Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here| Email Alex | Email Max JOE BIDEN is famously not a fan of recreational drugs. But when it comes to drug therapies, his administration is demonstrating serious receptiveness. In recent years, the emerging field of psychedelic assisted therapies — which use drugs like MDMA, psilocybin (the psychoactive compound in mushrooms), and ketamine to help treat conditions such as depression, addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder — has exploded among mental health professionals and researchers. While there has been some media skepticism about groups aggressively pursuing psychedelic assisted therapy, federal health agencies continue to signal that the Biden administration is serious about the potential. In May, Democratic Sens. BRIAN SCHATZ of Hawaii and CORY BOOKER of New Jersey wrote to the National Institute of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, calling on the agencies to conduct more research into therapeutic uses of psychedelics. In its June response, which was shared with West Wing Playbook, the FDA and NIH said the NIH “supports a robust portfolio of basic and clinical research for therapeutic discovery and development,” and spent more than $34 million last year in funding projects across various agencies. “Research on psychedelic drugs holds promise for uncovering mechanisms of illness and possible interventions, ultimately leading to novel treatments with fewer side effects and lower potential for misuse,” NIH director JOSHUA GORDON and NORA VOLKOW, director of National Institute on Drug Abuse, said in their letter. They also noted the NIH has been working with the Drug Enforcement Agency and the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy to develop a framework for obtaining DEA registrations to conduct research around controlled substances like psychedelics. The administration went even further in a similar letter to Rep. MADELEINE DEAN (D-Pa.). The Intercept reported in July that the administration told Dean that it anticipates federal regulators will approve, within the next few years, MDMA use for therapies related to PTSD and psilocybin for treating some types of depression. The administration also told Dean it was “exploring the prospect of establishing a federal task force to monitor” the emerging psychedelic treatment ecosystem. The administration’s openness to the use of psychedelic drugs in a therapeutic capacity comes as Biden continues to resist widely-popular movements to legalize more recreational drugs; mainly, weed. The president is an outlier in his own party on marijuana, screening White House staffers for heavy marijuana use, and resisting calls to legalize weed, despite many political strategists believing it would be a winning issue for him if he runs again in 2024. Cannabis policy researchers told West Wing Playbook earlier this year that they have “seen nothing from the president in terms of what he promised to deliver on” during the 2020 campaign, which included moving cannabis from a schedule 1 to a schedule 2 drug classification to make it easier to research marijuana’s potential medicinal uses. During the 2020 presidential primary, Biden’s opponents did not miss a chance to highlight his role in crafting and aggressively supporting the war on drugs in the 1980s and 90s. They noted that while in the Senate, he advocated for a number of laws that increased penalties for drug crimes. And Biden himself even conceded, on the campaign trail, that he hadn’t always been right on criminal justice issues, particularly around non-violent drug crimes. In that context, his stands on psychedelic drug therapies suggests a larger political reconsideration is underway. The Biden White House has focused more heavily on the prevention of drug addiction. The majority of the public efforts touted by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy focus on fighting the opioid addiction crisis and combating fentanyl and cocaine trafficking —the only mention of MDMA on the White House website, for example, is from an individual who was granted clemency by the White House earlier this year for a non-violent drug crime. MESSAGE US — Are you NIH director JOSHUA GORDON? We want to hear from you and we may publish your response tomorrow. Email us at westwingtips@politico.com.
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