By George Greer, MD, President of the Heffter Research Institute:
This information is for all of you who contacted Heffter recently about helping with this research or pursuing further education to do this research or provide psychedelic therapy.
Regarding education, because there are no graduate programs that focus on psychedelic research, it’s probably best to find the program that you like the best. Then you would be eligible for the post-graduate certificate program at CIIS to educate psychotherapists about this work: http://www.ciis.edu/public-programs-and-performances/certificate-programs/certificate-in-psychedelic-assisted-therapies-and-research.
In terms of getting involved in the current research, Heffter does not conduct the research, but performs scientific reviews of the proposals and then funds the studies at various medical schools. So if you are interested in participating, you should contact the researchers through
with a search for “psilocybin,” and seeing which ones are actively recruiting subjects. You can check back there every few months to see when new studies begin recruiting.
As you will see there, the opportunities for treatment in research studies happening right now is limited to alcohol addiction at New York University, nicotine/smoking addiction and treatment-resistant depression at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, cocaine addiction at U. Alabama, Birmingham, and obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression at Yale University. There is also a study at the University of Zürich in Switzerland for depression, and planned studies for depression at Imperial College in London, England.
There are also studies that are not for treatment of any condition, but are to learn about the effects of psilocybin. This includes studies at both NYU and Hopkins for religious professionals a study of long-term meditators at Hopkins.
If you live near any of those locations, you can contact the researchers through the links at http://clinicaltrials.gov.
Later this year, there will be a large, multi-center study treating depression in patients with and without a life-threatening cancer diagnosis, but the locations have not been determined. This will be a “Phase 3” study, which is required by FDA before the drug can be approved for prescription use. The Usona Institute is conducting this study, and you can learn about them and subscribe to their newsletter at http://www.usonainstitute.org and subscribe to their newsletter here: http://www.usonainstitute.org/contact/.
Hopefully, psilocybin will be approved by the FDA for treatment of depression a few years from now, and that treatment would occur at special clinics with specially trained clinicians.
I hope this information is helpful for you.
George Greer, MD, President, Heffter Research Institute
Last updated August 2019.