States Side With Cancer Patients In Psilocybin Lawsuit Against DEA

Marijuana Moment reports

A bipartisan group of attorneys general from eight U.S. states and the District of Columbia has sided with cancer patients in a lawsuit against the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) that seeks legal access to psilocybin, a compound found in psychedelic mushrooms, for end-of-life care.

The patients and Seattle-based palliative care physician Dr. Sunil Aggarwal sued DEA in March after the agency denied their application to legally use a synthetic form of the drug under state and federal right-to-try (RTT) laws, which give patients with terminal conditions the opportunity to try investigational medications that have not been approved for general use.

In a friend of the court brief filed late last week in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the state attorneys general say DEA’s rejection of the patients’ application was an overreach of the agency’s power. Noting the therapeutic potential of not only psilocybin but also MDMA, the brief urges the court to rule in the patients’ favor.

“Here, dying patients seek access to promising new treatments still in the investigative process—access expressly permitted under both state and federal law—to help them live in peace,” says the brief, filed Friday by Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson (D) and joined by Mark Brnovich (R) of Arizona, Kathleen Jennings (D) of Delaware, Karl Racine (D) of Washington, D.C., Kwame Raoul (D) of Illinois, Dana Nessel (D) of Michigan, Keith Ellison (DFL) of Minnesota, David Yost (R) of Ohio and Ellen Rosenblum (D) of Oregon.

The brief likens the situation to one that arose in a 2006 Supreme Court decision, Gonzales v. Oregon, in which the court ruled that the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) didn’t permit the U.S. attorney general to “bar dispensing controlled substances for assisted suicide in the face of a state medical regime permitting such conduct.”

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8 States Side With Cancer Patients In Psilocybin Lawsuit Against DEA

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