TAOS — New Mexico lawmakers are asking the Department of Health to study whether the state would benefit from a psychedelic therapy program.
Senate Memorial 12, which refers only to therapy using psilocybin-containing mushrooms, passed the Senate in a unanimous vote Wednesday, the last full day of the 30-day legislative session.
Evidence is mounting psilocybin-assisted therapy is efficacious for treating major depression, treatment-resistant depression, existential distress in end-of-life care, post-traumatic stress disorder and other diagnoses.
Sen. Jeff Steinborn, a Las Cruces Democrat, pulled in a Democratic House colleague and Republican Rep. Stefani Lord of Sandia Park as co-sponsors of SM 12, as well as Republican Sen. Craig Brandt of Rio Rancho.
Unlike a bill proposed last year to create an advisory committee to report on the cultivation, quality-control and administration of psilocybin mushrooms in a therapeutic setting for treatment of certain behavioral health conditions, the nonbinding bipartisan memorial doesn’t ask for funding.
After receiving a do-pass recommendation from the House Health and Human Services Committee on March 1 during last year’s 60-day session, lawmakers postponed further action on House Bill 393, which would have allocated $150,000 to the Department of Health. The bill died.
“What killed [last year’s] bill was the ask for funding,” Marisa C de Baca, president of the New Mexico Psychedelic Science Society, told The Taos News. The society helped write HB 393 and SM 12. The latest measure seeks to lay the groundwork — by curating studies and reports on psilocybin therapy and exploring what other states have done in terms of program regulations — for a bill to create a New Mexico program as soon as the 2025 legislative session, when the Legislature will meet for 60 days.
The memorial doesn’t require House adoption or the governor’s signature, and it doesn’t have the force of law; rather, it formally declares psilocybin therapy is “being researched here in our state” and elsewhere, C de Baca said.
Proponents such as veterans groups, licensed therapists, physicians, and organizations like the New Mexico Psychedelic Science Society and Sol Tryp — a ketamine therapy and psychedelic advocacy organization based in Las Cruces — expressed their support for the memorial to lawmakers last weekend during a Senate committee meeting.
Colorado, Oregon and several municipalities, including Washington, D.C., have adopted or are in the process of adopting psilocybin-based treatment programs. Colorado is even decriminalizing psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelic substances outright.
After vetoing a decriminalization measure last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signaled his openness to California becoming the third state to regulate its own psychedelic therapy program.
“Psilocybin has been proven efficacious in the treatment of various mental conditions,” and clinical trials overseen by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs are currently studying its specific effectiveness in treating PTSD among veterans, Steinborn told the Senate committee.
“Let UNM do the studies, let Johns Hopkins do the studies; but if the clinicians who say it’s so valuable are going to use it, they need to do it under a regulatory framework that doesn’t get them into trouble,” Senate Health and Public Affairs Committee Chairman Jerry Ortiz y Pino, D-Albuquerque, said in a Feb. 10 meeting, leading to an amendment specifying the Department of Health will formulate regulatory concepts in collaboration with the University of New Mexico, which will provide the research.
A surge of studies on the healing benefits of psychedelics “is not slowing down in our country at the state and federal level,” C de Baca said. “The Veterans Administration, the American Psychological Association and many medical institutions are asking for more data — especially since the twice-passed ‘breakthrough therapy’ assignments by the FDA. Arizona and Texas have both passed bills allocating millions of funds to continue the study of this application.”
Breakthrough therapy designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration “is designed to expedite the development and review of drugs that are intended to treat a serious condition,” according to the FDA website; various studies have shown psilocybin and other psychedelics are effective in treating substance use disorder, smoking cessation and alcohol addiction.
SM 12 notes “New Mexico has one of the highest suicide rates in the United States,” and that “a large portion of suicides in New Mexico are veterans and first responders diagnosed with depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.”
“We are losing lives every day to overdose and suicide,” C de Baca said. “We need to move fast but diligently.”
This story first appeared in The Taos News, a sister publication of The Santa Fe New Mexican.
