Prescription ayahuasca could come in the next decade as Canadian company sets ... trends now

Prescription ayahuasca could come in the next decade as Canadian company sets ... trends now
Prescription ayahuasca could come in the next decade as Canadian company sets ... trends now

Prescription ayahuasca could come in the next decade as Canadian company sets ... trends now

A medical-grade version of the popular hippy brew ayahuasca could become available to Americans within the next decade.

Filament Health, a Canadian psychedelic drug company, has created a medicinal form of the powerful psychedelic which can be taken orally as a pill. The firm hopes to push the medical-grade through an FDA trial in 2023. 

Ayahuasca is being touted as an alternative treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression after becoming popular with the backing of celebrities such as Joe Rogan and Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers.

But Americans currently need to travel to Central and South America for expensive retreats and religious experiences involving the potent brew.

However, its therapeutic benefits are mainly anecdotal, and a growing body of evidence shows that the drug also carries the risk of long-lasting effects on mental health. 

Ayahuasca is a brown-reddish drink made by boiling stems from its namesake vine and leaves from the chacruna shrub together (pictured)

Brewed ayahuasca elixir including chacruna bark is pictured on a traditional shaman's drum.

Ayahuasca is a brown-reddish drink made by boiling stems from its namesake vine and leaves from the chacruna shrub together (pictured)

Ayahuasca contains the compound N,N-Dymethyltriptamine (DMT), one of the world's most potent hallucinogens. 

Like LSD and psilocybin, DMT has demonstrated its ability to increase connectivity between different brain networks impeded by depression and trauma.

The ayahuasca brew is made from boiling the Amazonian vine Banisteriopsis caapi, which contains the DMT, and the chacruna bush. 

The brew is typically administered by a shaman, who acts as a guide during the trip.

There is no standard ayahuasca recipe. Different cultures and shamans will make it differently based on their tradition. This means that there is no uniform dose of DMT, creating a variable experience for users. 

Filament Health, which focuses on developing botanical psychedelics to treat mental illness, has created a medicinal form of ayahuasca that will likely enter a regulator-approved trial in 2023. 

It could become available for prescription use in North America within the next decade, according to Ben Lightburn, CEO of Filament Health.

‘Drug development is long and expensive… at minimum, a typical drug development course takes five to seven years, and we’re only in the very early stages right now,’ Mr Lightburn told the Toronto Star. 

Filament licences its therapeutics to researchers and institutions that want to study psychedelics' applications to mental health treatment. Several institutions have  embarked on studying psilocybin manufactured by Filament. 

The same process must happen before the medical grade ayahuasca can be studied in a clinical trial. 

Researchers who want to study banned substances such as DMT have to jump through some bureaucratic hoops as well. Because DMT is a schedule 1 substance, meaning it is deemed to have no medical benefit, researchers have to provide the DEA with extensive ingredient lists, oversight protocol, and storage plans. 

Researchers interested in studying DMT have to submit an Investigational New Drug (IND) application to the appropriate division within the Food and Drug Administration, which can reject. In that case, a project can be placed on an indefinite clinical hold 

Even if the experimentation is approved, and medicinal value is uncovered, there is no obvious path toward assigning the drug a new classification, making its introduction to the US market still murkier.  

Filament Health specializes in

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