Compassionate use of psychedelics
Medicine Health Care and Philosophy May 28, 2020 Adam Greif, Martin Šurkala 25 citations
The paper argues that compassionate psychedelic psychotherapy using psilocybin and MDMA can be morally permissible. When given under supportive conditions with psychotherapy, these therapies show promising results, but their controversial nature requires ethical justification. The authors review safety and efficacy and claim that it can be rational for some patients to try psychedelic therapy despite uncertainty, because the expected value can outweigh that of routine care, palliative care, or no care. They respond to the objection that psychedelic psychotherapy is epistemically harmful, arguing that this objection is unsubstantiated, mainly because no experimental evidence suggests such harm occurs.