“What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

When we launched Budding Trends years ago as a modest little blog focused on cannabis law, the idea that we’d one day spend serious time tracking potential widespread access to psychedelics was, to put it mildly, not part of the original pitch deck. And yet, here we are.

Many of our award-winning readers have come along for the ride, and our numbers show that many of you (dozens!) want more. So today, we’re making it official: Budding Trends is doubling down on our coverage of the legal and policy issues surrounding psychedelic healthcare. We’ll be bringing you more frequent, more in-depth analysis of the regulatory frameworks, litigation, state legislative developments, and healthcare policy questions that are shaping whether — and how — psychedelics become part of mainstream medical treatment.

We’ve Been Building to This

We didn’t arrive at this decision overnight. If you’ve followed our psychedelic coverage, you know the story has been unspooling for several years now, and it’s been anything but boring.

We started connecting the dots back in the fall of 2023, when we wrote about the diverging federal approaches to cannabis and psychedelics — noting the FDA had issued first-ever draft guidance providing considerations for developing psychedelic drugs as medical treatments. That same season, we reported on the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Aggarwal v. U.S. DEA, which directed the DEA to reconsider its denial of a petition to reschedule psilocybin and explained what that decision meant — and, just as importantly, what it didn’t mean — for the path ahead.

Around the same time, we wrote about the moves by California and Hawaii to liberalize access to psychedelics, noting that Oregon had already opened the first licensed psilocybin service centers in the country and suggesting that we fully expected the momentum to continue. For what it’s worth, we stand by that prediction, but likely would not have been able to predict the momentum we’ve seen in Mississippi. And that momentum is only building.

In our year-in-review post covering 2023, we called that year “momentous” for psychedelics — citing the FDA guidance, the first-ever congressional hearing on psychedelic therapy, state-level legalization in Oregon and Colorado, and a wave of clinical research showing therapeutic promise. It was a good year.

And then, as they almost always do in this space, things got more complicated.

In August 2024, we wrote about the FDA’s decision not to approve Lykos Therapeutics’ MDMA-assisted PTSD therapy. We titled the post “The Bright Side of the Road” because even in that setback there were signs that the door wasn’t closed. The lesson? The legal and regulatory path for psychedelic medicine is long (and winding).

In March 2025, we returned to the Aggarwal saga one more time, after a federal appeals court ruled against the doctor who had spent years fighting to legally obtain psilocybin for his terminally ill patients. We’d been tracking that case since we first wrote about it in 2023. As we wrote in that post, we weren’t just interested in Dr. Aggarwal’s outcome — we were interested in what courts and agencies would do “when faced with a medicinal demand for psychedelics outside of the research context.” That question hasn’t been answered. And it sits right in the middle of every legal and policy challenge still to come.

On the federal administration side, we’ve watched with curiosity as members of the Trump administration have offered surprisingly sympathetic public statements about psychedelic therapy and bipartisan support has continued to develop. In May 2025, we wrote about how then-surgeon general nominee Casey Means had expressed support for psychedelic therapy in her public writings. A couple of weeks later, we covered FDA Administrator Matt Makary’s comments suggesting psychedelics were a “top priority” for the administration. And in August 2025, we reported that the DEA had formally transmitted a request to HHS to move psilocybin from Schedule I to Schedule II — a direct result of Dr. Aggarwal’s years-long litigation — and what that may mean for the industry more broadly.

And Then, in the Last Month, Things Got Interesting

We had this post largely drafted when the news dropped that, on April 18, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order that is intended to “accelerate innovative research models and appropriate drug approvals to increase access to psychedelic drugs that could save lives and reverse the crisis of serious mental illness in America.”

But we didn’t have long to noodle on that news. On April 22, 2026, the DEA issued its order on marijuana rescheduling. We talked yesterday about what rescheduling certain classes of marijuana means for psychedelics.

All of which is to say, if you were wondering whether this was a good time to start paying closer attention to psychedelic law and policy, the universe appears to have weighed in.

Why the Legal and Policy Questions Are About to Get Much Bigger

All of that coverage has convinced us of something important: The most consequential questions in the psychedelic space right now aren’t purely scientific or medical — they’re legal, regulatory and, for better or worse, political.

Clinical research has been building a compelling case for the therapeutic potential of psilocybin, MDMA, ibogaine, and other psychedelics for conditions including treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, addiction, and anxiety. Federal agencies and policymakers are paying attention in ways they weren’t even five years ago. And states are moving — sometimes cautiously, sometimes boldly — to create regulatory frameworks of their own.

But here’s the thing: The path from promising clinical results to accessible medical treatment is paved almost entirely with legal and policy decisions. What scheduling framework applies? How do state regulatory structures interact with federal law? What liability questions arise for healthcare providers who want to offer psychedelic-assisted therapy? What does informed consent look like in this context? How do healthcare licensing boards treat practitioners who are operating in this space? Who pays for it, and what does coverage look like?

These aren’t abstract questions. As the number of licensed psilocybin service centers grows, as researchers continue pushing for drug approvals, and as patients and physicians increasingly explore what’s possible, these questions are landing on real people’s desks. Including the desks of lawyers.

What You Can Expect from Us

We’re going to bring you the same mix of legal analysis, regulatory tracking, and — yes — occasional pop culture references that you’ve come to expect from Budding Trends, applied more regularly and more deeply to the psychedelic space. That means:

• More attention to the federal regulatory process — the rescheduling proceedings, the DEA’s evolving position, FDA drug approvals and the like.
• Closer tracking of state-level legislative and regulatory developments, as states like Oregon, Colorado, and others work through the early years of their novel psilocybin frameworks, and as other states consider their own approaches.
• A sharper focus on the healthcare law questions, such as licensing, liability, insurance coverage, and what it means in practice to incorporate psychedelic therapy into a medical practice.
• And when the litigation is interesting — and it usually is — we’ll be there for that, too.

And as always, we’re going to do our best to deliver the message in plain English so that you don’t feel like you’re reading a legal textbook. For Budding Trends to make any sense at all, it has to remain something that all stakeholders can understand and apply to their approaches to the product.

A Word on Why This Feels Right

We’ve said before, with only a small measure of self-deprecation, that Budding Trends started as a cannabis blog.  The psychedelic space crept into our coverage the same way a lot of things do: because the law and policy questions were genuinely interesting and because the stakes — for patients, for healthcare providers, for the regulatory system — were real.

We’ve spent the last few years trying to be fair, thorough, and at least occasionally funny on these topics. We’re going to keep doing that. We just plan to do more of it.

So, welcome to the next chapter of Budding Trends’ psychedelic coverage. We’re glad you’re here. And as always, we’ll stay on top of it so you don’t have to. Thanks for stopping by.