Welcome to issue #25 of The Ethical Trip! This fortnight:
Will the NSW driving reforms really be that good for medicinal cannabis patients?
What’s informed consent (again)?
For all this, plus a grumpy snapshot of recent research and niche humour, read on!
Huge thanks to everyone supporting this work. Whether it’s feedback, sharing, or contributing a few dollars a month via buy me a coffee cactus, it all makes a big difference to me and I’m deeply grateful. I know I say it every time, but I mean it.
Table of Contents
Industry Insights:
Research Round-up
Some interesting papers hit the web this past fortnight, though not all were noteworthy for good reasons. Some, as it turns out, were appallingly bad
Lau et al (2026) gets into Peer Support Worker attitudes to psychedelic assisted therapy in Australia.
Soares & Campolina (2026) give a comprehensive overview of psychedelic-assisted interventions in palliative care, noting the gap between ‘evidence synthesis and normative clinical guidance.’
(Rant incoming…)
Just outside my normal 14-day cut-off, but I’m going to mention it anyway, Lago et al (2026) gives a case report of an octogenarian with advanced Alzheimer’s being given 5 grams of Enigma mushrooms. The observations of their subsequent increase in speech, mobility and autobiographical recall are interesting, and there’s no lack of hyperventilating, uncritical reportage on this. But, IMO, this isn’t good science, even by case report standards, as there’s a lack of full baseline measures like ‘formal biomarker confirmation and advanced neuroimaging’ (so we don’t really know if their diagnosis was accurate), and no longer term follow up.
Worse, there is a notable absence of ethical justification for the dosing and zero mention of anything like consent from the patient themselves. No advanced care directives, or reasons to believe that they would have agreed to this. Oh, so you got consent to publish the article from their guardian, who was likely the person who gave them the shrooms in the first place? Would you like a medal, or a chest to pin it on?
Dodging this ethical responsibility because it was a case report is no excuse. Frontiers of Neuroscience should never have sent this out for peer review, let alone published it.
