Psychedelic public health: State of the field and implications for equity

Psychedelic Public Health is an emerging discipline uniting the practices of public health with the potential benefits of psychedelics to reduce harm and promote health, wellness, and equity at community and population levels. Little is known regarding the current state of psychedelic public health despite rising psychedelic usage, evidence of its health efficacy, opening policy environments, and concerns regarding equity and potential harms.

To characterize the current state of psychedelic public health, this survey reviewed relevant webpages from 228 universities housing accredited Schools and Programs in Public Health (SPPHs) and 59 Psychedelic Research Centers (PRCs) in the US and globally. The scan corresponded to the Prisma 2020 checklist, identifying URLs through keyword searches by Beautiful Soup python package and Google search engine web application. Measures were coded through webpage text analysis.

Fewer than 10% (9.6%) of SPPHs engaged with psychedelics (2.6% substantially), while half (52.6%) of universities engaged (28.1% substantially). Among PRCs, only 10% indicated a collaboration with SPPHs, and fewer than 3% of PRC personnel held public health degrees. PRCs were preponderantly affiliated with medical schools. Although Indigeneity significantly contributes to Western therapeutic psychedelic protocols, only approximately one-quarter of active universities, SPPHs, or PRCs visibly addressed Indigeneity and only one PRC included Indigenous leadership. 92% of PRCs were led or co-led by people characterized as White-European and 88% by men. Only 20-43% of SPPHs, universities, and PRCs visibly addressed social determinants of health.

Public health schools, which train, study, and advise the future of public health, showed limited involvement in the growing psychedelic field, signifying a gap in psychedelic science and practice. The absence of public health's population-level approaches signifies a missed opportunity to maximize benefits and protect against potential harms of psychedelics at community and population levels.