Rescheduling Psilocybin: The Urgency & What You Can Do with Timmy Davis (CDPRG), Dr Sara Tai, Rudi Fortson & Ainslie Course

Recognition is growing that fresh approaches are needed for treating some of humanity’s most prevalent conditions. Psilocybin — the active component in magic mushrooms —  shows greater promise than available treatments for alleviating symptoms of conditions including major depression, substance dependency, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and eating disorders and cluster headaches. The CDRPG’s Psilocybin Rescheduling project brings together experts from across the world including clinicians, legal experts, and affected population groups to address unnecessary barriers to developing these findings into breakthrough treatments. 

The Psychedelic Society invites you to find out more about the transformation of this treatment field from Timmy Davis, the CDPRG’s Psilocybin Rescheduling Project Manager; clinical psychologist Dr Sarah Tai of Clerkenwell Health; renowned criminal barrister Rudi Fortson and Ainslie Course of Clusterbusters UK. Together, we will explore: 

• Why psilocybin has such unique potential to revolutionise treatment outlooks for so many common, hard-to-treat conditions;
• What it feels like to experience genuine symptom relief from psilocybin;
• Actions that we can take to dissolve the current regulatory barriers to the treatment research and development so sorely needed by so many in the UK.

One in six of us experience a common mental health condition like depression or anxiety in a given week. Everybody’s personal journey seeking meaningful relief from their symptoms is unique — but more than half of people with depression in the UK are united by finding no relief in the go-to treatments on offer, such as talk therapy and anti-depressants. Likewise, for people affected by the little-understood condition cluster headaches; which are known as suicide headaches due to the insufferable pain they induce; the quest for effective treatment is often lifelong. Not rescheduling psilocybin needlessly prolongs our collective suffering. Further clinical research into psilocybin can lift millions of people out of this gridlock — by making unprecedently promising treatments an accessible reality. 

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About the CDPRG

The Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group (CDPRG) is a purpose-driven, public-facing organisation whose mission is to assemble and present evidence drawn from across the spectrum of medicine, law enforcement, economics, ethics, criminology, and humans rights, for the benefit of drug policymaking in the UK. Find out more about their Psilocybin Rescheduling Project.

Speakers:

Timmy Davis 

Timmy Davis is the Psilocybin Rescheduling Project at the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group and a trainee at the SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He is a contributing member of Drug Science's Medical Psychedelics Working Group and a guide on the psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression trials at Kings College London, as well as a welfare and harm reduction manager at music festivals in the UK and abroad. He has a MA in Psychoanalytic Studies and a BA Hons in Philosophy and Religion from the University of Kent, where he was president of the psychedelic society for three years. 

Timmy has co-authored a chapter entitled The Feminine Enshadowed: the Role of Psychedelics in Deconstructing the Gender Binary with Cameron Adams PhD in the book Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine (2019). He is also the author of THOU ART NOT THAT - Towards a Psychoanalytic Understanding of the Bad Trip (forthcoming), The Psychosis of Saint Schreber (forthcoming) and New, Strange, Odd and Weird Perceptions: A Lacanian Approach to Psychedelic Experience.

Dr Sara Tai

Dr Sara Tai is a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at the University of Manchester and Consultant Clinical Psychologist for Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust. Sara is an experienced practitioner, trainer, and supervisor of psychological interventions for people experiencing serious problems that affect their mental health. Her research focuses on the development of psychological innovations and understanding the mechanisms by which they work.  

Sara led the development of the psychological approach and therapeutic model for the Compass Pathways trial of Psilocybin for depression; the largest trial of psychedelics for severe depression. She is also an advisor to other psychedelic clinical research teams and continues to provide support to therapists working in psychedelics. 

Rudi Fortson

Rudi Fortson is an independent practicing Barrister and a Visiting Professor of Law at Queen Mary, University of London. He is noted for his work in relation to serious crime, including fraud, confiscation, asset recovery, money laundering, and drug law.  He has written and lectured extensively on a wide range of issues relating to criminal law.  Among other publications, he is a contributing author (two chapters) to Blackstone’s Criminal Practice, and he regularly writes for Criminal Law Review. Fortson served on the “Runciman” Independent Inquiry into the Misuse of Drugs Act, and in recent years has advised various businesses and individuals on the complex UK and EU legal issues concerning the production, importation, and distribution of psychoactive substances, medicinal cannabis, and CBD products.

Ainslie Course

Ainslie Course is a member of the Board of Directors of Clusterbusters, a US-based organisation that supports cluster headache patients and advocates for better treatments, including the use of psilocybin. Based in Glasgow, her main focus is on raising the profile of Clusterbusters in the UK and Europe. 

Ainslie has experienced episodic cluster headaches for nearly 36 years and became involved with Clusterbusters some 20 years ago when she had exhausted all pharmaceutical options for treating her cluster headaches. She was a specialist nurse in the area of oral and maxillofacial surgery for many years and now runs a small online business.

If you would like to attend this event but are unable to afford the ticket price, please do get in touch with us directly at martha@psychedelicsociety.org.uk. At the Psychedelic Society, we believe that everyone should be able to access our events regardless of employment or health circumstances, so we will do our best to accommodate where we can.
 

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