Welcome back to The Drop In, DoubleBlind’s newsletter serving up news, culture, and independent journalism about psychedelics straight to your inbox.
Today’s lead story is about the DEA attempting to add a handful of drugs to the list of Schedule I drugs. It’s another attempt build on the previous failed proposal to do so in 2022. You can find that story immediately below!
If you keep scrolling you’ll find stories about games to play while tripping, the World Ayahuasca Forum, LSD art, and more.
Happy belated Equinox 💜
Mary Carreón
Editor-in-Chief
Featured
DEA Is Trying to Add Five Research Tryptamines to List of Schedule I Drugs…Again
One of the five compounds is the basis for an FDA-fast-tracked postpartum depression treatment. The DEA says none has accepted medical use.
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is once again attempting to update its list of scheduled substances by adding a grip of drugs to the Schedule I category, the most restrictive class of substances considered to have high abuse potential and no accepted medical use. On Sept 23, DEA posted a proposed rule that would specifically place 4-OH-DiPT, 5-MeO-AMT, 5-MeO-MiPT, 5-MeO-DET, and DiPT on the list, according to the The Microdose newsletter.
The DEA tried to ban these drugs back in 2022, but then withdrew its proposal to do so after considerable public pushback, including from pharmaceutical tech company, Tactogen, which argued the agency was burdening research with decisions that ignored current science. The DEA asked the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for an updated review. HHS delivered it in the beginning of April 2026, and in May the DEA reached the same verdict: It wanted to add all five drugs to the list of scheduled substances. Spokespeople from the agency say no well-controlled clinical trials show the drugs are safe or effective.
But that happens to be only the DEA’s perspective; the companies currently studying these drugs do not agree. Philadelphia-based Reunion Neuroscience holds an FDA Breakthrough Therapy Designation for luvesilocin, a prodrug of 4-OH-DiPT, as a treatment for postpartum depression. The compound is a synthetic psilocin analog that kicks in quicker and fades sooner that psilocybin, and it’s currently being studied at UMass Chan Medical School for symptoms of adjustment disorder, or distress that outweighs or outlasts a person’s reaction to a major life stressor, such as a job loss or breakup. San Francisco’s Mindstate design Labs has also led studies on 5-MeO-MiPT.
Mindstate CEO Dillan DiNardo told The Microdose the announcement was expected and that his company is weighing how best to contribute evidence. "They're charged with protecting public health, but they're being asked to apply a 20th-century category system to a 21st-century measurement problem," he said.
Psychedelic patent attorney Graham Pechenik said the new HHS review still fails to show abuse or a public health risk. “Just as before, the real impact of DEA's action would be to impede research.”
Chemist Hamilton Morris, host of former Vice show Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, called the proposal the latest chapter in the DEA's “scheduling rampage" on X. Last time, he helped garner the pushback that helped sink the DEA’s proposal.
The rule was formally published on September 23, which means the public has 30 days — until October 23 — to provide comment. As Morris put it in his post: this is “the fight begins again."
& More Must-Reads
The FDA spent four hours hearing from 80 advocates, researchers, and industry figures on how psychedelic therapy should reach patients, and the biggest fight was over whether the drug or the therapy does the healing. Read more here.
At the first World Ayahuasca Forum in Spain, some 200 Indigenous representatives made the case that their knowledge of these medicines is science, and that they belong at the table wherever decisions about ayahuasca get made. Read more here.
From Cards Against Humanity to Wink Murder, these are the best games for a high group hang, plus a few to skip, like anything with a 40-page rulebook or a swimming pool. Read more here.
Illustrator Brian Blomerth's "Mycelium Wassonii" turns the tangled story of R. Gordon and Valentina Wasson, the couple who helped bring magic mushrooms to America, into a watercolor love story told with cartoon dogs. Read more here.
From Rick Griffin's Grateful Dead posters to Alex Grey's Tool album art to blotter sheets as tiny canvases, here's how LSD shaped the look of psychedelia. Read more here.
DoubleBlind Digs
CONFERENCES: The 6th ALPS Conference, billed as Switzerland's largest gathering on evidence-based psychedelic science and mental health, returns to Aarau on Oct. 9-10, 2026, with two days of talks, panels, and research posters drawing researchers, clinicians, therapists, and students from Switzerland and abroad. Multilingual pre-conference workshops run Oct. 8 in English, German, French, and Italian, and group tickets and a ticket-reduction application are available. Learn more here.
INTERVIEWS: Shelby Hartman of DoubleBlind sits down to take the psychedelic renaissance's pulse: what's working, what's faltering, and where this whole movement is actually headed. Check it out here.
PSYCHEDELIC DESIGN: The online Psychedelics Design Conference returns Nov. 6-7 with two days on designing from a psychedelic perspective, featuring MAPS founder Rick Doblin, UCSF neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris, Berkeley's Marlena Robbins (Diné), and a live reveal of the 2026 Psychedelics Design Awards winners. Tickets are £35 through Sept. 30 before prices go up Oct. 1, and concession places are available. Get tickets here.
Around the Web
Pairing grief therapy with two ayahuasca retreats eased severe grief more than therapy alone in a small, non-randomized trial of 84 bereaved adults, PsyPost reports. Read more.
In the first clinical trial data on psilocybin-assisted therapy for people with both treatment-resistant depression and cluster B personality disorders like borderline, a group of just 10 participants saw drops in depression and suicidal ideation that held at six months, with no serious adverse events, according to a study in npj Mental Health Research. Read more.
The playlist in a psychedelic therapy session may shape the trip, and possibly the outcome, more than researchers have accounted for, and a new review in npj Mental Health Research says studies should standardize the job each song is meant to do while leaving the song choice flexible. Read more.
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