Psychedelics in PERIL: The Commercial Determinants of Health, Financial Entanglements and Population Health Ethics.

The for-profit psychedelic industry is starting to fund scientific research, mirroring practices from tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceutical, and food industries that have created conflicts of interest and harmed population health. Researchers face limited ethics guidance on accepting such sponsorship. A group of clinician scientists applied the PERIL ethical framework to a fictional case of corporate psychedelic funding, finding that financial ties can threaten a research program's purpose, autonomy, and integrity. The commercial determinants of health framework helps understand these industry-healthcare entanglements and offers a population health ethics lens for examining and addressing risks in the nascent psychedelic sector.

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Abstract

The nascent for-profit psychedelic industry has begun to engage in corporate practices like funding scientific research and research programs. There is substantial evidence that such practices from other industries like tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals and food create conflicts of interest and can negatively influence population health. However, in a context of funding pressures, low publicly funded success rates and precarious academic labor, there is limited ethics guidance for researchers working at the intersection of clinical practice and population health as to how they should approach potential financial sponsorship from for-profit entities, such as the psychedelic industry. This article reports on a reflective exercise among a group of clinician scientists working in psychedelic science, where we applied Adams' (2016) PERIL (Purpose, Extent, Relevant harm, Identifiers, Link) ethical decision-making framework to a fictionalized case of corporate psychedelic financial sponsorship. Our analysis suggests financial relationships with the corporate psychedelic sector may create varying degrees of risk to a research program's purpose, autonomy and integrity. We argue that the commercial determinants of health provide a useful framework for understanding the ethics of industry-healthcare entanglements and can provide an important population health ethics lens to examine nascent industries such as psychedelics, and work toward potential solutions.