The Complexity of Developing Pharmaceutical Mescaline Drugs

Good morning and welcome back to the Drop In! We're kicking things off with a story about a pharmaceutical company receiving a patent for mescaline-derived compounds and the questions it raises about Indigenous medicines and pharmaceutical drug development.

Enveric Biosciences has received a new patent covering a set of mescaline-derived compounds designed for potential use in mental health treatment. What the patent does (and doesn’t) show about drug development, ownership, and Indigenous medicines is the focus of today’s news story. You can find it immediately below!

If you keep scrolling, you will find pieces on Ozempic and harmine, what “entheogen” really means, and more.

🌳 Stay grounded 🌳,

Mary Carreón
Editor-in-Chief

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A Mescaline Patent Raises Questions About Indigenous Medicines

Enveric Biosciences’ latest patent on mescaline derivatives underscores unresolved questions around intellectual property, consent, and Indigenous stewardship of ceremonial medicines.

On December 29, 2025, Enveric Biosciences announced the issuance of U.S. Patent No. 12,492,179, titled “Substituted Ethylamine Fused Heterocyclic Mescaline Derivatives,” or the “‘179 patent.” The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech company said the patent expands its intellectual property protections around a class of chemically modified mescaline derivatives designed for the treatment of neuropsychiatric conditions. According to the press release, the patent strengthens its pipeline of “non-hallucinogenic, neuroplastogenic small-molecule therapeutics” and positions the company to develop or license compounds targeting psychiatric, neurological, and addiction disorders.

In its press release, Enveric framed the patent as a critical step in advancing next-generation mental health treatments, emphasizing that strong intellectual property protections are necessary for pharmaceutical companies to justify the cost and risk of clinical development. The company said the molecules covered by the patent are based on known compounds with relevant pharmacological activity but have been chemically altered to potentially improve efficacy and reduce side effects, creating additional opportunities for licensing and partnerships within the neuropsychiatric drug market.

“Enveric’s growing pipeline of patented molecules expands the available opportunities to develop next-generation treatments for neuropsychiatric conditions, leveraging our innovative research,” said Joseph Tucker, Ph.D., Enveric’s director and CEO, in the announcement.

While the press release uses broad language, the scope of the issued patent is more specific. Patent No. 12,492,179 claims pharmaceutical formulations containing compounds selected from a defined list of seven mescaline-derivative chemical structures — identified in the patent as Bx(II), Bx(IV), Bx(V), Bx(VI), Bx(VII), Bx(VIII), and By(IX) — including their salts. (“Salts” are slightly modified versions of those compounds that are commonly used to make drugs stable and effective.) The patent does not claim to be using natural mescaline from cacti or peyote itself.

Neither the press release nor the issued claims name specific mental health diagnoses, such as depression or anxiety, for these mescaline-derived compounds. Instead, Enveric consistently describes their potential application in broad categories, including neuropsychiatric, neurological, and addiction disorders. Within the patent’s specification, a wide range of possible psychiatric indications is discussed as examples, including anxiety disorders, mood disorders, stress-related disorders, dissociative disorders, sleep disorders, and eating disorders. But, listing those conditions in the patent does not necessarily mean the drugs are being tested in people or actively developed for those uses.

We reached out to Enveric Biosciences three times requesting comment on the scope of the patent, how the company views the cultural significance of mescaline with regards to Indigenous use and history, its approach to licensing and partnerships, and its anticipated development timeline for mescaline-derived compounds. The company did not respond by the time of publication.

Mescaline is the active ingredient in peyote, a slow-growing cylindrical cactus that has been used as a sacrament by many tribal nations in the U.S. since the mid-1800s, after spreading north from Indigenous communities in Mexico, where peyote has been used ceremonially for thousands of years. Its use is embedded in ceremonial systems that encompass land stewardship, kinship, and cosmology, even as peyote itself has faced ecological pressure and long histories of criminalization.

As pharmaceutical companies increasingly pursue synthetic or modified versions of mescaline, Indigenous scholars and advocates say those developments cannot be separated from that context. Christine Diindiisi McCleave, PhD, a Strategic Relationships Advisor and a member of the Turtle Mountain Anishinaabe Tribe, said there is no singular Indigenous position on synthetic mescaline, but there is consistent concern about how patents specifically are being pursued.

“There is no consensus among Native American Church members or peyote practitioners regarding synthetic mescaline, and any narrative suggesting otherwise is inaccurate,” McCleave told DoubleBlind in a statement. “[In] my dissertation research…what is consistent across interviews, focus groups, and surveys is deep concern about patents, pharmaceutical ownership, and the absence of a true consent process.”

McCleave said that the ethical stakes involved extend beyond chemistry and clinical endpoints. “When pharmaceutical companies isolate, modify, synthesize, and patent compounds derived from Indigenous ceremonial contexts, cultural heritage, and biotechnology, what is lost is not simply cultural symbolism, but ethical and relational accountability.”

For many practitioners, mescaline cannot be meaningfully reduced to a molecule. “Mescaline is not just an alkaloid associated with peyote; it exists as part of a whole within a living ecosystem of kinship, ceremony, land stewardship, and moral obligation,” McCleave said. “Patent frameworks transform that relationship into an extractable asset, severed from the responsibilities, narrative, and cosmologies that give it meaning.”

Views on synthetic mescaline as a conservation strategy vary across Indigenous communities, particularly when it comes to protecting wild peyote. “According to my research, some practitioners cautiously support synthetic mescaline as a possible conservation strategy to reduce pressure on wild peyote populations. Others reject it entirely as spiritually hollow or as a Pandora’s box that accelerates commodification,” McCleave said.

Despite the differing views, one common thread runs through the debate. “What unites these perspectives,” McCleave said, “is the insistence that Indigenous peoples — not pharmaceutical companies — must have authority over decisions that affect ceremonial medicines, cultural survival, and ecological stewardship.”

Enveric Biosciences is among a growing number of pharmaceutical companies developing compounds derived from psychedelics designed to produce therapeutic effects without inducing the trip. Many such drug developers contend that altering the molecule is not the same as working with the traditional mescaline compound, which Indigenous communities have designated as a heritage molecule and do not want it or peyote swept up in the “psychedelic renaissance.”

“The claim that chemical modification or non-hallucinogenic derivatives represent a meaningful ethical distinction is particularly unconvincing in the case of mescaline,” McCleave said. “That framing relies on a narrow biomedical definition of harm while ignoring spiritual, cultural, and ecological impacts. For many peyote practitioners, removing the psycho-spiritual dimensions of the medicine is not a neutral technical decision—it is an erasure of what makes the medicine what it is.”

One of the central issues is the absence of meaningful consultation in pharmaceutical companies' decision-making processes, which, McCleave contends, is a fundamental ethical failure in current pharmaceutical approaches. “Crucially, there has been no meaningful tribal or community consultation regarding synthetic mescaline development, nor any evidence of free, prior, and informed consent,” she said. “These omissions violate widely accepted international standards.”

Those standards include the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Nagoya Protocol governi

ng access to genetic resources and benefit-sharing, and the World Intellectual Property Organization’s 2024 treaty on genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge.

So, how can pharmaceutical companies ethically engage with Indigenous communities? Probably not by securing a patent before seeking consultation from the communities they are extracting from. “From my perspective as both a researcher and an Indigenous rights advocate, ethical pharmaceutical development cannot begin after patents are filed,” she said. “It must begin with consent, governance, and enforceable benefit-sharing — otherwise, claims of ethical legitimacy remain hollow.”

As biotech companies continue to expand their psychedelic drug pipelines, Enveric’s mescaline patent underscores a broader tension within the field: whether innovation will meaningfully reckon with Indigenous rights and historical harm, or continue to extract value from ancestral medicines while leaving questions of consent, reciprocity, and accountability unanswered.

Interview with Merry Prankster Ken Babbs and the Making of Psychedelic America

Before psychedelics became the subject of policy debates, clinical trials, and glossy retreats for CEOs and tech executives, Ken Babbs was helping invent the culture around them in real time. A core member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, Babbs was there as LSD moved from a VA hospital experiment to a traveling, technicolor performance that reshaped American counterculture, complete with tape recorders, spontaneous theater, and a bus that became as legendary as the people riding it.

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