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.
Hellbound and Down 