real people, for whom nothing else works, continue to suffer.
“We’re not talking about unsupervised self-medication, we’re talking about carefully administered, well-regulated therapy,” he said.
“The burden of this conservatism falls on those who have to suffer needlessly.”
You can’t have people taking mind-altering drugs. They might start voting for the Greens.
Highly unlikely. A tripping fascist is unlikely to change his/her uniform.
Still cannot let go of old conservative ideas and obsessions such as ‘the war on drugs’; the US is only now getting past the impact of Nixon’s ‘Rockefeller drug laws’ used to profile and lock up minorities even for possession of low amounts of cannabis (probably incarcerated in private prisons….), plus the later ‘zero tolerance’ policies.
Issue is now, how many people have strong scepticism towards science versus being encouarged to trust their instincts or the industry e.g. climate science denial by fossil fuels; no doubt legacy pharma companies may be cautious in protecting their legacy products.
Worse, was how many developing nations took on the same ‘war on drugs’ strategies in the 70s to intimidate younger generations and of course the left (deemed to be ‘communists’), while encouraging autocratic anti-drug measures and many lucrative opportunities for corruption.
Never let an opportunity go by….
Hear hear
“The burden of … conservatism falls on those who have to suffer needlessly.”
A saying for the ages. Conservatives always make sure others suffer from their actions.
Substantial evidence that these drugs have much greater efficacy than current pharmaceuticals that are very lucrative for big pharma. Their drugs don’t work at all, but do you leave them addicted to expensive drugs that don’t work.
Really worth pursuing, and at worst leaves terminally ill patients meeting their end with dignity and peace.
As Agni says, we can’t have that.
Had to come back to comment sorry. Smearing my S**** all over the place. Hoorah for freedom! I was addicted to Magic Mushrooms for many years. It was enlightening. It is something I had to stop to guard my mental health. Indeed, addictions need to be managed so they do not spiral out of control, taking the addicted and the people around them with them down their ‘drug induced rabbit hole’. It is the 21st century. For me, 2000 does not seem like that long ago; 2001??.. Well…….fill the gaps as you please between the then and now….
Conservatives. God bless their oppressive souls. One would think to argue the benefit of ending suffering, minimizing pain and giving people peace and dignity in their old age, when they are terminally ill, when they are so up shit creek with dementia (aggressive cases-very hard to manage and futile exercise and expending of energy. If someone’s soul mind and spirt have departed, and all that is left is a body full of faulty wiring?
Where is the ‘opt out’ (*futurama suicide booths) button on life when the quality of it is gone>????
How do conservative get away with running the dialogue? It is beyond reason, sense, compassion, very basic empathy.
Many conservatives identify as religious. For them the premise of their arguments are ‘sacred’ to the core on the issue of right to death, right to alternative therapies when treating the terminally ill.
Let’s watch Andre Denton re-runs to reacquaint ourselves further with these issues, and continue to talk about them.
I know the scenario is not perfect. The federal ALP are split in two. The LNP? God knows. The ALP are untested. But it is a case of better the devil be don’t know. I am pretty sure the moderate leftists were never the devil. Cohesion ALP. Do not let the ‘Narrative’ fall into the wrong hands.
Too much is at stake!!!!!
Keeping psychedelics illegal and unregulated artificially inflates their value and the profits that criminal organizations can accumulate. What is ‘conservative’ about an unregulated market? Nothing. ‘Conservatives’ are a convenient façade protecting enormous, untaxed profits for criminals. I’d be very surprised if there are not direct links between those in power protecting the racket and those who benefit financially from its protection.