Careful examination reveals there is not enough data available on the alleged benefits and pitfalls.
Also, an issue is the fact that there are so many symptoms that psilocybin may treat. This may be a strength for its possible usefulness, but it is a weakness for trial design. Trials are weaker and less reliable when a multitude of variables are examined, because that raises the likelihood that chance has a strong effect on one of those variables.
In short, we can’t yet be at all confident about how well psilocybin works, which is deeply unfortunate because, low quality though the studies are, they indicate considerable promise. If psilocybin does work, its biggest appeal is the mode of treatment — rather than continuous treatment, psilocybin trials use one dose or two dose protocols, and the early data indicates that effects may persist for a year, and perhaps more.
The other major appeal of psilocybin is its potential cost saving. Even at the current price for research-grade psilocybin, $7,000 per gram, a two-dose course of treatment at 25mg per dose, the very high end of what has been trialled, would have a cost price of $350. Even factoring in profit margins and extra costs at each point in the healthcare chain, that base cost is small compared to the cost of many annual prescriptions for psychiatric drugs, let alone regular in-person therapy.
As it stands, then, genuine progress on psilocybin will continue to be slow without significant funding from other sources. Government funding for research tends to have a reputation for being unwieldy and slow, committed over lengthy periods and mostly to ‘safe’ projects with predictable outputs that tick regulatory and legislative boxes.
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