Naturally, we would think of plants because, for thousands of years, we turned to the living world to color our artistic creations. Powdered leaves of the Lawsonia inermis tree gave us the spectacular range of russet reds we call “henna” (which I use routinely in my hair). Potions derived from the Prunus cerasifera plum tree could yield green, yellow, and orange hues. Even the animal kingdom could serve as a library for our palettes, such as the deep black ink of the cuttlefish Sepia oficianalis—hence the name we give to monochrome photographs, “sepia.”

The living world is ablaze with colors in every shade and hue we can see or imagine—and even some we can’t see or imagine, such as ultraviolet light, visible to most insects and birds, and polarised light, discernible by some crustaceans. Why wouldn’t we sample from this ready-made rainbow, already crafted for us by 3.5 billion years of evolution and essentially free to use—off patent, in the public domain, and already available?

Though it might seem counterintuitive to spend time and energy chemically tweaking the compounds in oil and gas—which, remember, only come in the clear-white-yellow brown-black spectrum—to produce all the colors that were already found in living creatures, there were numerous reasons the textile industry shifted to chemical dyes after the industrial revolution:

One, plant-based dyes require enormous volumes of land to produce—detracting from areas available for food; two colors can be reliably produced in consistent volumes and shades rather than varying from batch to batch due to natural variability; three, colors can be produced at any time of year, not being reliant on harvests and seasons; and four—most appealing to designers—petrochemicals could be modified to produce virtually any color at whim, a drastic departure from days when artists had to make do.

This has led to an entrenched problem: designers believe they can have any color they wish, anytime they wish. And this will be incredibly difficult to change, says Suzanne Lee of Brooklyn-based startup Biofabricate.

“The fashion industry is used to a full spectrum of color, where everything is available all year round,” she says. “With the right chemistry, we can produce any nuance of color that a designer could wish for—but that is not true for biological colors, and it’s going to be a while until we can achieve the same intensities in that full spectrum.”

As many in the field point out: people are accustomed to having to wait years or decades for medical breakthroughs such as vaccines or new cancer treatments, but in the fast-paced fashion industry—by its very nature, reliant on hyperactively changing trends—designers and buyers alike are not accustomed to waiting. Worsening matters are industry-sanctioned norms, such as Pantone’s annual “Color of the Year” award. The choice for 2024: Peach, deemed a “call for human connection” by Vogue magazine. Once those shades appear on the catwalk, the fast fashion industry rapidly follows suit, churning out chosen shades at enormous volumes for the lowest cost possible.

It will not be easy to rise to the challenge of producing so many colors so cheaply or so quickly, says Carole Collet, Professor in Design for Sustainable Futures at Central Saint Martins at the University of the Arts, London. “We are still learning. We’ve relied on the petrochemical industry for 100 years for almost everything we do, and we just haven’t developed equivalent amounts of green chemistry techniques or bio-based chemical knowledge,” says Prof Collet, who investigates new ways to biodesign using sustainable sources such as agricultural waste, reclaimed materials, and synthetic biology. “If we want to move away from toxic textile and dye production systems, this won’t happen overnight.”

Take that, AI: As always, we have so much more to learn from biology than Silicon Valley would have us believe.

Biological Libraries  

But we are quickly losing those biological repositories of knowledge, notes Prof Collet: the most recent Living Planet Report released by the World Wildlife Foundation with the Zoological Society of London concluded that 73% of the world’s wildlife has vanished in the past 50 years. Rainforests, coral reefs, and all the Technicolor biomes that took billions of years to evolve are transforming daily into scorched savannahs and bleached coral cemeteries. We are losing these libraries of biological information at the same time as we are destroying them.

This is why Prof Collet founded the Living Systems Lab Research Group in 2013 at Central Saint Martins. “I wanted to really understand how we could design new systems that are not linear and destructive, but circular, complex, dynamic and interrelated like living systems,” she says. “In the natural world, if you disrupt one species, you disrupt the entire ecosystem. All core concepts like this should be taught to our students so they understand all the impacts of their work.”

One of those students is Ruth Lloyd, currently completing her PhD under Prof Collet at CSM to develop “an alternative biological color framework for microbial textile screen printing.”  Don’t know what a “color framework” is? I didn’t either. Dyes produce different shades depending on the textile material or manufacturing environment. Think of photographic films we used prior to the digital era, such as sepia or the Instagram filters named after them today. Tweaking the base factors yields a different rainbow of results.

CSM was an obvious choice, she says, being the only art college in the UK with a Grow Lab, a Containment Level 1 laboratory where art students can learn the principles of biology alongside standard lessons in technique, history, and theory.

Lloyd agrees that all design students need to understand basic ecological and biological concepts—but it goes deeper than that, she says.

“In this new bio-design environment, the role of a designer has changed: we now work in environments that are predominately populated with engineers and scientists,” she elaborates. “The role of a ‘designer’ has changed – you can’t just be a creator, you also have to be an engineer, a scientist, an innovator, and an entrepreneur.”

A huge challenge? Perhaps not. “At the end of the day, a lot of what scientists and engineers do is really just problem-solving—and actually, a lot of what we call ‘design’ is really just problem-solving,” says Lloyd.

Why choose such a tricky field for a doctorate? “I just love color and textiles. I think it is something that brings a lot of joy to life.” True. The Buddha may have quipped that “life is suffering,” but human creativity and innovation clearly show that it doesn’t have to be.  

“Poisoned to Death” 

Lloyd’s PhD was partially funded by UK start-up Colorifix—cited by every academic and entrepreneur as an industry leader. Since 2014, they have worked to engineer microbes to produce environmentally benign colorants to displace incumbent petrochemical-based dyes.

It was not, however, the “joy” that color brings to life that inspired Colorifix’s Chief Science Officer, Jim Ajioka, to join this field. It was the suffering that Ajioka—also a senior lecturer in the Department of Pathology at the University of Cambridge—witnessed in Nepal, Bangladesh, and India.

When rivers and streams become contaminated with deadly pathogens, people turn to groundwater. “But all the aquifers in this region are laden with arsenic,” he sighs. “So instead of dying quickly from a diarrheal disease or a pathogen, people are just slowly poisoned to death.” 

In Nepal, he encountered countless people with cognitive impairment, horrific lesions, or missing fingers and toes from chronic arsenicosis. Further travels in Bangladesh and India, where “the textile industry just dumps their waste into the river,” strengthened his conviction that there had to be a better way to produce dyes.

“The problem is that I had to learn that there is no such thing as a ‘green premium,'” he says. Meaning: consumers are rarely keen to pay extra for an “eco-friendly” or “fairtrade” product. “Nobody really cares, unfortunately – it just comes down to money,” he says. “So you have to look at the incumbent competitors in the chemical dying industry and see if you can beat them – if you can’t, it will be an uphill battle.”

However, thanks to the inherent e2iciency of microbes—again, which have evolved over 3.5 billion years to operate at maximum e2iciency at ambient temperatures—Colorfix’s techniques can reduce water consumption by 77%, electricity usage by 53%, and CO2 emissions by 31%. And it’s incredibly safe by comparison: Colorifix claims that conventional dying processes use up to 70 different “highly toxic” chemicals—30 of which are “irretrievable,” such as mercury, lead, and formaldehyde. Colorifix’s method uses only one “renewable and non-toxic” additive.

A fresh batch of Solar Glow, Colorifix’s bioengineered yellow dye, emerges from an industrial dyeing machine. Using engineered microbes, Colorifix replaces toxic petrochemical dyes with sustainable, biologically-derived pigments, reducing water, energy, and chemical waste in textile production. [Image courtesy of Colorifix]

So good so far? Maybe. As Ajioka points out: It all comes down to the bottom line. Critically, Colorifix’s dyes are designed to work in existing machinery as “drop-in replacements” – unlike many bio-designed innovations that require novel presses and stencils. This spares manufacturers the burdensome costs of new equipment, and makes the switch to bio-fashioned dyes effortless as well as ethical.

Possibly more appealing to designers, who tend to think of environmentally friendly alternatives as inherently inferior (think frumpy hemp or unsavory vegan “cheese”), is the fact that some of Colorifix’s new dyes are aesthetically superior to conventional ones. Ajioka claims the first textile dye they are bringing to market—a yellow pigment they call “Solar Glow“—is brighter than any chemical dye, more vivid than almost anything you’ve seen in real life.

“It’s so bright it almost hurts your eyes,” he laughs.

Better With Age 

Over in the Netherlands, designer Ilfa Siebenhaar has also found that using bacteria to produce pigments can produce colors that are superior—not inferior—to chemical dyes.

“Our most successful color so far is violet—it attaches very well to textiles, and it is very stable,” she says.

Highly relevant. In centuries past, violet tones were some of the most difficult and costly to acquire—hence the link between royalty and purple robes.

Siebenhaar says she has created other new shades with microbes, such as a sharp pink. Many bacterial dyes, however, are more sensitive to UV light than petrochemical-based dyes and will fade more quickly than consumers may be used to. This, however, she says, could present an opportunity to “think differently” about how our clothes change over time. Rather than throwing our clothes away when trends shift, perhaps we might want something that changes over time, like a fine wine?

As a child of the 90s, it is blindingly obvious to me that we need look no further than the classic and coveted “acid wash” denim jeans of the grunge era as a prime example of clothes that get better with time.

Jeans are seldom (if ever) dyed anything but dark indigo blue to start with and fade over years with wear and tear. Thus, pale blue jeans were rapidly embraced by the grunge generation as a visual display of anti-consumerist sentiment (“I can’t be bothered to buy a new pair, these are fine”). But when consumers actually wanted pale blue jeans on demand—and were willing to pay a premium for it (a pale blue pair of Gucci jeans can set you back $1,300)—factories in Central America and Asia rose to the challenge. They quickly figured out how to deploy industrial machinery, including sandblasters, plus toxic chemicals such as the bleach potassium permanganate (perhaps the inspiration for the title of Nirvana’s debut 1989 album, Bleach). Extensive water pollution, lung infections, and worse were the inevitable results.

Our appetite for high-end and artificially faded jeans has not dimmed. Today, it’s estimated that humans purchase three billion pairs of jeans every year, 99% of which are dyed with petrochemical indigo—one of the first dyes to be synthesized, created by chemical godfather Adolf von Bayer in 1867. That is one enormous and entrenched “incumbent industry” to disrupt.

“It requires a huge amount of time, talent, and money to disrupt this industry – even

producing one gram of dye at the start of your industrial development can take years and a few million Euros of investment,” says Jeremie Blache, CEO of Pili, a “carbon-conscious color company.” As a nod to the wisdom of microbes, they take their name “Pili” from the pilus (plural, pili), extensions on the surfaces of bacterial cell membranes used to communicate.

Pili, however, has succeeded in producing a bacterial indigo dye they say matches chemical dyes in performance and cost. Plus, theirs can be used in existing equipment as “drop-in” alternatives, just as Colorifix achieved. Their process uses none of the toxic chemicals routinely used in denim manufacturing, such as formaldehyde and cyanide, and only produces 25% of the carbon dioxide emissions as conventional denim. In fact, their initial target was not water wastage but reducing greenhouse gas emissions, says Blache, hence the tagline: “carbon conscious color company.”

Jeans made with Pili’s technology will be available this spring from a number of high-end premium brands, he says. “Our goal is to change the entire industry, but we have to do this step-by-step: we need to focus on premium brands to start with because they can afford higher production costs for small orders, rather than the huge Chinese manufacturers with enormous outputs,” says Blache.

Over in California, biotechnology company Huue has also created drop-in replacement dyes for the denim industry, which are available now in a new line from British designer Patrick McDowell, who makes high-end garments for select buyers, such as his conventionally made Apollo Trouser, which costs £2,350. Starting with premium designers is necessary, says Huue Board Member and Material Impact Partner Corinna Chen, in agreement with Blache from Pili: luxury labels can afford small batches at a higher cost and often value the “green premium” more than giant brands.

Huue has recently partnered with UK fashion designer Patrick McDowell to showcase their biosynthetic indigo dye. [Image courtesy of Huue Bio]

“It’s taken us $14.6 million in investment to get to the stage of our first commercial dye, indigo for cotton – but that is just the start,” she says. “We want to create drop-in replacement dyes that can work with any textile, including polyester.” Even if it’s synthetic and less “green,” polyester is still the number one fabric in the world, she points out.

“The goal is to eventually create all the colors of the rainbow with biotechnology, so designers will be able to mix and match every shade to meet the needs of specific brands,” she explains. “Our job is to just tackle this problem in a realistic way to create things that people already want rather than try to reinvent the industry and force manufacturers to invest in new equipment and factories.

So, by harnessing the chemical wizardry of bacteria, designers can create new technologies that dramatically reduce the destructive impacts of our old ones.

The strap-line for the online publication Neo Life (whom I wrote for many times) was this thought-provoking line:

“Biology is technology.” Clearly aimed at Silicon Valley types, for whom nothing could be more sophisticated or impressive than technology.

As a biologist, I think that line is actually quite insulting to biology, which has spent 3.5 billion years evolving beautiful life forms and biochemical tricks we still barely understand, even with all our genetic sequencing tools and refined ultrasound scanners.

A more appropriate line, I think, is this from my first-year professor in biology at the University of Toronto, Dr. Spencer Barrett: “Biology is art.

Moreover, biologists have an expression: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

It might then interest some readers to learn this, regarding human evolution:

Color vision is a very recent development in life on earth: very few animals have “trichromatic” vision (meaning three types of color cell receptors in their eyes). Most people are vaguely aware that dogs “see in black and white,” which isn’t quite true—canines are red-green colorblind, like 7% of men.

However, few realize how recently this appeared in our evolutionary past. Amongst mammals, trichromatic color vision is pretty much only found in primates because tree-dwelling monkeys need to be able to discern ripe red fruits from bitter green ones (unlike animals that forage on the forest floor, where fallen fruit is invariably ripe).

Even when our ancestors came down from the trees, we retained this biological upgrade. And just like the joy we derive from our senses of taste and touch, this is a gift from evolution: food doesn’t need to taste as good as it does. We could just live like ruminants subsisting on identical mouthfuls of grass every day. And reproduction doesn’t need to feel as good as it does. We could simply lay our eggs on the ground and walk away without any further activity, like a fish or a frog.

But cooking and sex are two of our greatest joys in life—further disputing the ridiculous Buddhist belief that “life is suffering. As Ruth Lloyd of CSM put it: “Color brings a lot of joy to life.”

By harnessing the brilliance of biology, that joy can be divorced from the human suffering it never needed to cause in the first place.

But in our turbo-charged disposable economy, a new garment is typically worn just ten times or less, frequently discarded in less than a year, only to be replaced with more transient items that will be replaced just as quickly with the latest styles. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates we purchase 60% more clothes per year each but wear them for half as long, with the average American tossing 37kg of clothing per year. Globally, 92 million tons of textile waste is binned annually, 25% of which is crudely incinerated, releasing greenhouse gases and carcinogens like dioxins to the sky, while 57% is left to rot in landfills thanks to our insatiable desire for new, cheap clothing. As my mother frequently grumbled, “I love clothing, but I hate fashion.”

Fast Fashion’s Environmental Toll

The environmental wreckage doesn’t end there: synthetic fibres made from petrochemicals such as polyester account for roughly 60% of these tossed threads. These never really decompose as was once thought: synthetics simply shred into tinier and tinier fragments called “microplastics.” Fifteen years ago, when I was a specialist reporter on environmental issues, scientists worried these microplastics would permanently contaminate life on Earth, bringing dangerous chemical cargo like endocrine disruptors with them. Today, researchers have found them everywhere they have looked, from the bottom of the deepest ocean trenches to the slopes of Mount Everest—and, of course, in our food, our drinking water, and ourselves. We have detected them in every organ we have examined, including the brain, the liver, and the placenta: we are contaminated before we are even born.

Back in the ’00s, safer alternatives such as organic cotton or recycled polyester were on the rise, with more high-tech textiles coming into market yearly. My bedding is made of the nifty Tencel, an award-winning soft fabric made from discarded wood chips in a patented closed-loop production process. But even the clever alternatives come with environmental footprints—organic cotton still requires enormous areas of land for cultivation, further shrinking the land available for wildlife. And let’s not even get into the human rights abuses from slave plantations in the American antebellum south or modern laborers paid pennies in Bangladesh. Even if we are indifferent to fashion or outright averse to shopping, we all wear clothing, and roughly 12% of the planet’s population works in the textile industry: all of us are complicit, and all of us are affected.

“There has always been a blatant disrespect for the environment in this field—it has historically been built into what we do, and I didn’t want to be part of an industry that was so toxic, so I wanted to look at other ways of creating textiles,” says Carole Collet, Professor in Design for Sustainable Futures at Central Saint Martins at the University of the Arts, London, who investigates new ways to biodesign fabrics with synthetic biology and more. “It just makes sense to use synthetic biology to reduce all this waste—how efficient these bacteria are is the great promise. I really think it’s the future. But while in medicine, it’s accepted that it might take 10 or 20 years to develop a new drug or vaccine, the fashion industry is not used to waiting—it goes at a fast pace, and when a designer wants something, they want it yesterday.”

Biodesign: Crafting Textiles with Synthetic Biology

The case for producing industrial chemicals like fuels or fertilizers or modern compounds like pharmaceuticals, with algae and bacteria in bioreactors, minimizing water pollution and land usage, is fairly easy to make. Living organisms have had 3.8 billion years to perfect the art of “moving and placing atoms more quickly and precisely than anything we’ve ever engineered,” and the ancient art of fermentation is “an advanced technological toolkit” we can harness “for our very survival” as Natsai Audrey Chieza puts it. Founder & CEO of Faber Futures and Chair for Biodesign Track at SynBioBeta 2025, Chieza points to the fact that she was awarded the London Design Medal at the prestigious London Design Festival this year as a sign that we are starting to see “culture change” high up among investors and cultural institutions such as the Royal Ballet who she sees as primed to adopt the groundbreaking technology.

But the idea of replacing the silk, cotton, and traditional fabrics we have grown for thousands of years has proven tricky for a stubborn incumbent industry and a clearly confused public to embrace. Standup comedians, as usual, can be relied on for a quip that reflects wider attitudes: “There are little green people, people who say, ‘Mind the planet. Be nice to the monkeys and the fishes. Let’s make our own clothes out of body fluids.’ Now, these people, everything they say is pretty much correct—about the planet and the environment and so on… but nobody listens to them anyway. They are the vegan at the dinner table of life,” cracked Irish comedian Dylan Moran in 2011.

Moran was no doubt referring to synbio textile pioneer and self-described ” biomaterial pioneer” Suzanne Lee of Brooklyn-based startup Biofabricate, whose landmark 2011 TED Talk “Grow your own clothes” has been viewed almost 1.7 million times. Though she was not advocating using sweat or urine but rather the familiar bacteria we use to make kombucha as the source material for a new jacket (which she stylishly wore for her talk), even the chin-strokey New Yorker flippantly described Biofabricate’s creations—made in partnership with luxury brands Gucci and Balenciaga—as “eco-friendly doodads.”

But the nanocellulose threads churned out by bacteria in bioreactors (which require a tiny fraction of the water petrochemicals and crops do) is more than just ecologically benign—the materials are eight times stronger than steel at the molecular level. “Evangelizing that this would be the future 10 years ago, saying this really is the future of the fashion industry, I was always just the alien in the room—I was just 20 years too early,” says Lee.

“The key thing to understand about the fashion industry is that it is not a sector that does innovation well,” she says, pointing out it took 60 years for Lycra to make it from the laboratory to the mall. “Fashion brands do not do materials research, they just go to their suppliers and ask them to send samples—it’s in the supply chain where innovations take place. But there was never any investment from chemical giants such as Dupont or BASF into R&D, which is why everyone is struggling to really adopt fermentation at scale.”

As in so many fields, academic labs have no shortage of ideas or innovations, but adoption by the existing industry and “scaling up” is another matter – made all the more complex in textiles, where supply chains see products crossing multiple borders and thousands of miles from field to factory. “We’ve done enough showing off in research papers, now is the time to start actually proving it by creating startups or working with large companies to actually deliver these creations,” says Tom Ellis, Professor of Synthetic Genome Engineering at Imperial College London. This year saw further obstacles to an already complex industry with the shock increase in fuel costs after Russia invaded Ukraine, and a number of startups have quietly folded, he says. “But I still think the field is more exciting than it was 10 years ago because there are so many people now invested in delivering applications, not just focusing on the scientific side.”

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Bridging Innovation and Industry

At the front of the pack is London-based Modern Synthesis, who are one of the first startups to introduce a biomaterial—the same nanocellulose championed by Lee—into a consumer product: The “Bou Bag” from high-end designer Ganni, made of a natural textile scaffold combined with nanocellulose to produce a leather-like material. The nanocellulose reinforces the natural fibers in the same manner as rebar is used to reinforce concrete, and though the material is highly durable, they hope to release a 100% cellulosic version next year.

Working with high-end luxury brands is a more realistic way to get these new materials into the market, rather than trying to insert them into the enormous and complex global supply chains that would demand enormous volumes of product to even consider their adoption, says Founder and CEO Jen Keane from their South London studio (filmed by the BBC just minutes before I spoke to her). “Luxury brands can take on small volumes of materials at relatively high price points—and when you’re offering something that is unique, they want to be the first out there with it. And they are really good at building cultures and telling stories around new materials,” she says, noting that the “cultural challenges” are probably much greater than the technological ones.

But it is that cultural importance of textiles that might make them perfect to introduce the potential of synthetic biology to the world on a grand scale. “People forget that textiles were one of our first modes of communication,” she enthuses. It’s true: messages were actually woven into blankets and rugs, for example, by numerous cultures before the adoption of writing. “And as the Jacquard Loom was arguably the first computer, it’s almost one of the birthplaces of modern technology—there has always been a strong interlink between the technology and human creativity.”

The psychedelic renaissance as we know it in the UK – the reputational restoration of a range of powerful molecules long banished from respectable science since the 1970s – simply would not exist if not for him.

In 2016, Professor Nutt’s team conducted the first scans to reveal what happens inside the brain under the influence of LSD (70 years after the molecule’s creation). Over the past decade, he has spearheaded the movement to allow British children and the disabled to access safe cannabis medications. In 2021, he opened Awakn, the first clinic in the UK to provide safe access to psychedelics for intractable depression, without question saving lives. He has brought to market the botanical drink Sentia, one of the first true alternatives to alcohol, and plans to roll out more.

Yet he might still be best known for being fired by the British government in 2009 from his position as chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) – known as the Drugs Tsar after the publication of a controversial 2009 article in The Journal of Psychopharmacology in which he compared the dangers of consuming MDMA with horse riding, with the deliberately provocative title ‘Equasy – An overlooked addiction with implications for the current debate on drug harms’.

Clearly the infamous sacking has not stymied Nutt’s rise. Any attempts to dissuade him from speaking his mind clearly backfired as he has only grown in influence and prestige, largely thanks to the public spat with the infamous government sacking.

‘I tried to change politics and I failed. But at least I already knew that you can change people’s brains,’ he says.

Because, in fact, although he’d brought a model of the LSD molecule model to school as a boy (‘I am indeed a child of the 60s’), Nutt only came to study psychedelics in a serious way late in his career. The first time I met him in 2012 we barely spoke about psychedelics or equasy at all (unsurprising as he was clearly weary of discussing horses and MDMA) and instead spent most of our time discussing an entirely different condition: epilepsy.

His Mission

I have a minor form of the condition and had just got over a nasty experience with a drug called Lamotrigine, which harmed me worse than any boozy weekend ever did. Nutt, as it turned out, had written his PhD on epilepsy in 1979 and embarked on a quest to find drugs that could induce seizures in the same manner as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which is actually an effective treatment for severe depression: strangely, by inducing seizures ECT can promote ‘neurogenesis’ (the formation of new brain cells) and ‘synaptogenesis’ (new connections between brain cells).

In the process of attempting to design drugs that could induce the same effects, his work led him to open the first dedicated clinics for a range of disorders: anxiety (1989), insomnia (1994) and ADHD (1998), all in Bristol.

‘Really I wanted to just help people who weren’t getting a fair crack of the whip from the NHS,’ he explains. ‘You couldn’t get doctors to refer patients with anxiety issues, for example, because nobody seemed to know anything about anxiety. So I just had to set it up myself. You cannot imagine the level of disability in these patients. I dealt with many people who were so anxious and agoraphobic I had to visit them in their own homes. This was a very serious and under-served condition.’

Possibly counterintuitively, there is a unifying factor in sleep, seizures and anxiety: the neurotransmitter GABA, which seems to be at unusually high or unusually low levels in these conditions.

‘Pretty much my entire career has been spent at the interface of psychiatry and understanding the brain mechanisms of drugs, usually with a focus on GABA,’ he explains.

After his sacking the chance came up to run his own lab at Imperial in 2009.

‘Moving to London to work with some of the best brain scanners in the country was a natural move. It was an opportunity I just could not refuse,’ he says.

At Imperial he now leads the UK’s largest psychedelic research department (there are only four universities licensed to study these drugs) with 15 staff churning out cutting-edge research involving scientific feats never accomplished before: examining the influence of illegal drugs at the finest detail right inside the brain.

‘Which is exactly why I went into medicine in the first place: I wanted to study the brain,’ says Nutt.

What Can Hallucinogens Achieve?

Under his guidance, Imperial’s researchers have dosed people with class A drugs such as psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – and LSD, and measured not only their psychological responses, but also their neurological responses (extremely expensive and difficult by comparison). For this, they deploy some of the most powerful MRI scanners in the country to truly see what is going on.

Their first milestone paper, published in the prestigious journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, one of the most cited journals in the world) in 2012 used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the flow of blood to various brain regions. It found that the ‘default mode network’ (DMN) constellation of brain regions receives less blood, not more, which to the researchers came somewhat as a surprise, as many had expected that drugs that make one hallucinate or experience synaesthetic phenomena do so by pumping more blood into the brain, not less. But the discovery that the DMN receives less blood under the influence of a psychedelic actually makes sense: it explains why people experience less ruminative thoughts, less constrained thinking – less of the circular and negative thought patterns that accompany depression – when under the influence of magic mushrooms. This also helps to explain the phenomenon of ‘ego dissolution’, the same sensation often reported by experienced meditators: less focused on oneself, more ‘at one with the universe’, so to speak.

It is exactly this kind of evidence that is needed to bring these molecules to market.

‘We need the brain scans to show the pinnacle potential of these drugs,’ says Nutt. Anecdotal evidence is not enough – demonstrating the nuts and bolts underpinning their mechanisms is crucial.

Four years later, in 2016, his team published a related study in PNAS revealing what actually happens in the brain when people take LSD. The world had waited over seven decades for this. Although the psychedelic, first created in 1938 and then first sampled by chemist Albert Hoffman in 1943, was studied by thousands of psychiatrists with great fascination throughout the 1950s and 1960s when it was still legal, all legit research on humans ground to a halt in 1971 when governments banned them in a wave of hysteria. Now that regulations are thawing, scientists such as Nutt can use modern tools to examine the drugs in ways that post-war researchers might never have imagined possible.

When Nutt and his team could finally look at how LSD influences the brain, what they discovered came as no surprise to anyone: the drug increases the ‘functional connectivity’ between different parts of the brain. ‘Disparate regions in the brain communicate with each other when they don’t normally do so,’ he explains. This helps us understand how so many things may seem imbued with meaning during an acid trip – meaning that truly can bring insights.

This 2016 PNAS study on LSD was in ‘healthy volunteers’ – the real game changer came in 2021 with a ground-breaking study on using psilocybin to treat depression published in the esteemed New England Journal of Medicine in 2021, in which patients with ‘treatment-resistant depression’ (meaning they had tried multiple anti-depressants to no avail) were given either psilocybin or escitalopram (an SSRI) along with psychotherapy. The statistical analysis found psilocybin in combination with therapy was just as effective as the antidepressant, but, unlike the SSRI, it didn’t come with the weight gain, numbed emotions and dampened libido that frequently caused people to drop their prescriptions.

Other risk factors remain with psychedelics, such as the possibility of inducing psychosis in patients with unidentified predispositions such as genetic risk factors for schizophrenia or a history of childhood trauma. However, given how many people fail to experience any relief from depression with conventional drugs, and the downsides of years spent on daily medications, this study suggests the possible benefits of psilocybin therapies for mental health – which still have not been approved in the UK or the US – merit further study.

Next up for the Centre for Psychedelic Research: exploring if psilocybin could be used to treat anorexia and other eating disorders, which are among the most lethal of all mental health conditions. A shocking 15% of patients with severe eating disorders are estimated to die from their affliction, so any new treatments will save millions of lives. After Nutt and I spoke, that evening he was set to host a meeting with researchers in New Zealand, the US, and the UK all gathering at the same time to look at the data from their clinical trial for the very first time.

‘And absolutely nothing beats going over new data for the very first time – that really is the most exciting thing in the world,’ he says.

The New Frontiers

Nutt plans to begin this year a new research programme to examine if psilocybin could be used to treat gambling and opioid addictions, which would be a truly paradigm-altering study: zero drugs currently exist to treat gambling addictions and few for opioid addiction.

‘I think psilocybin will work for them, because I don’t think that psychedelics work like other drugs. I think they work not to modulate single neurotransmitters like SSRIs, but to disrupt brain circuits,’ he explains. ‘This is a whole different concept to other drug treatments.’

Given the enormous potential for these molecules to save people’s lives, and given that we’ve known about their promise since early studies using psychedelics for trauma, alcoholism, depression and more in the 1950s, researchers are near universal in agreement that the restrictions placed on clinical studies with psychedelics and numerous excessive costs are inappropriate and should be re-examined.

‘We are held back terribly by legal constraints,’ sighs Nutt. ‘There are studies we cannot do because of the law. We cannot do microdosing studies, for example, because of the complexities of the legislation. People have to come into a hospital to be administered a drug, so it’s not possible for us to do this with microdosing because of the complexities of handling, holding and looking after the patients. We should have an exemption for research.’

Some of the practical safeguards required by legislation are just comedic, he says.

‘You have to have a special safe in which to store MDMA and psilocybin – why? Why can’t you put them in the same hospital safe alongside hospital-grade heroin?’ he asks. ‘The law is absurd. It creates vast amounts of complexities. Universities can’t be bothered because of the amount of money it winds up costing. It all just scares people. They say the rules are designed to prevent recreational use, but I haven’t heard of any psychedelic ever leaking out from a research lab into recreational use. We’re never going to let these drugs leak out – it’s too important to us to keep our work going.’

Ultimately, is he optimistic that he will be able to bring these drugs to market?

‘It’s been 30 years since anyone has brought a proven new psychiatric medicine to market,’ Nutt flatly summarises. ‘But all this hassle is so unnecessary – hopefully that will change if the FDA in America ultimately decides to approve MDMA, and if the startup Compass gets approval for its patented form of psilocybin.’

And what about new molecular analogues to the ‘classic’ psychedelics? Throughout the psychedelic industry, every startup is focused on developing a new formulation of the traditional psychedelics, which they can patent and therefore use to raise funding for proprietary and exclusive development. Is this necessary?

‘No,’ he says flatly. The entire field exists due to the traditional molecules, why do we need new ones?

There is, however, one arena in which new compounds are desperately needed and it is this: alcohol.

For the past decade, Nutt and his business partners have been working to develop alternatives to alcohol, which Nutt argues is one of the deadliest drugs in the world – we just don’t think of it as one. His synthetic alternative aims to give drinkers the same buzzy feeling, but without liver damage, carcinogenicity or the capacity to render people completely blind intoxicated.

The name for his startup? GABA Labs, going right back to his roots. Already it has released the botanical drink Sentia. The next step, to popularise a true modern alternative to humanity’s oldest intoxicant.

That’s quite an opening statement from Rick Smith, executive producer of Plastic People, a new documentary produced by Toronto’s White Pine Pictures (Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, Unloved: Huronia’s Forgotten Children) that explores how every human on earth became polluted with tiny particles of plastic and what this means for our lives.

For the unfamiliar, microplastics are tiny fragments that have shred­ded off bags, fabrics, tires—any plastic product you can name—and now blanket the earth: We have found them at the bottoms of the deepest oceans and the tops of the tallest mountains, from the Mariana Trench to Mount Everest.

“It’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that every molecule of plastic ever created still exists somewhere on Earth in some stage of degradation, because this stuff never disappears. It just goes from being larger pieces of litter to tinier and tinier particles,” says Smith.

As the host of Discovery’s Daily Planet, journalist and Plastic People co-director Ziya Tong has followed the emerging science around microplastic pollution for two decades, ever since disturbing images of marine turtles and birds choking on plastic trash went viral.

“It was the growing ubiquity of microplastics that really made me start to worry,” says Tong, speaking from Toronto.

Now scientists find microplastics in every organ they look at: the liver, lungs, intestine—even the brain and placenta.

“In the beginning, we found it in one organ, then when we found it in the bloodstream, it was very scary because that implied it was spread­ing all over the body,” she says. “Seeing those breaches one by one, it’s been a slow and rather devastating domino effect.”

Tong and co-director Ben Addelman set out to tell what she has admitted is “possibly the most consequential story she has ever told,” to trace the complete story of microplastic pollution, from the adoption of plastics at the end of the 19th century, to the “plasticization” of life in the post-war era to modern studies of their impact on our health.

Study after study has found plastic particles everywhere we look: tap water, snowflakes, air samples, and unsurprisingly, human tissue. We are all becoming “plastic people,” or as Sedat Gündoğdu, a Turkish scientist from the Microplastic Research Group, jokes in the film, “Homo plasticus.”

“This is the starting point of the entry of plastic into the food chain,” says Gündoğdu, brandishing an aged clump of soil blended with shreds from plastic agricultural sheets, which he terms “plastisoil.” We can optimistically remove Saran Wrap and Tupperware from our homes and avoid food in plastic packaging, but when plastic is embedded in agriculture and food from the start, it doesn’t do much good.

“There is no way to clean microplastics from the environment,” says Gündoğdu. “We are poisoning ourselves with our own hand.” And that is just one source of plastic pollution. Step back and the film shows that the bigger picture is overwhelming.

“It is hard to wrap your brain around how astronomically huge the numbers are: over 1.5 billion plastic bottles are bought every single day. 2 million plastic bags are used every single minute on earth,” elaborates Smith in the film. Half of the 400 million tonnes of plastic produced annually, which could be used for useful things like semiconductors, syringes, and smartphones, go into disposable single-use products, which, once discarded can release tiny particles that can enter the global planetary cycles and wind up in our bodies.

So far, so worrisome. But most of us can name half a dozen pollut­ants that headlines have also screamed at us to worry about: asbestos, diesel, lead, fluoride. These are everyday polymers, the same materials found in our phones, bottles, carpets, computers, pens, and hundreds of other objects we touch with our hands every single day. Could these seemingly inert materials be so much more of a cause for concern com­pared to nuclear fallout or heavy metals?

The answer for Smith, Tong, Addelman, and many scientists is a resounding yes. So, what can be done about it?

For the producers and co-directors, the response was to make an urgent film about how we are all becoming Plastic People, and why we should care.

“Our ambition was to produce something comprehensive,” says Tong. And if one word can describe this film, it is that: comprehensive.

Most environmental documentaries narrow down to one issue, whether it’s the fight to protect the Amazon (The Territory, 2022), coral reef declines (Chasing Coral, 2017), or overfishing (Seaspiracy, 2021).

Plastic People ambitiously, and successfully, covers every facet of this staggeringly broad issue. Historic, economic, environmental, psycho­logical, scientific, and, of course, medical, topics are all covered. The film takes us to Minnesota, Turkey, Italy, Amsterdam, Texas, England, the Philippines, Paris, and Canada, visiting labs, operating theatres, slums, and beaches. It veers from the micro—tiny plastic particles and their toxic contents—to the macro: capitalism, corporate lies, colonial­ism, and climate change.

Tong, Addelman, and Smith explore the roots of plastic adoption in the industrial age when cities were elec­trified with plastic-insulated wires, and the Second World War when these “wonder materials” began to be mass-produced. We learn that the global adoption of “single-use” plas­tics was not an accident: following the war and seeking new markets, the petrochemical industry actively engineered this, pushing their mes­sage through the media, such as with an influential piece in 1955 Life Magazine titled “Throwaway Living,” promoting plastic dishware as liberating us from the drudgery of cleaning.

“They had to train us to throw useful products away,” says Addelman. “That to me is the biggest issue: We have made things single-use when they will last forever.”

Though we diligently recycle, most of our plastic garbage winds up in developing countries for disposal (termed “waste colonialism”) or littering far-flung beaches. “If plastic couldn’t be exported and you had to deal with it where it was used, I guarantee this problem would go away,” says Addelman.

And if that wasn’t dire enough, fossil fuel companies now want to triple global plastic output to financially compensate for the decline in burning oil for energy. “Production just keeps growing. Plastic is the embodiment of capitalism,” summarises Susan Freinkel, author of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (2011).

Moving from the macro to the micro, we explore the latest research on one endpoint for this pollution: our bodies. Tong not only scours the latest research, but has her blood and urine samples analysed. Holding a vial of her own faeces, she jokes, “This is the shit I do for science.”

She visits environmental scientists such as Mary Kosuth from the University of Minnesota, who has found microplastics in air samples, drinking water, and snowflakes. In the Netherlands, Dr. Gavin ten Tusscher explains how microplastics carrying “endocrine disruptors” (chemicals that mimic hormones, such as phthalates and BPA) could be responsible for the “major increase” in breast, prostate, thyroid, and testicular cancers. In Turkey, neurosurgeon Dr. Emrah Çeltikçi, after removing a tumour from a patient’s frontal lobe, worries about microplastics in the brain.

And in Rome, obstetrician Dr. Antonio Ragusa describes finding plastic particles in placenta. “That plastic was actually inside the cells, where it could alter the way DNA is expressed,” he warns.

Does this mean microplastics can can spawn cancers? Even in the womb?

“As a science journalist, I’m not willing to make connections until I see them. I don’t like exaggerating,” says Tong.

For my part, as another science journalist, I wrote about the possibility that microplastics pose a serious threat to human health 16 years ago in a 2008 cover story for This Magazine, “Plastic Unfantastic,” which traced the fate of plastic particles from factories to ocean gyres to the food chain.

There were no studies at the time that had analysed human tissue, so I focused on the research of marine ecologist Richard Thompson from the UK, who had found that microplastic particles from the ocean frequently held concentrations of PCBs a million times greater than those from the surrounding water. Subsequent experiments with lugworms found the invertebrates would absorb the toxic chemical phrenathrene from microplastics soaked in the molecule and placed in their tank.

I am a little embarrassed to read what I wrote 16 years ago: “It is still uncertain whether microplastic pollution represents an environmental hazard.” Granted, there were no studies to prove my theories—that microplastics would be found everywhere, including the human body, and that their toxic cargo was likely causing innumerable health impacts, including cancer—but I wish I had been more vocal, because everything I predicted turned out to be true.

Now the latest science gives us even more reasons for concern: this March, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine made a direct link between microplastics and cardiovascular disease. It found that in patients who underwent surgery for carotid artery disease, those who already had detectable levels of microplastics in their blood vessels subsequently also had higher rates of myocardial infarction, stroke, and death for three years afterwards.

And some of our best-intentioned ideas just make the situation worse. In the European Union, directives for a “circular waste economy” have resulted in 40% of the 8 to 10 million tonnes of sewage sludge produced annually is spread on farmland. Combine that with microplastic-bound fertilisers and “biosolid” natural fertilisers mixed with “microspheres,” European farmland is now the largest global reservoir of microplastics.

Quite the situation we’ve put ourselves in.

Is Smith being hyperbolic in claiming microplastics are “the most serious type of pollutant ever created”? I didn’t think so in 2008 when I first wrote about them, I didn’t think so when Smith wrote Slow Death by Rubber Duck in 2009, and I don’t think so now.

So, can this film make a difference?

All environmental documentaries have the same ambitions: to not only raise awareness but push us to act.

The granddaddy “green doc” of them all, Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006), catapulted cli­mate change into our global conscious­ness by explaining the nuts and bolts of a supposedly contentious issue, shifting global warming from “a matter of scientific debate”—which it never was—to an unques­tionable fact that should terrify everyone, and move us to action.

Plastic People, the latest in a growing list of fantastic environmental docs, should make us aware of an issue that affects us all and leave audiences wondering how we were ever so stupid in the first place. And like An Inconvenient Truth and other fine environmental films, it should make us want to work for change.

Strategically, the producers have aligned the release with the dates of key international negotiations, most notably the UN’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-4), to be held in Ottawa in April 2024. The plastic equivalent of the IPCC, this will strive to set out an internationally legally binding treaty on plastic pollution and lead to a treaty by 2025. “That is our chance as a global community to seriously reduce plastics in the world,” says Tong.

For decades, it has been borderline obligatory for all environmental docs to contain a “message of hope” in the conclusion. Few filmmakers wish to do more harm than good by rendering us hopeless and inactive. Most docs conclude with “calls to action,” which frequently have been infuriatingly chirpy. I can think of dozens of films about climate change that ended with “Come on America, we can do this!” Typically, the focus has been on individual choices—buy an electric car, fly less than three times a year—which kind of falls flat when you look at the bigger picture.

Refreshingly, Plastic People does not deliver simple-minded advice about clearing plastic products from our homes, as we’d still ingest microplastics through drinking water, air and food. And it would prob­ably be impossible (ever seen a glass bottle of shampoo?). Nor do they scold us to recycle our plastic waste, or tell us, for the millionth time, to bring our own shopping bags.

Instead, they focus on more radical actions individuals can take. Take for example Texan Diane Wilson, who sued the petrochemical giant Formosa Plastics for illegal dumping of industrial waste into the local estuary, destroying fisheries that had supported her family for generations. With evidence from 2,500 water samples, in 2019, she won $50 million, one of the largest settlements in the history of the American Clean Water Act, and is now investing “every penny” into her community.

And small communities can make huge steps, for example Bayfield, a town of just 1,100 people on the shore of Lake Huron in Canada that became the first “plastic-free” community in North America. More than 1,000 other villages and hamlets have followed suit.

Even in developing countries with shocking conditions, things can be turned round, such as with the Pasig River in the Philippines, once so chocked with trash it seemed you could walk across it. Now it is so clean that it is virtually unrecognisable.

“What you can do in just a few years is tremendous,” says Tong. “So, I am hopeful.”

The cynic in me remembers that no matter how much fanfare is made over IPCC treaties, global greenhouse gas emissions just keep rising. And that’s just carbon dioxide—a naturally occurring gas that is non-toxic and will be absorbed by vegetation over millennia. Other pollutants are more persistent and more dangerous. A century of leaded gasoline use left the globe covered in lead, and we will never get rid of it. Same goes for the mercury released by coal, persistent organic pollutants such as PCBs and other manmade poisons.

As much as I would love to think we can “turn things around” with plastics, I cannot help but think it’s too late.

Smith gets both the opening statement about “the most serious type of pollutant,” and the last word: “We know that our society can solve pollution problems. Our grandparents were exposed to pollutants that don’t exist anymore because the health effects became clear, those chemicals were banned, and the population became healthier as a result. This is not rocket science.”

Tong reminds us that we have only had single use plastics as the norm for a century, so we can return to the old ways quickly.

“The plastics industry trained us to live in ‘disposable culture land,’ so we can use those same tactics to train people to return to ‘grandma land,’ when people knew how to fix and reuse things,” she argues. “Single-use plastics were sold to us with the idea that life would be easier. So, we just need to show people that without them, we can live in a world that isn’t filled with garbage, and that will be healthier, saner, and more beautiful. That idea is our gift.”

I share the view that eliminating single-use plastic is a no-brainer, and as hopeless as the situation seems, we can’t not try. But I find it be optimistic given humanity’s track record.

Which is why I would have given Dr. Ragusa the last word instead:

“We must change the way we see the world, and we must revolt. And that is the main goal of our research: to inspire rebellion.”

Australia, a land most often associated with its dangerous wildlife and charismatic, crocodile-wrangling biologists, is currently the darling of the psychedelic world, having made headlines by fully allowing the prescription of psilocybin and MDMA as of July 1st, 2023. Mind Medicine Australia is pledging to supply the drugs obtained from Canadian start-up Optimum Health at “no cost” for clinical trials.

Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) approved MDMA and psilocybin for treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and treatment-resistant depression, respectively, starting July 1. This decision marks Australia as the first country to legalize these substances in a medical setting, beating out the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), despite its designation of psilocybin and MDMA as “breakthrough” therapies several years ago.

However, a deeper examination reveals that the situation is more complex than initial reports suggest. Despite the progressive image portrayed in international media, including BBC reports on Australia legalizing psychedelics for mental health, the actual implementation of this legislation faces several hurdles. Since the 2022 announcement, not a single prescription has been issued.

Bite-sized news stories proclaiming “Australia legalizes psychedelics for mental health” certainly give that impression. But drilling into the legalese, paperwork, and fine print reveals the reality is not as simple or impressive as the headlines convey.

A Failure to Deliver

“For now, this is not the miracle that has been advertised in the news – it’s a regulatory breakthrough that is only on paper,” says Dr. Jack Allocca, psychedelic neuroscientist at The University of Melbourne Florey Department of Neuroscience and Mental Health. “Some speculate that it was aimed to please certain individuals who are well connected to the government. Others suspect it’s nothing more than a PR stunt. It could just be that it takes time to put a law into practice, given that the bureaucratic burden on the whole process is very heavy. Either way, nobody seems to have a clear idea yet when this will become a reality or why the law was changed this way.”

Psychedelic Medicine is Legally Available, But Entirely Out of Reach

Psychiatrist Fernando Espi Forcen of Massachusetts General Hospital observes the shift from the anti-drug hysteria of the war on drugs to the beginnings of a mental wellness revolution. “Psychedelics have gone from fringe to fashionable,” said Forcen, in an interview with Psychiatric News. “Today, wealthy individuals can arrange a psilocybin retreat in Jamaica or have an authentic ayahuasca experience in Peru.” Yet, most Australians don’t have access to psychedelic medicine, legal or otherwise.

We will have to wait and see what the future has in store for the Aussies. However, given that Oregon also made headlines with their announcement of legal training programs for psychedelic therapists and then made the news again when the Synthesis Institute filed for bankruptcy, leaving students “in limbo,” we should be somewhat cautious. Exciting announcements are one thing – delivering on them is another.

The U.S. – whether the rest of the planet likes it or not – still sets the tone for drug policies around the globe. As the nation responsible for the demonization of psychedelics in the first place, with Richard Nixon and his militant 1971 declaration of a “War on Drugs,” much of the world will follow wherever America goes.

So what is the influential nation doing to progress access to psychedelic therapies?

Depending on your point of view, the U.S. has some of the most considered and progressive measures in the world – or some of the most careless and irresponsible.

“My big picture perspective is that the U.S. is passing complicated states-based reforms that are genuinely far ahead of the rest of the world,” argues Joshua Kappel, a drug policy attorney and the founding partner of Vicente LLP, a leading cannabis and psychedelics firm in Denver. “The advantage of the ‘states rights’ model is it allows us to advance progressive drug policies on a state-by-state basis, see how things work out, and then adapt based on real-life experiences.”

Thanks to “state’s rights” and ballot initiatives, individual regions may set their own rules (often by popular vote). Nearly 100 cities and 11 states are tabling new regulations. America is now an eclectic and confusing patchwork of psychedelic laws that vary from state to state – often in surprising ways.

State Legislation & Scientific Consensus Conflict

Moreover, regulations differ not only between states, but between cities within states. Seattle and Detroit, for example, have decriminalized psychedelics for recreational and medical use, yet psychedelics remain illegal in Michigan and Washington state.

Similarly, Oregon and Colorado have both moved to legalize mushrooms for therapeutic and medical use. Yet, the FDA still labels psilocybin as a Schedule One drug, meaning it is deemed to have no medical value.

That Schedule One designation is the equivalent of a “regulatory black hole,” says Mason Marks, a law professor who leads the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center.

However, when they look inward, the U.S. presents an even more complex and often confusing tapestry of state, federal, and local cannabis regulations that can often be at odds with each other. For example, Cannabis has been legalized and decriminalized in some form or another in 37 states yet remains on the Schedule 1 List of Controlled Substances, the very same list that includes drugs like heroin. Unfortunately, U.S. psychedelic laws are taking a similarly disorganized path. States like Oregon and Colorado are setting their own tune while the federal government continues to show a distinct lack of interest in rescheduling.

But does Canada really have such progressive legislation compared to others like the UK and here at home? Drilling into the legalese, paperwork, and fine print reveals the reality is not as simple or impressive as the headlines convey.

When we closely examine the psychedelic goings-on in Canada, we see something that’s perhaps not as progressive as we envisioned. And in some ways, it’s downright disappointing. Legal access has been possible for the terminally ill since 2020, formalized in law in 2022 with two programs approved: “Section 56”, which allows anyone to apply to grow mushrooms for their own use, demonstrating a medical need; and the “Special Access Program” that grants permits to medical doctors to deliver psilocybin therapy and report back to Health Canada on the outcomes.

However, the approval process for an application to try novel drugs like psilocybin is convoluted, and approval is not guaranteed.

Thomas Hartle, who has terminal bowel cancer, made history in 2020 when he became the first Canadian to receive psilocybin therapy with a Section 56 license. Just as others have reported for two decades, since early trials with cancer patients two decades ago at Johns Hopkins and UCLA, the experience transformed his perspectives on death, allowing him to more fully enjoy the time he has left. Despite the horrors he continues to endure, he somehow manages to laugh through them with optimism and good humor, such as when his colostomy bag exploded in the car on his way for an appointment, and he “arrived covered” in his “own poop.”

Hartle underwent his 81st round of chemotherapy last month, and yet made time to speak to us, just hours before the appointment. Saying the need to publicize the importance of psilocybin is more important than his comfort.

Despite his urgent need for a novel treatment like psilocybin-assisted therapy, Hartle faced significant challenges accessing this new, experimental treatment.

Hartle had to wait 106 days for his license in 2020. Many patients never even receive that approval: denials are given for various reasons, as each case is evaluated individually, but the most common reason is “patient safety.” Which is ludicrous, says Hartle. “Psilocybin is safer to take than Advil – so to deny anyone psilocybin due to the ‘safety profile’ of the drug is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard.”

Plus, if having to wait 106 days wasn’t bad enough, Health Canada’s bureaucrats took 511 days to reply to his second application for a license. And the answer was no.

“My particular kind of cancer kills most people within 18 months – so they waited my entire expected lifespan just to give me a response. If that doesn’t say ‘we hope you die before we have to deal with this,’ I don’t know what does,” he says. Given that euthanasia has been legal for Canadian citizens since 2016, he’s not exaggerating.

“In 2020, it really felt like we’d made progress, but now it truly feels like we’re just going backward. Telling Canadians that Section 56 is a viable way to access this therapy gives people false hope – it’s ridiculous to the point of being embarrassing for Canada,” he says. “The government keeps saying they need more research – but what happened to all the Canadian research from the 1950s?”

There is some cause for Canadians to feel a sense of pride. Long before Canada legalized cannabis, it was home to one of the most important, ground-breaking, and paradigm-bending psychedelic studies in history.

Strong words from any woman. Even more powerful when spoken by a Member of Parliament in the glittering and golden Chamber of the House of Commons in London, England.

“Even at its best, it is a living hell,” summarized Charlotte Nichols, Labour MP for Warrington North, speaking to the Houses of Parliament in May, calling for rescheduling psilocybin in the UK. “I am hopeful that this sort of treatment may offer a light at the end of a very dark tunnel and finally give me my life back.”

Of all psychedelics being considered for legal use, psilocybin appears to be just behind MDMA on the path to legalization: having been granted “breakthrough status” by the FDA in 2018, psilocybin has also been made legal for medical access in special circumstances in Canada in 2022, deemed legal for prescription in Australia earlier this year (and officially legal as of July 1st), and decriminalized or had enforcement radically deprioritized in some form or another in over 11 states and 100 cities in the U.S., many believe that the FDA will approve medical grade psilocybin from start-up Compass Pathways within the next few years. Psilocybin will likely be one of the first legal psychedelics that could “revolutionize mental healthcare,” as researchers, entrepreneurs, and journalists have proclaimed for years.

Yet in the UK, most psychedelics remain in “Schedule One,” deemed to have “no therapeutic value.” This designation was assigned to the drug over 50 years ago, but has not been reviewed despite hundreds of studies published worldwide over the past 20 years demonstrating its potential to support the treatment of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, addictions, traumatic brain injury, and more – all notoriously difficult to treat.

“There is not a single other field where we would accept a 90% failure rate as acceptable, yet in mental health treatment, that is where we are. So why do we set up expert bodies and not listen to them?” continued Nichols, referring to the UK’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), which was first commissioned to review the evidence for psilocybin’s value years ago and pressed by the Home Office to deliver their next report in December 2022 – all to no avail.

“It is dangerous, immoral, and unethical, and it is frankly offensive to both psychiatrists and their patients that we seem to think that, as politicians, we know better because of some moral panic 50 years ago. It feels like institutional cruelty to condemn us to our misery when there are proven safe and effective treatment options if only the government would let us access them.”

By contrast, the addictive and highly dangerous drugs heroin, cocaine, and even crystal meth sit on the “Schedule Two” list in the UK, thanks to their medical utility in extreme circumstances: diamorphine (heroin) is a powerful painkiller, invaluable for the dying; cocaine is a useful anaesthetic (in particular for dentistry thanks to its vasoconstrictive qualities); and amphetamines can reduce hyperactivity in children with ADHD (many drugs have reverse effects in preadolescent brains). The Schedule Two designation makes the drugs far easier and cheaper to research.

“Schedule One classification roughly doubles the cost of research,” says Professor David Nutt of Imperial College London, Director of the Neuropsychopharmacology Unit in the Division of Brain Sciences. “The overall price tag of a license is £15k ($18,441) alone, requiring £5k ($6,147) each for administration, staff time, and security measures, such as installing CCTV cameras for continuous monitoring and storage refrigerators bolted to the floor,” he explains. “Then add an annual renewal cost of around £2k ($2,459) and a staggering £300k ($368,908) price tag for every human study.”

Nutt is considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on the true risks of recreational drugs and the lead author of dozens of ground-breaking studies on the medical benefits of psychedelics, such as the first randomized clinical trial comparing psilocybin to the SSRI antidepressant escitalopram, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2021.

Since being fired by the U.K. government from his role as “drugs czar” with the ACMD for statistically proving that ecstasy is less dangerous than horseback riding, he has become internationally known for his unbiased scientific approach to psychedelic studies. His research focuses on showing the true harms of supposedly dangerous drugs – such as a 2010 analysis published in The Lancet that found mushrooms had the least potential for harm (a finding that other researchers have consistently replicated in the past 13 years), with alcohol (the only legal inebriant) ranked as the most dangerous.

“Yet the Home Office (a department of the British Government responsible for immigration, security, and law and order), simply ignores the scientific evidence for psilocybin’s safety and ignores what a barrier these costs are – it can take over a year to meet all their requirements,” adds Professor Nutt.One extra year may seem trivial, but for some, it is a matter of life and death. An estimated 125 people take their own lives every week in the UK due to forms of depression that may potentially be alleviated with psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy. More than 1.2 million adults in the UK are believed to live with “treatment-resistant depression” – the very condition that spurred the FDA in America to grant “breakthrough” status to the company Compass Pathways five years ago for their formulation of psychotherapy-assisted psilocybin therapy.

These mental health conditions come with a hefty price tag to boot: the overall cost to the British economy from depression alone is estimated to be over £10 billion ($12,222,400,000), and the cost from all mental health conditions close to £118 billion ($144,224,320), detracting fully 5% from the nation’s GDP.

“The baffling thing is that it’s so blindingly obvious that we need to reschedule psilocybin,” complains Conservative MP Crispin Blunt, who founded the Conservative Drugs Policy Reform Group in 2018 to campaign for a rehaul of British legislation on all drugs, from magic mushrooms to heroin to nitrous oxide. The CDPRG’s research has shown that once informed about legal access in Canada for those suffering from a terminal illness or intractable depression, Brits, like Americans, overwhelmingly support rescheduling psilocybin: fully 59% are in favor of legal access to palliative care patients, with only 9% against.

Yet, while the public supports legislative change, there is nothing but “bureaucratic inertia” in the government, says Blunt, noting that the Minister of State for Crime, Policing, and Fire, MP Chris Philps (the minister tasked with drugs policy) did not even attend a key debate.

“What are we to make of his absence?” asks Blunt. “There is absolutely no excuse for the government not being able to grip this and for regulatory agencies not being able to enable this. The government can choose to save lives by providing psychotherapy with psychedelics – for which the medical case is undeniable – or they can choose to continue to allow 18 people a day to commit suicide.”

After Psychedelics, Everything Started to Change Immediately for This Military Veteran

One group tragically prone to suicide: military veterans. This population is more likely to die by taking their own lives than in combat. For those in uniform, the inability to process trauma can be notoriously fatal. Let us not forget: One officer died in the Capitol Hill riots of January 2022, but four took their own lives in the months and weeks afterward.

Lance Corporal Keith Abraham served in the British military in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2008 before leaving for civilian life in 2012. His wounds ran deep, and nothing seemed to help.

He tried psychotherapy.

“It helped me understand the processes I was going through, which was valuable – but it didn’t heal my trauma in any way,” he says. “But for some, having to revisit traumatizing experiences over and over in talk therapy is counter-productive – therapy itself can be traumatizing.”

He also tried SSRI antidepressants “multiple times,” but they did little for him. “In fact, they often made things a lot worse – I’d rather be in pain than be numb,” says Abraham. “SSRIs only manage symptoms to help you with day-to-day living – but they can never truly heal you.”

American friends in LA suggested he look into ayahuasca, helping him to travel to Peru in 2014 for the ritual.

“Everything started to change immediately – and I mean immediately. It was incredible,” he says. “It healed my trauma for sure – but I knew I still had work to do and that many of the other people whom I had shared my combat experiences with were suffering just as badly as me, if not worse, and they also deserved the chance to do this.”

“We all deserve a shot at healing, no matter what we’ve done,” he says.

There is no telling when the UK may reschedule psilocybin or any other psychedelic, so for now, Heroic Hearts can only continue to help fund trips overseas. “We’ve waited this long – and clearly, we’re going to have to wait a little bit more,” he says. “In the meantime, we will just have to do our best.”

Psychiatrist Dr. Lauren MacDonald is another Brit working to bring people overseas for psychedelic therapy after it changed her own life. But while Abraham’s combat trauma is a story many understand, Dr. MacDonald’s tale is less so. Diagnosed with stage four melanoma at the age of just 29 in 2014, she was told that because her specific kind of cancer does not respond to chemotherapy or radiation, there was no treatment. She would likely die before the age of 30.

She spent two years tortured by sleepless nights, unable to think of little else but her impending death.

Thankfully, she was invited to partake in a clinical trial with the Nobel Prize-winning drug Keytruda. It saved her life, reversing the cancer completely. Yet after being told she was cancer free in 2016, she still felt crippled by the “debilitating fear and anxiety around death,” as she puts it. “After having my mortality shown so dramatically to me, I still had the existential dread of the cancer coming back.”

Dr. Macdonald – who had never even heard of psychedelic therapy – was inspired to try psilocybin for her “existential grief” after watching a TED talk by Dr. Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins on “The science of psilocybin and its use to relieve suffering.” There are no legal psychedelic healing centers in the UK, so she traveled to Holland in 2018 for therapy. In the Netherlands, mushrooms have been in a legal gray zone for many years, paving the way for a number of psychedelic therapy centers to serve psilocybin-containing truffles (also known as Philosopher’s Stones), which are fully legal despite containing psilocybin like other “magic” mushroom forms.

The experience exceeded all her expectations, she says.

“After coming face to face with my own mortality, there was just so much to unpack around cancer and death: Why am I alive? Why are any of us alive? What is all of this really about? And I realized that much of the anxiety and sadness I was still carrying were centered around the finality of death. But with the psilocybin therapy, I could finally, cathartically, let out all the emotions I had suppressed, and it all helped me to look at death in a different way. I no longer have the fear of cancer coming back. If it does, it will be sad and challenging, but I don’t have the same fear of the finality of death.”

But more valuable than shifting her views on death, she says, was how the experience shifted her views on life. “It really has changed how I lived – I have such a reverence for the mystery of life I didn’t quite have before.”

Dr. MacDonald – now a fully qualified psychiatrist – recently joined the team of researchers in the psychedelic department at Imperial College London under Professor Nutt.

Inspired by cases like Dr. MacDonald’s, palliative care nurse Rosanna Ellis has set up the charity Essence Medicine to help others travel to the Netherlands. She says psychedelics-assisted therapy can “help people die with more peace and dignity.”

Dr. MacDonald and Ellis are also working to help nationally upscale the other services required for psychedelics to truly work. Their current focus is on training large numbers of qualified therapists, as well as improving support and follow-up care for patients.

“Everyone is so focused on the drugs, but what we really need is the infrastructure to make sure people are trained properly and that all the patients are really supported emotionally,” she says. “So many patients report that their physical care for a life-threatening illness was exceptional, but that the emotional, spiritual and psychological elements of their suffering were totally neglected.”

A Rescheduling Catch-22

The “blindingly obvious” case for rescheduling in the U.K. has drawn widespread support across the political and cultural spectrum, from Heroic Hearts and Essence Medicine (patient-led activist groups who are next to impossible to argue with), the CDPRG (linked to the Conservatives, a party hardly thought of as revolutionary), to the Royal College of Psychiatrists (as buttoned up as it gets), to seemingly inoffensive pharma start-ups such as Compass Pathways (seeking acceptance by mainstream medicine), to corporate venture capitalists (where it’s all about the bottom line), to the populist Psilocybin Access Rights campaign, launched at the unabashedly hippy flower child love-in Medicine Festival last summer (so devoted to the virtues of plant medicine they refuse to sell alcohol).

The most frustrating thing, say British campaigners, is they are asking for the most minimal of changes. “All we are actually trying to do is clear barriers to research,” says Blunt, pointing out that if research is prohibitively expensive, it is next to impossible to provide the evidence required for rescheduling. “It’s a catch-22.”

While reformers in other nations seek full legalization complete with regulations and taxation, or more loosely defined forms of decriminalization, British charities are only asking to reschedule the drug for research purposes – it would remain unchanged in criminal matters, designated Class A.

“We have a political culture of taking baby steps and approaching things from an angle of evolution, not revolution – so this measure is really just dipping a toe in the water,” explains Sam Lawes, Outreach & Communications Manager for the CDPRG. “This is not an attempt to ‘move fast and break things,’ and this is not a conversation about the recreational use of drugs. This is a conversation about medical utility and the NHS’s ability to prescribe the best available medicines. It’s such a small request – and they could reschedule this in weeks if they chose to.”

He’s not being hyperbolic: in 2018, the government rescheduled cannabis in just a few weeks in response to demands for the legal prescription of Epidyolex for children with severe epilepsy.

“So while in Britain politicians are sitting on their hands, the Americans, Canadians, and Australians will all likely have legal access to medical-grade psilocybin in the next two years,” complains Lawes.

This begs the question: why is the UK lagging behind other nations like the U.S., Canada, and Australia? Surely, UK citizens deserve the same access to new potential tools to fight dangerous mental health crises like suicidal ideation, PTSD, and depression. Perhaps, once the researchers and medical experts busily trying to solve the psychedelic puzzle have finished, the politicians will finally get off their benches and do the kind of work the U.K. deserves.

The next part of this four-story series explores the human costs of psilocybin prohibition in Canada, and how one man fought tooth and nail for access to psychedelic medicine.

Most are familiar with Bicycle Day – when a Swiss chemist accidentally tripped balls cycling home from the lab in 1943 – and Timothy Leary’s tiresome “Turn On Tune In Drop Out mantra”. But the full history of LSD gets so much more colourful, so much more hilarious, and so much more disturbing. From CIA operatives agreeing to dose each other with “surprise acid trips”, hookers hired to spike unwitting San Franciscan civilians, how the founder of AA achieved sobriety through a mind-bending trip, and medieval peasants losing all four limbs to gangrene, the history of acid has it all…