Lawmakers in Missouri’s House of Representatives have given preliminary approval to a budget bill that would spend $10 million from state opioid settlement funds on research grants to study the use of psilocybin to treat opioid use disorder.
The measure, HB 2010, underwent several amendments in the House on Tuesday and is scheduled for a third reading and likely floor vote on Thursday.
An addition made in a House committee last week would have put the $10 million toward studying the psychedelic ibogaine as a treatment for opioid use disorder, but on Tuesday on the House floor, that provision was adjusted to fund psilocybin research instead.
Rep. Cody Smith (R), the sponsor of the underlying budget bill, said the change resulted from a conversation he had with the state Department of Mental Health last week.
“They had concerns about the ibogaine research they had read, and there are concerns about the dangers involved in that research,” Smith said. “However, they are interested in the psilocybin piece. And we’ve seen many other states use their opioid settlement funds to that end.”
In the coming decades, Missouri is set to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in opioid-related settlement funds. Psychedelic medicine
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