Colorado lawmakers have advanced a bill that would allow a form of psilocybin to be prescribed as a medication if the federal government authorizes its use.
About a week after the legislation was filed by Reps. Anthony Hartsook (R) and Kyle Brown (D), as well as Sen. Dafna Michaelson Jenet (D), the House passed it on a voice vote on second reading on Wednesday.
Similar to legislation that Gov. Jared Polis (D) signed into law in 2022 regarding the medical dispensing and use of MDMA, the bipartisan bill that’s advancing would empower doctors to prescribe drugs containing crystalline polymorph psilocybin, pending federal reform.
Colorado already legalized psilocybin and several other psychedelics for adults 21 and older through a voter-approved ballot initiative, but the new proposed reform would make it so drugs containing an isolated crystalized version synthesized from psilocybin could become available under physician prescription.
Hartsook said on the floor on Wednesday that his legislation has “nothing to do” with the separate psychedelics law that voters approved, emphasizing that the drug in question is a “synthetic” compound.
“It is designed and going through the trials” at the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA), he said. “Now I know many of us have concerns about the FDA and how they do things, but right now that is what we have as an agency. And depending what the FDA does in their trials and—if they approve it, and then the DEA then reschedules it—then it can be used.”
“Colorado, as a state, the way our constitution goes, when you come in with a new medication like this for treatment, it requires the state to say ‘yay’ or ‘nay,’” the sponsor said. “Most states have an automatic that, if the feds approve a medication, that it is approved at the state level. We don’t do that here.”
“The reason I’m doing this now in advance is so we don’t have to wait, and veterans and people that have not responded to other treatments don’t have to wait for us to come back here and get the wheels moving,” he said. “That is the sole purpose of trying to do this.”
Brown also said during the debate that “this bill is about making sure that the active ingredient, psilocybin, is subjected to the same rigorous, evidence-based standards that every other medication in our FDA drug approval process goes through.”
The bill’s findings section states that treatment-resistant depression is a major public health crisis, and psilocybin has been shown in clinical trials to “reduce depression scores significantly for patients with treatment-resistant depression when compared to active placebos.”
“Therefore, the general assembly declares that it is in the best interests of the people of Colorado that behavioral health professionals in Colorado have the ability to provide crystalline polymorph psilocybin to treat patients with treatment-resistant depression if the federal [Food and Drug Administration, or FDA] ultimately approves it for prescription use,” it says.
Psilocybin would still be listed as a controlled substance under state statute—with the nuance that state law permits adults to cultivate and possess certain amounts of the raw mushroom. But this bill would create an additional carve out exempting crystalline polymorph psilocybin from the definition of the psychedelic.
As of this month, meanwhile, Colorado regulars are now authorized to approve licenses for psilocybin service centers where adults can access the psychedelic in controlled settings.
The governor signed a bill to create the regulatory framework for legal psychedelics in 2023.
But lawmakers evidently are interested in setting the state up to allow for a more conventional system of distribution for certain psychedelics. In 2022, Polis also signed a bill to align state statute to legalize MDMA prescriptions if and when the federal government ultimately permits such use.
Whether FDA moves forward with any such approvals in uncertain, and the agency faced criticism last year after rejecting an application to allow MDMA-assisted therapy for people with PTSD.
However, some advocates and stakeholders are holding out hope that the tides could shift under the Trump administration, as the president has nominated several cabinet officials who back psychedelics reform, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that oversees FDA.
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Photo courtesy of Dick Culbert.
The post Colorado House Approves Bill To Let Doctors Prescribe Psilocybin After Federal Approval appeared first on Marijuana Moment.
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