Psychedelic Research and the Need for Transparency: Polishing Alice’s Looking Glass
Open accessAbstract
Psychedelics have a checkered past, alternately venerated as sacred medicines and vilified as narcotics with no medicinal or research value. After decades of international prohibition, a growing dissatisfaction with conventional mental health care and the pioneering work of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Science (MAPS) and others has sparked a new wave of psychedelic research. Positive media coverage and new entrepreneurial interest in this potentially lucrative market, along with their attendant conflicts of interest, have accelerated the hype. Given psychedelics' complex history, it is especially important to proceed with care, holding ourselves to a higher scientific rigor and standard of transparency. Universities and researchers face conflicting interests and perverse incentives, but we can avoid missteps by expecting rigorous and transparent methods in the growing science of psychedelics. This paper provides a pragmatic research checklist and discusses the importance of using the modern research and transparency standards of Open Science using preregistration, open materials and data, reporting constraints on generality, and encouraging replication. We discuss specific steps researchers should take to avoid another replication crisis like those devastating psychology, medicine, and other fields. We end with a discussion of researcher intention and the value of actively deciding to abide by higher scientific standards. We can build a rigorous, transparent, replicable psychedelic science by using Open Science to understand psychedelics' potential as they re-enter science and society.
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A prohibition against hallucinogen research established in many countries in the 1970s was until recently an impediment to progress in understanding the phenomenology and physiology of hallucinogen action.
“A prohibition against hallucinogen research established in many countries the 1970s was until recently an impediment to progress in our understanding of the phenomenology and physiology of hallucinogen action [2,3];”
From Molecular and Functional Imaging Studies of Psychedelic Drug Action in Animals and Humans. (2021) · cites this paper as [2]
The Brief History section says psychedelics were globally prohibited in 1971 and that prohibition suppressed psychedelic-research publication rates for decades. It also describes a twenty-first-century research resurgence. The paper does not specifically say that prohibition impeded understanding of both the phenomenology and physiology of hallucinogen action. (LLM, conf=0.85)
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- Authors
- Petranker, R., Anderson, T., & Farb, N.
- Affiliations
- University of Toronto (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Petranker, Rotem
- Venue
- Frontiers in Psychology
- Publisher
- Frontiers Media SA
- Published
- 2020-07-10
- Volume
- 11
- Pages
- 1681-1681
- ISSN
- 1664-1078 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC7367180
- OpenAlex
- W3041972496
- Cited by
- 69
- References
- 10
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 15 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 14 · 2022: 16 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 3.70
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Frontiers in Psychology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- University of Toronto
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Psychedelics and Drug Studies
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Research Data Management Practices
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Academic Publishing and Open Access
- Keywords
- psychedelic research, research transparency, open science, preregistration, replication, conflicts of interest, psychedelic drug regulation, research rigor, history of psychedelics
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