Federal Appeals Court Rules Against Doctor Seeking to Use Mushrooms to Aide Terminal Patients: How We Learned to Question the Rationale of the Controlled Substances Act

It’s funny how things work out – sometimes you find yourself living in a sort of butterfly effect where the tail seems to wag the dog. In 2023, when we first started writing about the traction psychedelics were gaining as medicine, our goal was not to end up spending years covering the winding legal battle of a Washington physician to legally obtain psilocybin for terminally ill cancer patients to manage their pain. 

But here we are. To be clear, while we’re certainly interested in the fate of Dr. Sunil Aggarwal’s efforts, we’ve been following the case closely because it’s one of a few legal cases to shed light onto what courts and federal agencies may do when faced with a medicinal demand for psychedelics outside of the research context.

In his efforts to be able to administer psilocybin to his patients, Aggarwal employed a two-fold approach: (1) he attacked the…