Politics
Ohio Health Agency Grants $400,000 To Fund Psychedelics Education And Training For First Responders, Doctors And More
An Ohio health agency is providing a state university with a $400,000 grant to educate first responders, law enforcement, emergency departments and behavioral specialists about how to deal with potential adverse psychedelic experiences as more people use the substances for medical or recreational purposes.
Amid the expanding psychedelics reform movement, there’s been increased attention to the possible health benefits of substances like psilocybin and ibogaine. But only a handful of states allow for the regulated use of certain psychedelics, typically in medically supervised settings.
Ohio is not among those states yet, but Ohio State University (OSU) is now launching its Psychedelic Emergency, Acute, and Continuing Care Education (PEACE) initiative, with nearly half a million dollars of funding from the state Department of Behavioral Health’s (DBH) SOAR Innovation grant program.
“People have started to learn about the benefits of psychedelics while, at the same time, the federal government categorizes these as controlled substances,” Stacey Armstrong, associate director of the OSU’s Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education (CPDRE), said in a press release last week.
“With the promising outcomes of clinical trials, there has been an explosion of information, but the information has been limited in addressing adverse experiences and harm reduction,” she said.
Funding from the DBH grant will go toward in-person seminars and online training materials that will be made available to those in professions most likely to face instances where someone might need attention after using psychedelics outside of a medical regulatory framework. The seminars and educational materials will come at no cost to qualifying participants.
“We want to arm our first responder and behavioral health workforce with knowledge about how to support someone’s challenging psychedelic experience in a way that’s going to be helpful, not increase risk or harm,” Armstrong said, adding that the center created the psychedelics program “to start educating Ohio’s front-line workers and support them in facilitating quality care, psychedelic-informed crisis triage and referral guidance to health care providers with specialized training in psychedelic harm reduction.”
According to CPDRE, the PEACE initiative is intended to reach over 127,000 professionals across the state, which will also include doctors, nurses, social workers, psychiatrists and other disciplines.
“CPDRE is all about access and affordability,” Tina Romanella, CPDRE’s program coordinator, said. “Too much information in this space is inaccessible, unaffordable or inaccurate. Our job is to make it all three: accessible, affordable and accurate.”
With funding now secured for the PEACE program, the center says psychedelics educational seminars will now be held in January, March and July of next year.
“We’ve created this content, but its value depends on reaching the people who need it,” Angela Douglas, CPDRE clinical research coordinator, said. “With DBH’s network and workforce expertise, we’re confident we can get this training to every corner of the state.”
“They have extensive connections. Their workforce development and policy leads are actively recruiting and gathering information, so we’re talking to the right people to make sure this gets where it needs to go,” she said.
OSU’s efforts compliment research it’s done in the past, including one study conducted in conjunction with Johns Hopkin University in 2023 that found an association between psilocybin use and “persisting reductions” in depression, anxiety and alcohol misuse—as well as increases in emotional regulation, spiritual wellbeing and extraversion.
While Ohio voters approved adult-use marijuana legalization in 2023, there’s been little interest so far within the legislature to pass psychedelics reform. That’s despite the fact that legislatures in red and blue states alike, as well as in Congress, have seen multiple efforts to advance the issue in recent years.
Photo elements courtesy of carlosemmaskype and Apollo.
