A U.S. Senate committee has scheduled a hearing on “alternative therapies” for military veterans, with multiple witnesses expected to discuss the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics.
The field hearing will take place outside of the Capitol, with members of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee set to meet in Montevallo, Alabama on Friday to discuss the suicide crisis among veterans and possible mental health treatments including psychedelic medicine.
Witnesses include an official with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition’s Adam Marr, Compass Pathways’s Steve Levine, the University of Alabama’s Jim Wright and Spinal Cord Injury & Diving Innovation’s (SCI-DI) Brian Schiefer.
“This is a call to action. The veterans aren’t broken, it’s the system,” Marr told Marijuana Moment on Thursday. “VA does some good things but what they don’t do well is these new innovations and have approaches to bring them in.”
In written testimony to be presented to the committee, Marr said that the phrase “alternative therapies” often “carries stigma,” and so he prefers to say “emerging or breakthrough therapies, as nearly every major psychedelic—MDMA, psilocybin, DMT, LSD, ibogaine, 5-MeO-DMT, methylone—are in FDA-regulated trials.”
“Generally, these psychedelic therapies show the potential to provide rapid and
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