Lucid News write
Their meeting laid the groundwork for the foundation of PAREA, a “coalition” of European psychedelic associations (including The Beckley Foundation, Open Foundation, and ICEERS); medical associations such as the European College of Neuropharmacology, the European Psychiatric Association, European Brain Council; and a number of patients’ associations.
Hawrot lives in Lisbon, close to the headquarters of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA). Europe is lagging behind the U.S. on psychedelics, but less so, explains Hawrot. “We are waking up the European regulatory giant,” he says. “Regulation is important because we want to avoid the premature introduction of psychedelic therapy before it is fully regulated, otherwise it can endanger patient health and the long-term sustainability of psychedelic treatments…and we don’t want to repeat past mistakes.”
The “sleeping giant” started to wake up on December 6, 2022, a historic day for the “psychedelic renaissance” in Europe. The European Parliament held a conference in Brussels on psychedelic-assisted therapies promoted by PAREA, and with the participation Nutt, Hawrot, Jan Ramaekers, and the psychopharmacologist Antón Gómez-Escolar, one of Spain’s most recognizable faces in the psychedelic space.
Gómez-Escolar got a “very good impression” from Brussels. “The MEPs who came to listen to us came with their homework done, they knew what we were talking about.” The researcher and disseminator of psychedelic-assisted therapy says that there is an “urgent situation” in the mental health of Europeans, one that has only worsened since the pandemic.
Read full report
