Weekly Psychedelic Policy Briefing: October 27, 2026
By Jack Gorsline
In this week’s briefing, Psychedelic State(s) of America founder Jack Gorsline details how federal agencies are preparing for the first psychedelic drug approvals. At the Psychedelic Healthcare Forum, the Oct. 15 industry day of the Horizons conference in New York, a Veterans Health Administration adviser said the VA has chosen ten sites for approved psychedelic therapies but expects reaching 1,000 patients in the first year to be a challenge. Gorsline attended and breaks down key takeaways below.
Comments closed Oct. 23 on a Drug Enforcement Administration proposal to place five tryptamines in Schedule I. One of them is the active compound in an investigational postpartum depression drug. In Washington, a DEA judge refused on Oct. 22 to reopen the cannabis rescheduling hearing and allowed written briefs on a federal audit instead.
VA Expects a Slow First Year for Psychedelic Care as Federal Agencies Prepare for Approvals
Federal officials described how agencies are preparing for the first approved psychedelic therapies at the Psychedelic Healthcare Forum in New York on Oct. 15. Horizons and Psychedelic Alpha co-presented the forum, and Psychedelic Alpha reported on the federal panel.
On that panel, moderated by POLITICO Deputy Health Care Editor Erin Schumaker, Andrew Gradison, a senior adviser to the Veterans Health Administration, said the VA covers 9 million veterans. He said 6.4 million receive VA care regularly and about 2.1 million of them have post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, or treatment-resistant depression.
Gradison said he and colleagues presented a phased implementation plan to VA Secretary Doug Collins about three weeks before the forum, and the VA chose ten sites that tend to have psychedelic trial experience. He declined to name the sites. In what he called the rosiest scenario, with approved drugs available in January or February, the VA would begin treating patients right away.
Progress will be “slower going than our veteran population would like,” Gradison said, because the treatments demand heavy staff time and the VA is putting safety first. To manage expectations, he said, it will be “a challenge in the first year to treat four digits’ worth of patients.”
Earlier that morning, in an interview with Psychedelic Alpha founder Josh Hardman, HHS Deputy General Counsel Matt Zorn said Executive Order 14401, signed April 18, does not change approval standards. “The title is ‘accelerating’; it’s not changing any of the standards we’re applying,” he said. He said approved treatments will need infrastructure “as simple as CPT or Medicare codes,” and that the order lets HHS “start working on these questions before” approval rather than after.
Valentina Mantua, associate director for regulatory science in the Office of Neuroscience at FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said FDA now has about 433 investigational new drug applications for psychedelics and that psychedelics now make up about a third of the workload in FDA’s psychiatry division.
Al Bugazia, deputy director of proactive health at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), said he has “an issue with the overhype of psychedelics.” He added, “These things are not panaceas. They’re not for everybody, and they can harm some people.” ARPA-H’s ASCENT-IBO program funds early-stage ibogaine trials for opioid use disorder.
FDA is separately taking public comment on how early-phase ibogaine trials should be designed. Comments close Nov. 20 under Docket No. FDA-2026-N-10429.
DEA Tryptamine Comment Window Closes as Compass Nears Its Psilocybin Filing
Read his full weekly update at
https://psychedelicamericas.org/news/weekly-psychedelic-policy-briefing-october-27-2026
