Three ways to achieve legal safe access to psychedelic plants, drugs, and experiences

There are three primary ways to achieve legal safe access to psychedelic plants, drugs, and experiences. Those are right to religious freedom, ballot initiatives, and the FDA path to prescription medicine status. None of them are easy, quick, or inexpensive. The FDA regulatory path requires rescheduling, and one of the primary definitions of Schedule 1 is “no known medical benefit”. The long and expensive endeavor of proving a medical benefit typically begins with academic research and leads eventually to the much more time consuming and much more expensive path of commercial research to prove safety and efficacy to the satisfaction of the regulator. As a rising tide lifts all ships, the three paths should, in an ideal case, complement each other. A current topic of discussion has become the opportunity and the attendant complication created by regulatory awards of monopoly.