Harvard Receives Gracias Gift for Study of Psychedelics in Society & Culture - Upcoming Harvard Events
Generous $16 million gift will support research and programs at Harvard Law School, Harvard Divinity School, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Three upcoming psychedelic events at Harvard
On Monday, Harvard University announced an unprecedented $16 million gift from the Gracias Family Foundation to support a the Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture.
The gift will fund research across the university and an endowed professorship on human health and flourishing. It will also support existing psychedelic projects on campus such as the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR) at the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School, which analyzes the ethical, legal, and social implications of psychedelics in research, commerce, and therapeutics, and the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) at Harvard Divinity School, which studies links between psychedelics, consciousness, religion, and spirituality.
Upcoming Psychedelic Events at Harvard
Next Wednesday, October 25, from 12:30 - 1:30pm Eastern, POPLAR at the Petrie Flow Center will host an online panel on Psychedelic Law and U.S. Military Veterans. This event includes recent Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, U.S. Navy SEAL Veteran Marcus Capone, U.S. Marine Corps. veteran Juliana Mercer, Mount Sinai psychiatry professor Dr. Rachel Yehuda, and Baylor psychiatry professor Dr. Lynnette Averill. Professor I. Glenn Cohen will introduce the panel and Professor Mason Marks will moderate.
Attendance is free but online registration is required.
On November 3, Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry will host its 3rd Annual Conference on Psychedelics and Psychedelic Medicine at the Westin Copley Place in Boston. The event is organized by Dr. Franklin King. It offers a full virtual option to accommodate those who cannot attend in person.
Speakers include Frederick Barrett, Alicia Danforth, Rick Doblin, Eduardo Schenberg, Darron Smith, and many others.
Register here for online or in person attendance.
POPLAR at the Petrie-Flom Center is accepting abstracts for its 2024 annual conference in June, which will focus on Law and Policy of Psychedelic Medicine. The conference will be held on the campus of Harvard Law School in the second half of June.
We aim to include accepted abstract in an academic book edited by Professor I. Glenn Cohen, Professor Mason Marks, Professor Amy Lynn McGuire, and Petrie-Flom Center Executive Director Susannah Baruch. In the past, we have successfully turned conferences into edited volumes (e.g., with Cambridge, MIT, Johns Hopkins, and Columbia University presses).
We seek papers that offer innovative perspectives and inventive approaches. Abstracts should focus on the fresh contributions the presentation will make, including sketches of the supporting arguments. The abstract should include (but not be limited to) a paragraph summarizing the issue that will be addressed and any currently contending views about its resolution. Successful abstracts will explicitly address how the proposed presentation will address the challenges and opportunities of legal and policy approaches to psychedelics.
We welcome submissions on both broad conceptual questions and more specific law and policy issues.
Potential topics include:
FDA law related to the development and regulation of psychedelic medicines
DEA law and the regulation of psychedelics as controlled substances
The intersection of psychedelic policy and intellectual property law
Potential federal law and policy reform on psychedelics
State and local decriminalization law and policy
Biopiracy and fair benefit sharing with Indigenous communities
Legal barriers to equity and access for specific populations and subgroups
Informed consent for psychedelic use
Public and private insurance coverage for psychedelic medicines
The ethics and regulation of “supportive touch” associated with the administration of psychedelic medicines
Lessons from medical cannabis regulation
The potential role of psychedelics in addressing the drug overdose crisis
Law and policy issues related to healing trauma
Legal obstacles to integrating psychedelic medicines into hospice and palliative care.
Please note that this list is not meant to be exhaustive; we hope to receive abstracts related to the conference’s central questions even if the topic was not specifically listed here. Papers that focus on ethics should include substantial discussion of policy implications. Relatedly, law will be treated broadly to include governmental policy decisions more generally. Successful abstracts will propose or outline an argument/position, rather than merely stating a topic. Purely technical submissions will likely be outside the scope of this conference.
To encourage interdisciplinary and international dialogue, we welcome submissions from legal scholars and lawyers, bioethicists, philosophers, clinicians, medical researchers, disability rights advocates, public health scholars and practitioners, economists and other social scientists, government officials and staff, and others who have a meaningful contribution to make on this topic. But we emphasize that whatever they're disciplinary training, the abstract and paper should clearly focus on the legal side of any issue discussed. We welcome philosophical and legal reflections from contributors across the world, with preference to contributions that are general, United States-focused, or explicitly comparative in nature. We welcome submissions from advocacy organizations, think tanks, and others outside academia, but emphasize that this is a scholarly conference, and abstracts/papers will be held to academic standards of argumentation and support.
How to Participate
If you are interested in participating, please send a 1-page abstract of the paper you would plan to present to petrie-flom@law.harvard.edu as soon as possible, but not later than COB on Friday October 20, 2023. If your abstract is selected, your final paper will be due on March 31, 2024, and you will be assigned a presentation slot for the conference. All presenters must provide a full final draft in order to participate. Presenters are expected to attend the conference for its full duration. We will accept conference papers of all lengths and styles (e.g., law review, medical, philosophy, or policy journal, etc.), but presentations will be limited to 15 minutes.
Please see the call for abstracts for more information.
*The views expressed on Psychedelic Week do not represent the views of Harvard University, POPLAR at the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School, Florida State University, or the Florida State University College of Law. Psychedelic Week is an independent project unaffiliated with these and other programs and institutions.
Mason Marks, MD, JD is a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is also the Florida Bar Health Law Section Professor at Florida State University, senior fellow and project lead of the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR) at the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School, and an affiliated fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Marks teaches drug law, psychedelic law, constitutional law, and administrative law. Before moving to Florida, he served on the Oregon Psilocybin Advisory Board where he chaired its Licensing Subcommittee. Marks has drafted drug policies for state and local lawmakers. His forthcoming book on psychedelic law and politics, Gates of Perception, will be published by Yale University Press. He tweets at @MasonMarksMD and @PsychedelicWeek.