Advocates for psylocibin as therapeutic treatment push Canadian government

Canadian advocates for therapeutic access to psilocybin are ramping up their efforts to get the federal government to grant exemptions to the country’s drug laws so that patients and healthcare providers can legally access the drug.

Advocates recently descended on Parliament Hill along with patients and doctors for meetings with members of Parliament (MPs), a demonstration, a reception and media interviews to transmit their message.

Spencer Hawkswell, CEO of nonprofit psilocybin advocacy group TheraPsil, said the lobbying days in late November 2022 were so successful that they are already planning a second round in February 2023.

“It went incredibly well,” Hawkswell told CannIntelligence. “We were able to sit down with a number of different MPs from the Liberal, Green, Conservative and NDP [New Democratic Party] caucuses. We had a much warmer and bigger reception than we thought we’d have, which is always good.”

But while they were able to get the ears of MPs, a senator and political staffers, both the federal health minister, Jean-Yves Duclos, and Carolyn Bennett, minister of mental health and addictions, declined to meet with them.

In the past, TheraPsil has held meetings with individual MPs and senators to lobby for legal access to psilocybin. This time it raised CAD5,400 (USD3,950) through a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign for the trip to Ottawa to lobby “to legalize magic mushrooms for medical use in Canada”.

That pales in comparison, though, with what the group has raised to fund its court challenge of Canada’s psilocybin rules. On its website, TheraPsil says it has raised more than CAD84,000 (USD61,470) of the CAD100,000 (USD73,170) it is seeking to fund the federal court case.

In July 2022, a group including seven patients and one healthcare professional filed suit against the federal government, arguing that the prohibition on psilocybin violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Section seven of the charter guarantees the right to “life, liberty and security of the person”, they argued.

In its response, the federal government argued that the law regarding access to psilocybin doesn’t contravene the Charter of Rights and, if it does, it is a reasonable limit that is “demonstrably justified”, as provided for in section one of the Charter.

A second case asked the court to overturn Health Canada’s refusal to grant exemptions to allow 96 healthcare professionals to use psilocybin in their training, arguing that there are not enough experientially trained healthcare practitioners in Canada to meet the need for psilocybin therapy.

While former federal health minister Patty Hajdu granted several dozen exemptions to the legal ban on psilocybin in Canada in 2020 to allow it to be used in treatment, the federal government later changed its position, and began granting very few exemptions.

Health Canada has maintained that the best way for patients and medical professionals to access psilocybin is through clinical trials.

Responding to a question in the House of Commons recently about therapeutic access to psilocybin, Bennett said that while psychedelics have shown promise in clinical trials, further research is needed.

“Currently, the best way for patients to access psilocybin is through their participation in a clinical trial,” Bennett said, adding that the federal government is funding research into its use. “Alternatively, patients can talk with their healthcare provider to inquire about the possibility for them to submit a special access program request to receive a prescription and be supervised. Last, patients can request an exemption on compassionate grounds when other paths are unsuitable.”

However, psilocybin advocates like Hawkswell and lawyer Nicholas Pope argue that there are very few clinical trials operating in Canada and those that do exist are full. Setting up a new clinical trial would take months before it would be able to accept patients.

Hawkswell said the Canadian government’s reluctance to grant exemptions to patients seeking psilocybin therapy comes at the same time as Canada is about to expand its ‘medical assistance in dying’ regime in March 2023 to allow access to those suffering from mental illness. Denying legal access to psilocybin prevents them accessing a treatment that could ease their mental health problems, he said.

“If Canadians are put in a situation where they’re able to access medical assistance in dying and not a treatment that even might work to alleviate them of their end-of-life distress or treatment-resistant depression,” said Hawkswell, “then there is a crime happening in this country.”

– Elizabeth Thompson CannIntelligence contributing writer

Photo: Marco Allegretti