A psychedelic therapy petition needs 1 million signatures to be considered by the EU's executive arm. | Richard Vogel/AP
If a citizens’ petition calling for psychedelic therapy succeeds, the European Union’s executive arm could be forced to consider the treatments, our POLITICO colleagues in Europe report.
How so? An EU mechanism called a European Citizens’ Initiative allows citizens to call on the European Commission to propose new laws. If a petition gets enough support, the commission must consider taking action on it.
PsychedeliCare wants the European Commission to boost EU-funded research into psychedelic therapy, which typically involves combining psychedelic drugs and talk therapy to treat mental health problems like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The group also called for standardized European safety guidelines for using psychedelics in therapeutic treatments and for adopting unified standards for classifying psychedelics.
What’s next: The petition must reach 1 million signatures from at least seven different EU countries for the European Commission to consider it, which doesn’t often happen.
The petition, which has 11,276 signatures so far, has until January 2026 to reach its 1 million signatures goal.
Meanwhile, in the U.S.: The petition pointed to the U.S. as an example of progress in psychedelic therapy, noting that the Food and Drug Administration has given MDMA, psilocybin, and a form of LSD “breakthrough therapy” designations meant to signal their treatment potential and speed their development.
But the FDA rejected Lykos Therapeutics’ application for MDMA-assisted therapy to treat PTSD last summer after the agency’s outside advisers said the regimen wasn’t effective and the company hadn’t shown that its benefits outweighed its risks. The decision disappointed psychedelics advocates and sent a chill through the U.S. psychedelic drugmaking community.
WELCOME TO FUTURE PULSE
Lake George, N.Y. | Richard Schumaker
This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care.
The salad chain Sweetgreen is promoting a menu free of seed oils, the plant-based oils Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has targeted, The Guardian reports.
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WORKFORCE
To be useful to doctors, AI must solve narrow, specific problems, like reducing their administrative burdens.
Will artificial intelligence tools for doctors live up to the hype?
For primary care physicians, the trick is using the technology for tasks that eat up doctors’ time, like updating electronic health records, according to a new report in the Annals of Family Medicine.
Why it matters: Doctors spend more than half of their workday managing electronic health records. Documentation, chart review and medication refills pull them away from patients and encroach on their personal life and family time. They sometimes spend more time updating medical records than interacting with patients.
Using AI for administrative tasks, from automating routine medication management workflows to helming documentation responsibilities, could make the primary care industry healthier and more sustainable, writes Dr. John Thomas Menchaca, a tech researcher and primary care doctor at the University of Utah, who authored the report.
Case in point: Menchaca points to the Segway as a cautionary tale. The two-wheeled personal vehicle was hailed as the future of transportation in the early 2000s, but since Segways weren’t solving real transportation problems, they failed to deliver on their promise to revolutionize transportation.
To succeed, AI similarly needs to focus on solving doctors’ narrow, specific problems.
“AI is just one tool — a means to an end, not the end itself,” Menchaca writes. “Whether powered by AI or by pen and paper, meaningful solutions for primary care clinicians will need to help where they need it most: lightening the workload.”
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WASHINGTON WATCH
ARPA-H's Susan Monarez has been tapped as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. | David Goldman/AP
Susan Monarez, who served as ARPA-H’s deputy director since January 2023, has been tapped for the role, according to three people familiar with the move, granted anonymity to discuss the pick, which has yet to be announced.
Monarez’s selection breaks with the tradition of selecting career agency officials to serve as acting directors during a transition.
It’s unclear how long Monarez will hold the position. President Donald Trump tapped Dr. Dave Weldon, a former Republican congressman, to lead the CDC, but a date for his Senate confirmation hearing has not been announced.
The agency is responding to several threats, including falling routine vaccination rates in children, an outbreak of avian flu in dairy cows that has infected 67 people and is tied to one death, and the spread of mpox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
