We explore how different actors imagine very different futures for psychedelic therapies in the UK's emerging regulatory landscape.About this Event
Muireann Quigley and Louise Hatherall: The Drugs That Came in From the Cold: Reflections on the UK’s Emerging Regulatory Landscape for Psychedelic Therapies
After decades of prohibition, psychedelics are once again being taken seriously as potential therapeutic tools in psychiatry and mental health care. Substances such as psilocybin and MDMA – long associated with counterculture, illegality, and moral panic – are now the subject of clinical trials, regulatory debate, and growing public optimism. In the UK, however, this resurgence is unfolding within a highly restrictive legal framework, presenting a significant barrier to realising psychedelics’ therapeutic promise.
Drawing on interviews with researchers, clinicians, trial managers, policy actors, and people with lived experience, this talk reflects on how psychedelic therapies are currently being understood, negotiated, and imagined in the UK. While clinical evidence has generated renewed hope for treating conditions such as treatment resistant depression and PTSD, interviewees describe a landscape shaped by tight drug classifications, regulatory uncertainty, and contested assumptions about risk, legitimacy, and medical authority.
We explore how different actors imagine very different futures for psychedelic therapies – from tightly controlled, fully medicalised forms of access to broader calls for decriminalisation and cultural change. Psychedelics may have ‘come in from the cold’, but, for now, they remain stuck in a regulatory limbo between prohibition and possibility.
How to find us: check-in at the porter's lodge of New College. They'll give you directions to the room, which is to the right once you get past the lodge.
Event Venue
New College, Lecture Room 6, Holywell Street, Oxford, United Kingdom
GBP 3.96
