Trippers, trip-sitters and early jitters: The fight to make psychedelic medicines accessible in Australia
“Unless they’ve got shitloads of money, they’re really not going to have access to these treatments,” Dr Stephen Bright tells me over the phone.
Dr Bright is a jack-of-all trades: a psychologist, academic, drug harm reduction advocate and consultant for Australia’s burgeoning psychedelics industry. He’s probably best known as a co-founder and Director of Psychedelic Research in Science & Medicine (PRISM), a non-profit organisation.
He’s talking here about the high cost of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and psilocybin-assisted pyschotherapy for treatment-resistant depression. Since the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) – the government agency that regulates the quality, supply and advertising of medicines within Australia – announced the legalisation of both treatments, nine months ago, a tide of excitement has swept the nation. Glowing media reports on the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs have saturated the mainstream press.
There’s been less coverage on the economic implications of that TGA decision, however, and for those unable to access these treatments for free through clinical trials, which are still ongoing, early predictions suggest these programs will cost somewhere between $15,000 and $30,000. It’s no small sum.
Dr Bright says that the substantial cost of psychedelic treatments in Australia and the level of media hype around them will push desperate people towards underground psychedelic therapy.
He warns, “if you’re working with an underground practitioner who’s not regulated by any authority like AHPRA [the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency], then there’s no recourse if that person does something shady… It really is Russian roulette in the underground.”
If you’ve paid close attention, you’ll know that, amid the hype, the psychedelic space has also attracted some not-so-good press lately. Accusations of shoddy science have emerged. People have expressed dissatisfaction with the misleading advertising and low quality of service offered by psychedelic telemedicine companies in the US. Across North America, ketamine clinics with high-end spa facilities have attracted criticism for exploiting legal loopholes, over-promising the therapeutic reach of drug treatments and prioritising the psychedelic drug aspect of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.
Recent investigations by Psymposia in the US have revealed a pattern of negligence, inadequate safety and even sexual misconduct in both underground psychedelic therapy circles and clinical trials for psychedelic drugs.
Australia has not suffered the same level of scandal in psychedelic research and single-minded capitalist profiteering has yet not swamped the new market. But cultural commentators here have raised concerns over safety and a dominant narrative of psychedelic exceptionalism.
Last year, Four Corners revealed allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour against Julian Palmer, an Australian underground psychedelic guide. “Many years ago I made mistakes”, a visibly nervous Palmer replied to questioning on camera. “There is an element where the plant medicine providers do have a kind of power… There can be an abuse of that power by males in this space”.
Palmer did not include himself in the latter bracket.
“I really resent this Me Too bullshit,” he stated.
Dr Bright expresses concern that desperate people with few other options will continue to seek out problematic spiritual guides: “Now that a company is able to say, yeah, we can do this treatment with you tomorrow; it’ll cost you $25,000. Well, if that person doesn’t have $25,000, are they also then going to access this treatment in the underground where it might cost them $4000?”
He’s hardly the only one worried about the prohibitive cost and hype around new psychedelic treatments. Hidden away in academic journals, you’ll find words of warning from those in the field popping up recently.
Last month, in an academic paper published in the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, medical professionals and health economists flagged that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is likely to remain out of reach for many patients in Australia, if systemic barriers in the public health system persist. Structural roadblocks and insufficient funding are hindering the approval of low-cost generic ketamine for treatment-resistant depression in Australia, the authors argue.
On the phone, Dr Dilara Bahceci, a co-author of that paper and Clinical Research Fellow at the George Institute, explains that psychedelic therapies are unique because they bring psychiatry and psychology into conversation with each other.
But in the pharmaceutical world exceptionality is a double-edged sword. The combination of drugs and talk therapy means there isn’t any precedent for a government subsidy.
“It’s really frustrating for patients to know there’s a treatment out there that is potentially really effective… But the barriers to access are immense,” Dr Bahceci says.
Dr Dilara Bahceci talking at a conference in Melbourne. Photo: supplied.
* * *
Nine months ago, the TGA announced the reclassification of the legal status of MDMA and psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. In doing so, they made Australia the first country in the world to reschedule MDMA and psilocybin for above board usage (albeit in a restricted manner).
That decision came as a shock to the medical profession. At the time, some researchers in the field expressed reservations over the TGA’s abrupt about-turn. They felt the government agency was storming ahead of the science and leaving behind a debris-filled path hazardous to the still-infant discipline. An ABC Background Briefing report, which revealed the TGA had ignored the advice of its own advisory committee, as well as the counsel of peak medical bodies, captured mutterings of discontent from TGA insiders and researchers. The popular sentiment was that the intense lobbying of Mind Medicine Australia, a controversial advocacy organisation, had swayed the decision.
(“I don’t know anybody who expected the TGA to announce in February that they were going to be rescheduling these drugs,” Dr Stephen Bright tells me.)
For the last four months, authorised prescribers in Australia have been allowed to administer MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD and psilocybin-assisted therapy for treatment-resistant depression. The problem is: there are still almost no qualified practitioners in Australia, and no clinics are ready to provide these services.
Dr Bright said that the profession is currently mired in a “limbo period”. He is only aware of one psychiatrist who the TGA has approved as an authorised prescriber. So what’s going on?
* * *
Bringing a new drug to market is an expensive endeavour. Current estimates suggest a total cost well over $2 billion for a single drug.
To put this into perspective: that figure is not too far off the $3 billion the Federal Government recently dedicated to social and affordable housing following months of parliamentary negotiation. That $3 billion is intended to ease Australia’s nationwide housing crisis.
This is where patents come in: patenting gives pharmaceutical companies exclusive rights to the industrial application of a new drug invention. In other words: a patent provides a legal right to stop third parties from manufacturing, using and/or selling an invention. It’s a divisive issue.
Dr Stephen Bright describes his view of patents as “agnostic”. He says they are “a necessary evil” because they drive innovation and enable companies to recoup the money they’ve spent on research and development (R&D). But he recognises that patents can inflate medication costs and empathises with those who see patents as limiting patient access.
Intellectual property rights have long attracted criticism from experts as a weapon in the arsenal of Big Pharma. Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, an outspoken critic, argues that patents are not a catalyst for innovation but a failsafe method for pharmaceutical companies to monopolise markets and maximise profit. Enforced in a “historically unprecedented” and stringent manner, drug patents harm vulnerable populations in the developing world, prone to health epidemics, the most. Think, then, of patents as the lubricant for the drug-pumping machine that is late stage capitalism.
When it comes to psychedelics, patenting is complicated. Certain psychedelics – namely, psilocybin, mescaline and dimethyltryptamine (DMT) – are naturally-occurring products. Laws prevent the patenting of natural substances, but there are loopholes. In cases where pharmaceutical companies cannot patent the actual compound, they can – and already have – patented new ways of synthesising the drug and new delivery methods.
Dr Bahceci is “fully on board” with patents for “truly novel” drug innovations but notes there are now patents in the psychedelic industry that represent “unnecessary reformulations or minor changes” to already-existing drugs.
“Trying to patent a natural product and profit off of it without creating true innovation is a waste of resources… Systems that permit price gouging in healthcare don’t bode well for our future.”
Dr Dilara Bahceci talks at the Science Tent at Splendour in the Grass in 2022. Photo: supplied.
There is a real fear in psychedelic communities that profit-driven venture capitalists could co-opt and misuse psychedelic research, exacerbating its precarious position in society. Among industry insiders concerns have arisen surrounding the motives, funding and business structure of Compass Pathways, an American for-profit corporation that has undertaken psychedelic research. A Quartz investigation found the company had presented suffocating contracts to independent researchers in an attempt to control published results – an anomaly even by pharmaceutical industry standards. More recently, non-profit organisations have organised petitions attempting to reverse patents awarded to Compass Pathways for dubious inventions.
Last year, another American company, MindMed, received a patent for a single dose combination of MDMA and any psychedelic – a drug combo nauseatingly familiar to night owls across the world as candyflipping. It raises the question: just how novel are some of these supposed inventions?
In the case of ketamine, there are two different types with therapeutic benefit: racemic ketamine, the generic kind, for which there is no patent, and esketamine. In 2021, the TGA approved a Spravato nasal spray containing esketamine for those with treatment-resistant depression. Both versions of the drug are proven to cause similar remission rates in depression but racemic ketamine, the significantly cheaper option, is not approved for the treatment of severe depression.
“The frustrating thing is,” Dr Bahceci explains, “generic ketamine is just as effective, and it’s literally $5 to $20 per dose, while Spravato is $500 to $900 per dose. So we’ve ended up in this situation where neither treatment is actually accessible.”
When you’re prescribed Spravato esketamine in Australia, you attend twelve medically-supervised sessions across eight weeks as part of the initial treatment plan. The drug cost alone is almost $10,000.
Without success, the Australian psychiatric profession has applied three times to have Spravato esketamine listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), meaning there is no government subsidy for the product.
* * *
Private sector interest in Australia’s psychedelic market is waning. It appears the show is over and the amphitheatre housing the corporate suits is starting to empty. A few audience members still linger in anticipation of an encore, sinking into velvet chairs and lapping up the ritzy atmosphere of the sector’s early hype. Assumedly most of them know the red carpet treatment and cameras are only temporary – soon to be replaced by the quiet of white-walled clinics and the stretching of time in labs and boardrooms as rigorous research and application writing takes over and drug policy evolves. But those investors and philanthropists, locked in for the long haul, are a dwindling number.
Psychedelic stocks in Australia have steadily declined over the past couple of years. There was a brief spike when the TGA approved MDMA for the management of PTSD and psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression but today share prices for Emyira and Little Green Pharma are hovering near all-time lows. Both biotechnology companies are key players in the Australian market for alternative medicines.
It’s a similar story in the US. Staff layoffs and bankruptcy have plagued the biotech and alternative-wellness sectors on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Countless ketamine clinics have shut up shop. Investment has plummeted. Training programs for psychedelic practitioners have collapsed, leaving students out of pocket and without completion certificates.
The benefit of psychedelic drug treatments – and the reason Big Pharma has generally steered clear – is that their administration bumps up against our current reality of prescribing anxiety and depression medications, such as antidepressants, indefinitely. When it comes to psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), more commonly known as acid, research suggests that participants only need one or a very small handful of intense spiritual experiences to feel continued benefits for months afterwards.
In fact, it’s not necessarily doom and gloom when it comes to receding private sector interest. Some commentators have suggested that current stock prices are more of a market correction, and those more sceptical of the operation of capitalist markets argue that subdued corporate interest is exactly what psychedelic medicine needs. That is, it may encourage a shift away from patenting (to please shareholders) and towards an open science approach.
What’s clear is psychedelic research requires government support. But that support hasn’t been forthcoming, as the ketamine example illustrates. Moreover, we are still a while off the government providing any subsidies for MDMA or psilocybin-assisted therapy.
Months ago, if you looked at the website of the Pax Centre, a multidisciplinary trauma-orientated clinical service in Perth, you would have found a cost estimation for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD.
$25,000.
Dr Michael Winlo, chief executive of biotech company Emyria, which owns the Pax Centre, tells me that the psychological service “shared some early cost projections purely to be very transparent with patients that it is not yet subsidised by anybody… We don’t want to mislead anybody that this is a funded service or that Medicare will chip in.”
The high cost stems from the amount of personnel time required to deliver the treatment course safely and effectively, Dr Winlo makes clear.
“There are very few [profit] margins in those cost estimates,” he says.
Psychedelic-assisted therapy isn’t a simple biomedical solution to mental distress. We’re not talking here about swallowing a few antidepressants every day. We’re not talking about low dosages of psychedelics or micro-dosing. Treatment sessions, no stroll in the park, are day-long affairs under the supervision of two trained clinicians. Then there’s the preparation time, weekly integrations and admin work.
As Dr Bahceci explains, “it can be like receiving months or years worth of therapy in weeks.”
Dr Michael Winlo, CEO of Emyria. Photo: supplied.
Dr Winlo expresses one important caveat, however: “The evidence has shown that this treatment has remarkable benefit for certain patients and appears to be quite durable as well. So the potential here is we have a fairly cost-effective treatment… If you look at what the average cost of treatment for a patient with severe PTSD over a year, you get to numbers like $30,000. That’s a product of admissions and regular check-ins with a psychiatrist or a counsellor, other interventions that may be offered from time to time and drug therapy which is quite common.”
“The biggest barrier,” Dr Winlo contends, “is rethinking the way we pay for mental health treatment and not drip-feeding care over a lifetime, which ultimately lead to very large costs with very little to show for it.”
It’s a point Peter Hunt AM, who runs Mind Medicine Australia (MMA), also makes.
“You can’t look at these costs in isolation,” he tells me.
Hunt takes issue with the numbers being thrown around by key psychedelic players. He suggests that psilocybin-assisted therapy should cost $12,000 and MDMA-assisted therapy should cost $16,000. “Anything above that I would question very strongly,” he states.
When he unpacks MMA’s economic modelling for the therapies over the phone, it doesn’t appear that the organisation has skimped anywhere when it comes to patient safety. He sounds genuinely aggrieved that some, in his eyes, are trying to capitalise financially on the treatments.
It’s difficult to know whose vision is more realistic but it’s clear that psychedelic treatments aren’t cheap. As I write this story, I become hyper-aware of a gut-punching reality: there is no magic pill and no quick easy fix. Working on our mental health is hard; it requires time, discipline and money. Many of Australia’s most vulnerable people don’t have those luxuries, and time is running out to help them.
While Dr Winlo and Peter Hunt downplay the intensive cost of these new psychedelic therapies, pointing out that the lifetime cost of managing serious mental health disorders is likely far higher, I’m still left wondering how some people will afford the upfront lump sum.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things, psychedelic-assisted therapy likely saves an individual money. But, for those of us with less money on hand, corned by inflation, housing crises and spiralling student fees, struggling to meet our weekly rent, what the hell do we do?
* * *
When you think of psychedelic culture, what do you think of?
I think of white Silicon Valley tech-bros micro-dosing acid, middle class art school kids huffing keys of ket in Australian clubs that have an entry fee of 50 bucks and obscene displays of comfort at faux-hippy festivals such as Burning Man. In short: I believe psychedelic culture has become synonymous with whiteness and privilege.
Historically, psychedelic research has largely been conducted by white people for white people. One American study found that 82% of participants in research-related, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy between 1993 and 2017 were non-Hispanic white.
That’s not to say the science is mired in the past. The American non-profit organisation MAPS has taken steps to address race within psychedelic debates and fund studies on trauma within minority communities in recent years. In the organisation’s latest MDMA trials, staff have substantially boosted the racial diversity of participants and the involvement of clinicians of colour. In MAPS’ Phase 2 MDMA studies only 12% of participants were people of colour. In their second Phase 3 MDMA trial, recently completed, a majority were participants of colour. They’ve managed this by addressing racialised drug stigma, increasing stipends for travel and childcare costs and offering scholarships to clinicians of colour with shared experiences of oppression as marginalised trial participants.
The experts I interviewed for this story all agree there is an ongoing conversation in Australia’s psychedelic space around improving diversity. But, beyond platitudes, the experts have difficulty citing concrete examples of diversity initiatives.
Dr Bright suggests it’s likely that the vast majority of psychedelic clinical trial participants in Australia are also white.
“Every person I’ve screened so far in my [university-sponsored] MDMA trial has been a white person,” he says.
Asserting that there is “deep interest” in these questions, Dr Winlo, meanwhile, theorises that the lack of activity on the Australian front stems from the inadequacy of funding.
“The sector is not deliberately trying to be exclusive. It’s simply trying to walk through the mechanisms that have been established for drug approvals before,” he says.
He’s right: nobody is intentionally trying to sideline minority groups in the research. The reality is that the underfunded field is still in its infancy in Australia and reliant on the evidence of overseas undertakings. Researchers haven’t even reached the stage where they are ready to ask questions about how an individual’s race or sexual orientation or income level may impact their experience consuming psychedelic drugs. They’re still laying the foundations.
But it’s this structural form of racism and classism, nefarious and better hidden, that irks me, that makes me wonder if more could be done to fight back against the system.
* * *
A phalanx of police officers surround the 300-strong crowd, immobile, as if frozen in time while creating a pincer movement, right before striking. There are almost as many cops as protestors.
It’s August 2023 and Ricky Hampson Senior stands in front of the mic in footy shorts, thongs and a t shirt. Tattoos crawl up his forearms and shins. Beside him, family members hold a banner reading “Justice 4 Dougie”. Aboriginal flags flap in the wind over Town Hall steps.
Hampson Senior doesn’t project as he discusses the death of his son, Ricky “Dougie” Hampson Junior, a Kamilaroi-Dunghutti man. He doesn’t roar like many speakers do at street demonstrations. He scatters pauses over his speech. In the short silences, the whole of Sydney’s CBD falls into quiet and recedes, as if shoved under the earth. The world is skewed, inverted. A father’s love causes temporary planetary misalignment.
Ricky Hampson Senior speaks at a BLM rally in Sydney, August 19, 2023. Photo courtesy: Robbie Mason.
For context: Dougie attended Dubbo Base Hospital in August 2021 with severe stomach pain, a highly elevated heart rate, and a tearing sensation in his stomach. The family allege that Dougie was released from the hospital without appropriate treatment. They maintain hospital staff treated Dougie differently because he was a blackfella and he admitted to smoking yarndi – weed – recreationally. Hospital staff diagnosed him with cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, assuming he was high, sedated him and sent him home where he passed away 18 hours later. There is now a coronial inquest investigating the death.
In front of Town Hall, Hampson Senior labels his son’s death a “death in custody”, drawing a direct link between the work of police and health professionals.
“This health system is killing us too and not many people are talking about it,” Hampson Senior says.
“They [colonisers] have faded our skin but they won’t fade what’s inside here,” he later states, tapping his heart.
Reflecting back on that Black Lives Matter rally, my mind turns to an essay I once read in Overland. In that deeply personal essay, Vanamali Hermans, a disabled Wiradjuri, Irish and Flemish community worker, critiques the assumption that hospitals and clinics automatically offer healing and safety.
Hermans writes: “My mum Julie, a Wiradjuri woman, spent the last years of her life institutionalised in hospitals, subjected to increasing violence and having her identity weaponised against her. Having witnessed the way these places controlled and ultimately ended my mum’s life, I have come to understand the way in which hospitals and health professionals alike are required to perform to a strict set of politics that dispose of disabled people, Blackfullas, other Black and Brown communities, poor people and those considered not ‘human enough’.”
When I think of Hampson Senior’s pain, I recognise that is a shared pain; Australia’s medical profession has a fraught history.
For much of the 1800s and 1900s, doctors and researchers approached the Aboriginal body as something to be probed, prodded, measured and examined. They came with needles, rulers, magnifying glasses and notebooks, inscribing on Aboriginal bodies their visions for the colonies and, later, the Australian nation. Using outbreaks of venereal disease as moral cover, they tore First Nations people from their ancestral lands, placing them in punitive offshore detention centres, known then as lock hospitals, where they subjected them to medical experiments.
In The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia, historian Warwick Anderson shows that, in the 1920s and 1930s, medical researchers from the University of Adelaide conducted invasive experiments on Aboriginal people in central desert communities. Fancying themselves as pioneers accelerating the course of scientific knowledge, researchers ventured out into the bush repeatedly to collect data on a race, they believed, doomed to extinction. There, in the name of science, they extracted blood samples, undertook pain threshold tests and physically restrained subjects who were hooked up to elaborate medical apparatuses. It’s a story that played out across the country, embedding eugenics within the towering sandstone walls and hushed corridors of the university.
In her seminal work Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Māori anthropologist Linda Tuhiwai Smith emphasises the violence of ethnographic scrutiny. “Research”, she writes in the book’s introduction, “is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary… It stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful.”
Indigenous Australians have ample reason to distrust clinical trials and drug therapies. It’s not just historic malpractice in clinical research that causes suspicion. Drug stigma persists in Indigenous communities that are disproportionately targeted by Australian police for strip searches, and Indigenous Australians end up stuck in the prison pipeline at a far higher right than non-Indigenous Australians.
Moreover, psychedelic-assisted therapy involves extended engagement with healthcare services and clinical settings. There’s nothing brief about the experience. Surely, then, the standards for diversity in psychedelic clinical trials – participant and clinician diversity – must be higher than for a simple drug trial?
* * *
“Plants have really saved my life. My guru in India, my deep connection with my beautiful spiritual teacher in India and psychedelic plants medicines, have saved my life,” Bailey repeats. “That’s partly why I serve this medicine. Because I know what it can do.”
Bailey* teaches yoga and meditation and works as a medicine woman in the underground psychedelic therapy world. She also moonlights as a DJ and rave organiser, trading the yoga classroom for the kaleidoscope lights and neon clouds of the country’s club and doof circuits where possible. While some people exploit those spaces to blow off steam, indulging in hedonistic drug-fuelled revelry, Bailey remains grounded, telling me that she sees more of a future in medicine work and yoga. Coming from someone who has spent stints in rehab and five years in an Alcoholics Anonymous program, it’s an emphatic statement.
An Australian bush doof - a space popular for psychedelic ingestion. A national pastime, if you will. Rara Avis, 2021. Photo courtesy: Chris McClymont.
Bailey carries a zealous belief in the power of psychedelics. She says that her niche is helping people “connect with the divine, with the highest frequency of unconditional love”. She even uses the word “God” at one point in our conversation, before clarifying she’s “not Christian or religious”.
Bailey offers one on one therapy to those wishing to overcome trauma but there’s a strict vetting process. She doesn’t work with anyone who has bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, for example, and she wouldn’t throw anyone in the deep end who isn’t mentally ready. Plant medicines are “not for everybody”, she emphasises.
Without the mountains of paperwork and Kafkaesque bureaucracy you’ll find in legal psychedelic therapy settings, rejecting an applicant does sometimes come down to “gut feeling”.
“Now that we’re in this time of science and psychologists are working in this space, people ask: ‘are you certified?’ It’s like no but my soul is bloody certified, I tell ya,” Bailey shrieks, breaking out into laughter.
For those who pass the screening process and visit Bailey’s home for a solo session – she mostly facilitates shroom journeys – they’ll find a nurturing environment with catered music, sprays, cool cloths, blankets and soft bedding, designed to soothe bodies that run hot and cold while tripping, both temperature-wise and energy-wise. Bailey also cleanses the space with prayer, drums and rattles. Safety is a big part of what Bailey does.
“We do a check-in before [they trip] to see where they’re at. We set an intention and then I continually help them come back to their intention. I’m there the whole time guiding and helping to support them,” she explains.
She says she is “very grateful” that mental health professionals are now embracing psychedelic medicines but suggests the predicted costs of legal MDMA and psilocybin therapies are “absolutely crazy”.
“Who can afford that? It totally prices people out.”
Underground psychedelic therapy is much cheaper. Bailey charges $1400 for a one on one session, and if you attend a group ayahuasca ceremony in the Blue Mountains or Byron Bay you could be looking at a far smaller figure. Bailey nonchalantly mentions a group session at the end of this month that costs $300.
But Bailey says that people approach her for spiritual guidance because they want “an authentic experience”, not because it’s affordable.
“Medicine wasn’t made to be clinical. It goes so beyond white walls,” she says.
Alongside a friend, who is a birth doula and erotic dancer, she co-facilitates an ongoing women-only event series designed to help women feel more comfortable and sensual in their bodies. Participants consume a low dosage of shrooms as part of the journey, so news of the event largely travels via word-of-mouth. The event poster, sent to me by Bailey’s friend and co-facilitator, reads like a warm embrace. Women are “sisters” in this medicine journey “dripping in sensual delights”. Bring “soft and cosy” clothes – “a blanket or a shawl if you like” – the poster advises. There is also detailed dietary and detox information.
Recognising her whiteness and the fact that she does not resemble a “typical medicine woman”, Bailey wants to engage more First Nations women, and there is a discounted rate for mob.
“We want to offer this space to more Indigenous and BIPOC communities who may not be able to afford a $200 ticket to an event such as this,” Bailey explains.
While some groups – women, for example – may feel more comfortable seeking psychedelic therapies in the spaces Bailey creates, Bailey also sees benefit in the range of choices now available to Australians.
“I believe people will go where they feel safest. Some, who have only known doctors and pills and that way of healing, may feel safer in a clinical environment. They may not feel safe coming to someone who is not officially certified and works out of her home and shakes rattles and beats drums. That might feel really scary to someone. I think everything has its place, right?”
* Name changed to protect this person’s identity.
* * *
When I ask Peter Hunt from MMA about diversity in this space, he is a little more circumspect than Dr Winlo and Dr Bright. He states that any sidelining of minority groups is psychedelic clinical trials is a “side issue” which will “sort itself out as these therapies become available in clinical practice.”
If you run with the framing of the psychedelic field that Psymposia and Four Corners have platformed, you begin to spot hybrid activist-scientists, amateur guides and lobbyists who genuinely believe they’re leaders in a global revolution. According to this narrative, there’s little time to waste on interrogating expectation biases in trials and creating the most accurate safety profiles possible for these drugs. There’s simple a frenetic rush to get these drugs to market. It’s possible to read Hunt’s response above through this lens.
Led by Peter Hunt, a famed investment banker, and his opera singer wife, Tania De Jong, MMA is a charity that has courted controversy. The organisation’s leadership have purportedly investigated becoming a for-profit venture, although they deny this is the case. Some believe they bring a corporate and litigious mindset to the psychedelic world.
Tania De Jong (left) and Peter Hunt AM (right), co-founders of Mind Medicine Australia. Photo: supplied.
In a sphere populated with wellness gurus, tree huggers, bush doofers, anti-capitalist bohemians and pacifist hippies, MMA has attracted suspicion. For the trippers who delight in the mysticism, cosmological unity and nature adoration that psychedelics encourage, the commercialisation of plant medicines is best met with a critical eye.
But Hunt says that MMA is solely focused on ensuring patient access, and he doesn’t feel the need to dwell on the decline in Australia’s alternative medicine stocks, when I bring up this trend over the phone.
“Mind Medicine is really not interested in that,” he declares.
It’s clear Hunt and De Jong have good intentions at heart, even if they have a left-field way of making their points. Evidence: the organisation has established a Patient Supporter Fund for disadvantaged patients.
Hunt explains that access to the fund will depend on the referral and opinion of psychiatrists. The intention is to partially subsidise medical costs for in-need individuals.
“We’re not suggesting that we are going to fund 100% of the cost for an individual, unless that individual is in a desperate condition and has no financial resources; so a homeless person, for example, with zero resources and severe PTSD. If we’re approached by a psychiatrist about that sort of individual, we will do our very best to assist that individual, and if we can’t do it we’ll go to a homeless organisation to see if we can get them to help.”
With the pool of money deriving solely from donations, it’s unclear how many patients the organisation will be able to help before the source dries up and precisely who will be eligible. It’s ad hoc but, in the absence of government subsidies, what other options are there?
* * *
Earlier in this essay I highlighted the slow pace of the rollout for MDMA and psilocybin therapies in Australia. I asked: what’s going on?
That was a red herring.
Far from a cause of alarm, the bottleneck is evidence of maturity within the field. In fact, I can confidently say the era of a sexy frontier science, populated by cowboy psychonauts, revolutionary cultural messiahs and snake oil salesmen, is over. The story of psychedelic medicine in Australia is now one of data collection and rigorous science. As a journalist, we’re taught to jump for the headlines and snatch colourful anecdotes out of the air. But the story of writing this story, I quickly discovered, was that perhaps there was no juicy story at all – or at least not in the way the Daily Mail defines a story.
Sure, there are unanswered questions – or only partially answered questions – around the affordability of psychedelic treatment options and around how the industry will engage minority groups. In light of the discipline’s chequered history, these are very important demands. I don’t intend to underestimate their significance.
But this is equally a story of my mind wandering as I sink into the folds of my couch late at night listening to Dr Winlo talk of “secure drug supply chain management” and “fit-for-purpose facilities” through my phone’s voice recorder app. As I relisten to the phone call, I’m struck by the logic of it all, the cold rationalism, which is precisely what good science is about.
While Australia may all of a sudden be a world trailblazer, those working within Australia’s psychedelic research space have learned from the mishaps and royal fuck-ups overseas. It’s as if the TGA has channelled the energy of Australian icon Steven Bradbury. While most breakthrough psychedelic research has occurred overseas – especially in the United States – red tape and late stumbles have caused a pile-up on the ice rink’s final corner, and Australia has come through at the last moment and snatched the gold medal.
Dr Winlo draws lessons from the failure of psychedelic wellness clinics in North America.
“These treatments need to be offered within a wraparound care service,” Dr Winlo warns. “I don’t think these treatments should be standalone options operated out of a single clinic in some luxurious location. Patients don’t want psychedelics; they want to get well.”
“The psychedelics may be a part of that journey for them. But it won’t be the beginning or the end. It’s important these treatments are offered in the context of a service that can be there before, during and after treatment,” he continues.
“We don’t want anyone to be abandoned in the system”.
Even Bailey, without any official licensing for the psychedelic therapy she offers, emphasises that there is “no rush” with these medicines.
“Look, I did my experimenting. But you are playing with fire. You have to be careful, just like with any drug,” she says. “It’s really important to do the research and chat to someone in person who can guide you, and not just jump in and eat a whole bunch of mushies because you can hurt yourself mentally.”
There’s a lot of excitement now among psychedelic advocates and clinical researchers in Australia but it doesn’t feel forced anymore. Nobody is screaming into a void. In the place of wild claims, there is self-assuredness.
“Psychedelics are the future of mental health,” Dr Bahceci says. “This is the most exciting thing to happen in psychiatry in over 50 years.”
Peter Hunt from MMA echoes her sentiment, asserting, “this is the start of a paradigm shift in psychiatry where the two limbs of mental health, medicine and therapy, come together in a combined way to provide a treatment option for patients which give patients a real prospect of positive change.”
“Australia has a real opportunity to lead the world,” he continues.
“We should be very proud about this.”
