UK MP Crispin Blunt raised the question of rescheduling psilocybin in Parliament this week after PM Boris Johnson gave Blunt personal reassurance back in May that this would be considered for clinical research purposes.
As the mental health crisis continues to skyrocket, emerging evidence is pointing to psychedelic compounds, such as psilocybin, holding promise as innovative treatment solutions for resistant mental health disorders.
Chair of the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group (CDPRG), Blunt, raised the question of rescheduling psilocybin this week, asking the Prime Minister if he is willing to “cut through” the current barriers to research given the Prime Minister’s commitment to UK bioscience and the potential for improving mental health treatments for conditions such as depression, trauma and addiction.
Johnson said that he would consider the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs’ (ACMD) recent advice on reducing barriers to research with controlled drugs, and would “get back to him as soon as possible”.
Blunt commented: “I am trying to make clear the evidence-free position of the Government’s current scheduling of psilocybin and psychedelics and the cost that the current scheduling is imposing on British scientists and researchers which is making research very difficult to do.”
Back in April, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, spoke at the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) annual conference, setting out a vision for the UK to become a life sciences superpower, wanting “to deliver on our vision to create the most advanced and data-enabled clinical research environment in the world”.
In July, the Government set out its ten-year plan to help fulfill this vision following its response to COVID-19, which it says would focus on “harnessing private sector expertise and removing unnecessary bureaucracy so that the UK’s most knowledgeable industry leaders can tackle future healthcare challenges at speed and at risk – with the aim of changing people’s lives for the better.” This strategy includes developing tools to address mental health conditions.
To add to the already pressing need for mental health solutions, data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that depression rates had doubled since the COVID-19 pandemic – with 21 per cent of adults experiencing some form of depression in early 2021 compared to 10 per cent before the pandemic.
Earlier this month, Health and Social Care Secretary, Sajid Javid, spoke at the Global Mental Health Summit 2021, noting that: “We’re at an important moment for mental health. The strains of the pandemic have meant that the issue of mental health has been in the public consciousness like never before,” and that “the silent pandemic of poor mental health has taken too many people before their time, and now is the time to act with the same sense of urgency as we have done for other major killers.”
Although psychedelics research is carried out in the UK, psilocybin’s status as a Schedule 1 drug makes this research extremely costly, with many barriers associated with acquiring a licence to handle the compound. These barriers hinder research and development in an area that could potentially revolutionise the treatment of mental health in the UK.
“I hope that my focus this week will have encouraged attention to it. The Health Secretary offered me a meeting so that he could be brought up to speed with the issue in the wake of my question to him on Tuesday,” said Blunt.
“I am trying to make clear the very substantial potential benefits that could arise, if the pharmacology that would come from psychedelics can then be used in association with psychotherapy to much improve the outcomes around treatment of the most debilitating serious mental health conditions.
“Every day we delay – delaying for reasons that are not based on evidence – we are causing harm. So, we need to get on with this – we are causing harm to people, we are causing harm to our economy, and we are causing harm to our reputation for supporting science. And this is sufficiently important to justify senior ministers’ attention.
“The outcome of policy after 50 years of trying to manage the system we’ve got under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 is catastrophic by any reasonable standard. And so, CDPRG is addressing these catastrophic bad outcomes we have from the current framework for drugs policy.
“What I have certainly observed is, frankly, the rich contempt from the science and research community for the policy and the authors of that policy. What I am trying to do through CDPRG is get quality, academic peer-reviewed advice from researchers employed by the CDPRG, to help me and other colleagues bridge that gap between evidence and science with the policy community so that we get to a place where we are working together to try and advance the wider national interest and the wider public interest.”
Speaking to the Minister for Crime and Policing, Kit Malthouse, Blunt noted that: “In 2019, 90,503 of our fellow citizens were driven to suicide by their depression or trauma, or their rock-bottom in addiction has been death. If there is any scale of potential for these drugs, and it appears that there is, any further delay in getting the science and research going is not defensible—in fact, it is a morally disgraceful abrogation of our duty to the public good.”
Citing the rescheduling of cannabis-based medicine Epidyolex into Schedule 5 following advice from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and of the ACMD, Malthouse said rescheduling would be considered if and when a psilocybin-based medicine is approved by the MHRA.
Malthouse said: “As a founder of the all-party group on life sciences, I am well aware of the potential of any number of compounds to assist us in the constant battle against mental and physical illness, and of the need for this country to lead in research that might alleviate the problem, not just here, but in the rest of the world.”
A survey carried out by YouGov in collaboration with PsiloNautica and Drug Science earlier this year revealed that a clear majority of UK citizens are in favour of rescheduling psilocybin for research purposes, as well as support for the use of psilocybin in palliative care and for treating military veterans suffering from psychiatric disease.
