The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has formally requested that federal health officials conduct a medical scientific review on psilocybin in response to a long-pending rescheduling petition.
After initially denying advocates’ request to authorize a review into the psychedelic, last week DEA forwarded the request to move psilocybin from Schedule I to Schedule II of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for consideration.
The August 11 transmittal follows an intensive legal back-and-forth between DEA and the petitioners, led by Washington State-based doctor Sunil Aggarwal, who has sought approval to administer psilocybin for end-of-life care of his patients.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected separate arguments from lawyers for Aggarwal and his clinic, the Advanced Integrated Medical Science (AIMS) Institute, in February—ruling that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) provided a reasonable explanation in denying the doctor’s request for review.
Aggarwal and AIMS have been working since at least 2020 to find a way to legally obtain psilocybin for patients in palliative care, initially seeking to win permission from regulators under state and federal right-to-try laws.
While the federal appellate court’s earlier ruling last October technically went against DEA, the court did
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