The “psychedelic renaissance”: how research came back

Between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, human research with classic psychedelics such as psilocybin, LSD and mescaline was effectively dormant in mainstream Western science. Sweeping prohibition, international scheduling under the 1971 UN Convention, and reputational damage had shut down most clinical programmes and dried up the funding and regulatory permissions needed to restart them. The return of this research — often called the “psychedelic renaissance” — was not a single event but a slow, contested accumulation of regulatory persistence, private philanthropy, institutional courage, advances in brain imaging, and a gradual shift in public attitudes toward mental health and drug policy. This article surveys how that came about, with an eye on what it might mean for countries like South Africa, where psilocybin remains Schedule 7 under the Medicines and Related Substances Act.

First cracks in the freeze

The earliest modern human studies with psychedelics after the long pause were small, methodologically cautious, and aimed more at re-establishing safety than at proving efficacy. In the 1990s, psychiatrist Rick Strassman at the University of New Mexico ran the first US FDA-approved clinical research with a classic psychedelic in decades, using DMT. Around the same time, researchers in Switzerland, including Franz Vollenweider, began publishing work on psilocybin’s pharmacology and psychology in healthy volunteers — possible partly because Switzerland had a slightly different regulatory history with the compound.

The moment most often cited as the renaissance’s proper beginning is the 2006 double-blind study by Roland Griffiths and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University, published in *Psychopharmacology*. It administered psilocybin to healthy volunteers in a controlled, supportive setting and reported predominantly positive, sometimes deeply meaningful experiences. The study was rigorous enough to appear in a mainstream pharmacology journal and helped normalise the idea that psilocybin could be studied as a scientific subject rather than only a cultural curiosity.

Philanthropy where pharma wouldn’t go

Because classic psychedelics are off-patent — psilocybin was isolated and synthesised by Albert Hofmann in the 1950s, and patents on the molecule itself have long expired — conventional pharmaceutical firms had little commercial incentive to fund the expensive clinical trials required for approval. The renaissance was therefore bankrolled largely by private philanthropy and non-profit research organisations for its first two decades.

The Heffter Research Institute, founded in 1993, was pivotal in funding early psilocybin work at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), founded in 1986, took a parallel route focused primarily on MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. The UK’s Beckley Foundation, founded in 1998, supported neuroimaging and drug-policy work. More recently, philanthropic capital has been joined by venture-backed entities such as COMPASS Pathways, which has invested in large-scale trials for psilocybin therapy in treatment-resistant depression — a development that has itself generated debate about commercialisation and intellectual property over compounds rooted in indigenous and mid-century science.

Institutional credibility and regulators

A second enabling condition was the willingness of respected academic institutions to host this work. Johns Hopkins, New York University, Imperial College London, Yale and the University of California, San Francisco, among others, opened dedicated research groups and eventually formal centres — such as the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research (2019) and Imperial’s Centre for Psychedelic Research (2019). Their presence inside reputable medical schools did two things: it gave regulators and ethics boards confidence that trials could be run safely, and it signalled to the wider scientific community that the topic was no longer career-ending.

Regulatory engagement followed. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted “breakthrough therapy” designations to psilocybin programmes for treatment-resistant depression in 2018 and 2019, and similar conversations have occurred elsewhere. In 2023, Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) rescheduled psilocybin for limited clinical use under strict conditions. These mechanisms do not amount to approval for general use, but they materially lower the barriers to running the late-stage trials needed for any future medical access.

Brains, not just minds

A less visible driver of the renaissance was technological. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and modern positron-emission tomography let researchers observe how psychedelics perturb large-scale brain networks — most famously the default mode network — in ways that were simply not measurable in the 1960s. This gave the field a credible biological story to tell alongside its psychological and clinical claims, and helped attract neuroscientists who might otherwise have stayed away from a stigmatised topic.

Cultural currents and the South African question

The research revival has also tracked broader cultural shifts. Treatment-resistant depression and the limits of existing antidepressants have made clinicians more willing to consider novel mechanisms. Decriminalisation campaigns — beginning with Denver in 2019 and Oregon’s regulated psilocybin services model — alongside public shifts in cannabis policy, have changed the perceived boundaries of respectable debate. Patient advocacy groups have argued that access should not wait indefinitely for full approval. None of these forces is unanimous, and serious questions remain about trial design, the durability of effects, equity of future access, and how non-Western and indigenous knowledge systems are (or are not) credited.

The South African dimension is still modest. Psilocybin is a Schedule 7 substance under the Medicines and Related Substances Act, and the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA) has not indicated plans to authorise clinical use. The cannabis litigation of the late 2010s, however, established a constitutional precedent that private adult possession and use may attract privacy protections — a precedent some advocates argue could, in time, be tested in relation to other substances. For the moment, the country’s connection to the global renaissance is mainly as a place of biodiversity, traditional knowledge, and potential future research participation rather than as a regulator of access.