The Legality of Psychedelic Therapy with Courtney Barnes

My unofficial Vital Study Zine #9 with observations from Vital Psychedelic Training and recent happenings in the space

NO. 63 by Norbert Schoerner from Gallery 46

This week Vital students heard from hero lawyer Courtney Barnes of Barnes Caplan LLC, state policy advisor for Decriminalize Nature, and associate attorney at Denver cannabis specialists Vicente Sederberg LCC.

When Brits now based in the USA visit me in London nowadays, they’ll chuckle “I forgot weed is still illegal here!” as if that’s quaint and amusing. So I spent most of this week checking out UK legislation and musing on that. Muse upon this week’s insights including the opening of the world’s first psychedelic ‘amazement park’ in my home town of Bristol, where Ben Sessa’s Awakn just secured UK government funding and a green light for Celia Morgan’s addiction treatment using ketamine in North America.

Psychedelic attorney Courtney Barnes. I only use lawyers who wear Pucci, personally

I did pick up: in the US and undoubtedly here in the UK, you can get busted for supply for leading a ceremony even if you’re not the actual supplier, although ‘duty of care’ legally obliges professionals to point enquiring patients towards the safest route to psychedelic experience they know of. Any kind of illegal activity whatsoever is unthinkable for any professional in a US state where psychedelics remain illegal. “I’m a member of my local emergency services and can’t possibly get involved in anything beyond the law,” said one Vital student.

Screening potential voyagers, ideally via a spoken reference is highly recommended. From a licensed US facilitator: “My clients come from two close and respected community sources. Many have experience from their youth and would like to undertake a significant, intentional experience for the right, realistic reasons, in the forest, with someone trained to look after them.” Interestingly, when this Vital student evaluated possible experients he covered all the bases recommended for both the legal treatment he was licensed in his state of residence to provide, and the canny, no-stone-unturned, word-of-mouth recommendations for underground practitioners. 

Next issue: Kylea Taylor charts a path through the ethical warpstorm of psychedelic therapy

More mushroom tea, vicar?

Approach

Savvy brits in the space are sussed to self-care. But the vulnerable are left behind

Contemporary graffiti in east London

Here’s a ray of optimism, before I start even attempting to unravel the respective messes that are Britain’s drug laws and mental health provision.

A judge in Cumbria, northern England just said she hoped ’the law will catch up with science’ when pardoning an accused man for growing his own magic mushrooms to benefit his mental health.

Britain has the highest depression rate among children in Europe, along with one-third of the continent’s drug overdose deaths and its worst alcohol problem. Mental health problems cost the British economy £118 billion annually. The situation is apparently more dismal than we even think. Lockdown saw a 47% increase in young people seeking help and I need hardly quote again my recent article elsewhere detailing the stigma that still exists in the workplace around stress and burnout.

It’s characteristic of the British legislature to turn a benign blind eye to self-medication while dragging its feet on psilocybin prescriptions. Former prime minister (PM) Boris Johnson and his pantomime villain advisor Dominic Cummings supposedly had psychedelic therapy as a political cause celébre partly because Brexit meant chances to the law could be actioned quicker. Now they’re out of the game, things are even worse in the corridors of power.

Unlikely Men in Tights of this particular pantomime are the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group

UK home secretary Priti Patel says she’ll ban ‘middle class’ cannabis smokers from nightclubs and take away their passports to derision from even Daily Mail readers. Front runner for new PM Liz Truss has turned Judas on her 420-friendly past.

The centre left is no better with its leader Keir Starmer, a former head of public prosecutions, saying he’s “seen too much damage” in his former role. Dude, the unremittingly grim extraction economy lifestyle is the problem across all classes especially the estate-condemned non-working class. Not the weed itself.

While kids opting for dank oblivion above all else is a problem, it is hardly caused by marijuana alone and previous alternatives like booze and heroin are frankly worse. My entirely subjective opinion from the ground is that the approach reeks of not upsetting near-senile, control-freak baby-boomers.

Unlikely Men in Tights of this particular pantomime are the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group that are actually part of the UK’s centre-right Conservative [Tory] Party. Its campaign to legalise cannabis and psychedelic therapies has the blessing of former prime minister John Major, ex-Tory leader William Hague, current Northamptonshire police, fire and crime commissioner Stephen Mold, plus ex-MI5 (it’s like Homeland Security) chiefs Lord Evans and Baroness Eliza Manningham-Butler.

Over half of voters from even right-wing parties believe in the legalisation of psychedelic therapy, according to a YouGov poll quoted by broadcaster and former advisor to PM Theresa May Tom Swarbrick. Thought leaders like the redoubtable Zoe Cormier of good eggs Guerrilla Science are also in the media front lines doing the mushroom god’s work.

Meanwhile the country’s largest NHS trust are opening a new dedicated facility in the grounds of the former ‘Bedlam’ hospital alongside Compass Pathways which you can read about elsewhere in this issue.

The naturally British reaction is to quietly do what it seems the justice system, NHS and general public are already doing. Which is plough on regardless leaving the government apparatus and armchair windbags to their own ineffectual posturing. 

Hymn of the Big Wheel

Therapy

My home town of Bristol boasts a psychedelic ‘amazement’ park and therapy clinics. How did that happen?

Jeremy Deller, ‘Wiltshire Before Christ’ photo by David Sims for Aires Arise

“Bristol is the San Francisco of Britain” declares Dr Ben Sessa of my home town where Awakn Life Sciences is based.

How? Not only with Britain’s first psychedelic clinic – accessible without a referral – but also the world’s first immersive psychedelic ‘amazement park’. Bristol is making up ground, perhaps, for its heritage in tobacco and slavery.

The clinic is the first branch of Awakn Life Sciences, opening also in London (opposite Euston Station) fronted by Psychedelic Renaissance author Dr Ben Sessa and addiction treatment icon Dr Celia Morgan. As of earlier in 2022, AWAKN’s main investor is the UK government. 

Wake the Tiger is the name of the day trip destination. A lockdown brainstorm from festival innovators Boomtown, it is actually named after Peter Levine’s trauma tome Waking the Tiger. Creative director Lak Mitchell’s wife is a shadow-specialising psychotherapist, and suggested it. Wake the Tiger’s backdrop narrative offers a journey to an alternative dimension where all the unwanted clutter of consumer culture ends up; the sequence begins with a luxury living development where the only thing really living is a tree in the lobby.

Wake the Tiger in Bristol, the world’s first psychedelic ‘amazement park’

Stu Tallis who sorted the branding at Taxi Studio, told the website Business Leader, “It pushes the boundaries of imagination and represents the truly unique and fantastical experience that fuses ancient wisdom and creativity… it needed to be scalable to accommodate the possibility of replicating the experience across the country and becoming a multiverse. It is a category-defining moment representing a sea change in how immersive art experiences are created.” 

Opening in late July 2022, Wake the Tiger received £1.85 million in crowdfunding. Reviews are gushing, from those microdosing or otherwise. Kids get in free. They don’t know they’re born. Dropping a Purple Ohm to watch Bristol City lose at home to Swindon (by four goals) was all that we had in my day.

“Wake the Tiger is a unique and fantastical experience that fuses ancient wisdom and creativity”

Bang in the middle of the upmarket Clifton district is AWAKN’s Bristol ketamine clinic. The Times dispatched its most simultaneously verbose and glib columnist, David ‘Fatty’ Arranovitch to check it out. Unlike more intrepid reporters (hem-hem), he did not try it out. Although he does end the piece by pointing out the potential for psychedelic treatment of obesity, after beginning by complaining about the walk up Constitution Hill that I and my chums made to school most mornings, while daydreaming of the next time we could obliterate the pain of a rigid, parentified upbringing in service to the slave morality. Sorry, flashbacked and regressed a bit there.

Professors David Nutt and Celia Morgan, who form the Awakn dream team with Dr Ben Sessa

Anyway, another AWAKN is planned for Manchester later this year while Oslo in Norway was the first AWAKN to open. AWAKN’s chief advisor is Professor David Nutt, a national treasure since he was sacked as the government’s drug policy advisor for saying LSD (and ecstasy, and cannabis) was less harmful an intoxicathan alcohol on daytime TV. Dr Sessa, who Vital students will hear from in Week 13, I believe is the most forthright and refreshing middle-aged man in the psychedelic space internationally right now. 

AWAKN’s special sauce though is arguably provided by Celia Morgan. The fabulously clever redhead is also Exeter Uni’s head of psychopharmacology, and inspires fervent adoration from her Phd students. The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) are funding two-thirds of the costs for her alcohol use disorder treatment programme with the very British name of ‘Project Kestrel’, although KARE was used instead once the bureaucrats got their hands on it.

Professor Morgan appeared in Business Insider’s list of the most important women in psychedelics earlier this year. Devising the first official cure for alcoholism, though would assure her a place in medical history. There are no flies on Morgan, who has discussed the dangers of chronic recreational ketamine use on BBC Woman’s Hour – “I’ve met teenagers who have to wear catheters,” is her conversation-stopper.

Professor Morgan has even adapted psychedelic therapy for both the addiction and ketamine aspects of Project K: “We designed it to go with the ketamine effects,” she told The Guardian newspaper in its own report, “We wanted something evidence based, a therapy that has been shown to help people avoid alcoholic relapse. But also something that would work with what we know about the brain in the ketamine state.”

Morgan embarked on Project Kestrel as a final year student at once-mighty University College London (which is about to open its own psychedelic mega-department headed up by the highly plausible Rosalind McAlpine). She pulled together strands of her friend’s experiences of recreational ketamine use with her family’s of addiction, and laid the foundations of an approach that could wrest thousands of sufferers and those close them from the living hell of alcoholism. Plus cut the £5.5 billion the UK loses to the condition every year. Morgan’s test subjects stayed clean 87% of the time after six months, compared to a measly 2% beforehand.

Many have pointed out that it could be the therapy itself that’s making the difference, provided at very high quality in the trials for free, just like in the depression trials. (That this is not your regular psychoanalytic therapy is a matter for another time, although props to Arranovitch for quoting a patient as saying “it was more about the boozing than my mother”). 

Only 8% of addicts ever seek treatment as it is, due to stigma or the way they’re not guzzling miniature brandies on the commute like a TV stereotype. It’s this ‘not quite in crisis, yet’ group who suffer too and are arguably more motivated to seek treatment should it be available without a CV-staining, divorce-prompting  diagnosis. Dr Sessa too stresses that childhood trauma isn’t usually born of what we know as ‘abuse’ – corporal and cruel punishments – and instead is a feature of many material-focussed western upbringings.

“We wanted evidence based therapy shown to help people avoid alcoholic relapse, plus work with the ketamine state”

Dr Sessa is a soundbite slinger, which I as a journalist appreciate. “Bristol is the San Francisco of Britain” is one of his best shots, and he’s done a lot to catalyse that.

‘There is only one good use for a small town. You hate it and you know you'll have to leave,’ sings Lou Reed on the opening track of Songs for Drella, his and John Cage’s 1990 concept album dedicated to Andy Warhol.

I left my own home town of Bristol for university in 1992, aged 18. Since, it has realised its media image as a Mecca of skateboarding, street art and… intentional drug taking (plus plasticine animation, as local artist Banksy rarely misses the opportunity to point out). And in the past six months, Bristol has even superseded modern-era triumphs such as the aforementioned world’s favourite artist’s Dismaland exhibition, in the admittedly dismal Weston Super-Mare, a former holiday resort notorious for its quicksand beaches. 

But I remember my home town for its repression, casual violence, and nihilistic ennui, caused mostly by traumas and addictions that while ‘low-level’, eat away at the soul and body nonetheless. And it’s partly because they will never be seen as a source of necessary concern; we change only when we have to. If the West of England is coming unstuck from those behaviours, then I shall never slag it off again. I might even go to Wake the Tiger. 

UK leads new inner space race

Space

But there are not nearly enough healers to dish out the (desperately required) medicine. Why?

This is actually from new ‘psychedelic amazement park’ Wake the Tiger in Bristol

“Mental health workforces are shrinking at a time the demand for mental health services is increasing,” says the news blog for Europe’s first psychedelic research centre Clerkenwell Health, just down the road from me in London. 

Dr Derek Tracy, medical director at West London NHS Trust, told Sky News earlier this month that he has never seen such a high demand for access to mental health treatment. “It's as busy as I've ever seen in my career. Numbers are up across all age groups and in all types of presentations, in London and nationally.”

March 2021 figures claimed a quarter of adults reported ‘clinically significant psychological distress’ that month, up from just over a fifth before the C-19 pandemic. 

So one in four of us are suffering from… ‘clinically significant psychological distress’. Suicides are up again since 2018. In May 2022 the number of under-18s referred to emergency mental health services went up 37% on the previous year, a record high. Depression and anxiety are the number one reason for taking time off work.

“There are not enough therapists to deliver these treatments”

This while corks pop on bottles of Nyetimber as the UK is declared “world leading” in the innovative treatment research field.

Back on Clerkenwell Health’s blog, “Developing new drugs has attracted significant commercial interest. But the delivery aspects of these treatments are yet to receive the same attention. There are more than 150 psychedelic drug developers in the market. Patients’ demand for psychedelics is also increasing.”

Clerkenwell Health’s stark conclusion? “There are not enough therapists to deliver these treatments.”

I’d respond: that’s because there are too many barriers to becoming qualified.

This week Vital students heard from lawyer Courtney Barnes, who detailled Oregon’s facilitator license training requirement that are not dissimilar to its own syllabus. Clerkenwell Health’s own psychedelic therapy program requires accredited health professional (AHP) status for entry. Which puts it beyond my means, for example. That requires a degree in occupational therapy at least, or better still being a clinical psychologist, which involves a decade or so of grind that I’ve been told by those who know for sure is not worth me trying in my mid-40s. Psychotherapist training is three to six years according to the UK Council for Psychotherapy. 

I wonder how long the list would really be of qualified individuals, who have experience with psychedelics, and have long harboured a compulsion towards a very different psychological approach? How do they feel about the commute to central London?

Who otherwise has the time or the money to retrain? I’ve worked with graduates in £80K of debt who want to be superstar fashion stylists, not spend their days under fluorescent light talking to long-term alcoholics about their visuals. Experts from Stanislav Grof to Dr Rick Strassman implore upon prospects how demanding psychedelic therapy can be.

This is before we talk about the 28% of AHPs who quit due to burnout, the 16% who want to leave the sector entirely, the 43% actively looking for a new job, or the third who cite low pay and overwork as the main issues.

“Developing new drugs has attracted significant commercial interest. But the delivery aspects of these treatments are yet to receive the same attention”

100,000 vacancies in the NHS lie unfilled while expensive and life-consuming qualifications that were once unnecessary – my mother worked as a midwife, and the ward sister at Dick Whittington Hospital A&E here in London with no university education – stand right in the way of anyone compelled to join the sector. Anecdotally: a friend who’s worked at a high level in nursing for 12 years, including on the COVID-19 ward, has to undertake an MSc (in… nursing) before she can go up a pay grade and become a senior nurse. Granted there may be one or two useful things she picks up during it, but compared to 12 years on the job will it be worth the time and the debt? Especially given the demand for senior nurses?

Full psychopomp status via the Clerkenwell Health program lasts only three months and is free, incidentally. To accredited healthcare professionals.

Embers of hope burn, certainly with outspoken, heritage foundations like Beckley emerging into the C-suite conversation and the fast-tracking of the MAPS PTSD programme. Though no wonder unofficial psychedelic mental health services thrive. While these may cater well to the slightly-unhealthy normals, who Grof to David Nutt say can benefit immediately from psychedelic experience alone, they cannot expect to hold back the tide of trauma and addiction. And as almost everyone connected to the issues –except the gatekeepers – agrees, the current set-up certainly can’t either.

The New Bethlehem. Not like the Old Bedlam

Medical

The UK NHS, Compass Pathways and King’s College promise a ‘beacon for mental health treatment’ in South London

South London architecture collective Resolve

Compass Pathways are partnering with the UK’s National Health Service and King’s College London – at the once-notorious ‘Bedlam’ asylum in London.

Plants to treat over 650 NHS patients with Compass’ Comp360 psilocybin-based treatment plan include a new facility amongst 200-acre woodland.

Mired in scandal back in the 1700s for making a tourist attraction of inmates St Mary Bethlehem Hospital has actually moved site at least once and is now in un-psychedelic Croydon. It’s run by South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM), the largest mental health trust in the UK National Health Service (NHS). Research will be conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology at Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s, which was founded in the 12th Century and has partnered with Compass since 2007.

It’s the first of its kind for the UK state healthcare system that’s under siege from the demographic time bomb and mental health epidemic. 

“It will be a centre of excellence for new therapies that don’t always involve psychedelic drugs but also the key therapy that goes along with it” says Professor Allan Young from IoPPN.

“The focus is on people who use mental health services day to day, developing effective new medicine for patients with depression, anxiety, addiction and other mental health issues,” says NHS exec David Bradley.

No news yet on who will be designing this New Esalen but South London’s Resolve must be high on the shortlist. 

London-based Compass has come out swinging in 2022, taking on autism alongside the NHS with its, er PSILAUT program and fighting off off a challenge to Comp360 by Freedom to Operate, whose founding legal eagle Carey Turnbull said, “We are confident that the PTAB's extremely narrow interpretation of Compass's patent claims will provide generic manufacturers of psilocybin with wide latitude to produce and commercialise psilocybin without risk of violating the Compass patents.” So everybody’s happy… for now.

Once and future Albion

Integration

Is this actually it? Builded here? Amongst the mills?

Jeremy Deller’s 2022 cover for The New Statesman magazine’s ‘A Dream of Britain’ issue guest edited by actor Michael Sheen

“It’s a hopeful, optimistic interpretation… blended, dynamic, fantastical,” says British artist Jeremy Deller of his vivid cartographic A Dream of Britain pictured above. 

The vibrant painting of the United Kingdom closed the British Museum’s smash Stonehenge show of spring/summer 2022. Deller is colourblind so sees it differently to you and I. This he says reflects a national identity that is forever intersubjective, and in flux.

In issue one of the Vital Student Zine I pulled out Albion Dreaming Andy Roberts’ history of psychedelic Britain. “From the Sixties onwards sections of the counter culture used the term Albion to refer to their vision of a land, society and individual consciousness based on the insights offered by LSD” he says of the romantic goal gathering pace in pop culture.

All the big gun historians from Pliny the Elder, through Marinus of Tyre, to Geoffrey of Monmouth cite Albion as the original name for these sceptred (in a non-dual way) isles. The legend is kick-ass. First, the original King of Syria, or a King of somewhere in Greece maybe, had 43 (or possibly 33) illegitimate daughters who all got married on the same day, killed their husbands on the same night, and fled right here. Where there were no men. So they had it off with incubi – the male equivalent of a saucy ‘succubus’ sex demon – and produced a race of giants. The sisters named the place after their alpha female, Alba.

William Blake’s ‘The Dance of Albion'

In the sequel, beleaguered Brutus of Troy is fleeing his eponymous horse fiasco when the freaking goddess Diana appears and tells him to voyage beyond Gaul to “raise a second Troy”. There were only 24 giants left by then including the fearsome Gogmagog, who got chucked off the white cliffs of Dover. That’s my GoT-style swashbuckling version with apols to Geoffrey of Monmouth and the crew.

“To the counter culture Albion refers to a land, society and individual consciousness based on the insights offered by LSD”

Any sort of ‘New Albion’ got off to an auspicious start after Sir Francis Drake used it as the first name for California upon landing in 1579. Since then it’s had further ups and downs. The Esoteric saint, the poet and painter William Blake named Albion the primeval titan from which his four aspects of man sprang, and pictured it as a giant wearing nothing but a broad grin against a rural Utopian background featuring splashes of pastel colour… apropos of nothing. Blake implores Albion when in need of a term to idealise Britain: his Vision of the Daughters of Albion is a feminist protest poem influenced by his friend and collaborator Mary Wolstencraft Shelley, while he cries “does this thing happen on Albion’s shores?” in Little Boy Lost, an ode against child cruelty. The English cricket, rugby, and Commonwealth Games athletic teams all use Blake’s proto-socialist hymn Jerusalem instead of the official national anthem.

Pete Doherty’s Margate HQ The Albion Rooms

Shadow side ‘Perfidious Albion’ was a term invented by French bishops to bemoan England’s Dark Ages clerical set-up. Later, French Revolutionaries assumed support from the country that toppled its monarchy and installed a puppet aristocracy a century previous. When it didn’t come, the former miserables ran with the term propagandising an, erm, supposed track record of diplomatic betrayal, even bringing up the whole Joan of Arc thing again which everyone knows they were in on.

Two Roman Legionaries Discovering The God-King Albion Turned Into Stone by Mark Sheeky

Two Roman Legionaries Discovering The God-King Albion Turned Into Stone is a 2008 painting by Mark Sheeky. He says, “It’s inspired by Brief Encounter, a film from 1949 that showed a Britain which no longer exists, a country and time so alien to the Britain of 2008 that it is difficult to believe that a place like that ever existed. I wanted to represent the end of that old Britain, so I chose the end of another era as the setting. Two foreigners, Roman legionaries, walk towards the edge of Britain in the grey rain. Through mud, to the grassy limit of the country, the top of the great white cliffs. As they reach the edge they discover a giant stone man standing in the sea, the once king Albion, now dead and grey and cracked. A statue preserved like a memory. A reminder of an ancient time now gone forever.”

Or has it? Under re-story-ation rules fiction can be considered as powerful as the imagined past, right? And in terms of syncronicitous relevance, the phrase Albion cropping up like this must be some sort of sign?

“I’m not an activist, I’m a fantasist”

Here in C21 the Dionysus figure of our second Atlantis, musician Pete Doherty evokes Albion so strenuously that he’s opened a hotel in Margate (it’s like Portland crossed with Oakland, by the sea) called The Albion Rooms. ‘Reebok classics, and canons at dawn; terrible warlords, good warlords, and an English song” goes his band Babyshambles’ gentle rabble-rouser Down in Albion. “I’m not an activist, I’m a fantasist. Inverted snobbery is just as dangerous as snobbery itself, you know – that pride in having nothing.”

By Erwin Wurm at Albion Fields sculpture park

Over at the other end of the quantum funnel from this grass-roots desire for a new national identity lies Albion Fields sculpture park, open till end of October 2022. It’s an outdoor exhibition free to anyone but to which nonetheless ‘the glitterati are flocking’ according to Tatler magazine. 

The woodland’s owner (in fact it was planted at his birth) is Michael Hue-Williams, an art dealer who first showed Ai Weiwei in the UK and represents generation-defining photographer Nick Knight. He says, ‘Walking through these beautiful grounds during lockdown, I realised I have a unique opportunity to share the experience.’ Perhaps reciprocity can exist at all levels. Once and future.