One of the biggest arguments for the research into psychedelics as medication is the usefulness to patients suffering from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Most of the people currently suffering from PTSD are veterans (25 million or so according to the latest statistics). The current treatments for this particularly nasty psychological disorder are not currently consistent or successful in the long term. But without the continuing research there is no need to worry about patients currently suffering from this disease, as currently there is no help for them in the long term. Why worry about something that cannot be helped? However, if research into Psychedelics were to continue, there is strong hope for those currently suffering long-term effects.

Another reason why research is so slow is because the follow-up work with patients in these trials. It is not just an administering of a drug and then never seeing the doctor again. It’s a continual therapy of both drug administration and talk therapy that brings about the most data and effective results. Beyond all of that long term research there is the rather ugly side of data collection on this drug and that is its adverse side effects on the patients. Psychedelics are proven to cause a depressive state in a patient to worsen and become destructive and unsupervised use can become dangerous to the patient and those around them. And unlike many other drugs that could be tested through animals before humans, psychedelics cannot as it’s a psychological drug, recreating the disorder PTSD in a rat for example would be near impossible.