호주 부부의 영향력: 환각제를 의약품으로 재조정하기

### 타니아 드 종과 피터 헌트: 호주에서 사이키델릭 일정을 재조정하기로 한 획기적인 결정 뒤에 숨은 뜻밖의 커플
* 🇦🇺 과학이나 의학에 대한 배경 지식이 없는 오페라 가수와 전직 투자은행가 남편은 **호주가 환각제를 합법적인 의약품으로 분류한 최초의 국가**가 될 수 있도록 설득했습니다.
* "그들이 걸어온 길은 지금까지 **전 세계에서 승인을 받은 어떤 의약품과도 완전히 다름**니다."
* 🧠 환각제는 수세기 동안 사용되어 왔으며, 최근의 첨단 도구에 따르면 **뇌 가소성을 증가**시킨다는 사실이 밝혀졌습니다.
* 💊 의사들은 외상 후 스트레스 증후군이나 치료 저항성 우울증과 같은 질환을 치료하는 데 상당한 진전을 보이는 **환자들을 대상으로 한 임상시험에서 놀라운 결과**를 발견하고 있습니다.
* 타니아와 피터는 마법의 버섯을 통해 삶을 변화시킨 경험을 한 후 설립한 자선 단체인 **마인드 메디신 오스트레일리아**를 운영하고 있습니다.
* 🚦 그들은 새로운 의학적 치료법을 도입하는 데 필요한 전통적인 과학적 엄격성을 우회하여 **TGA 내의 익명의 선임 의사**를 설득하여 **환각제 일정을 변경**했습니다.
* 💉 호주에서 사이키델릭 보조 치료법을 도입하기 시작하면서 향후 발생할 수 있는 결과와 도전에 대해 **큰 희망과 조심스러운 낙관론**이 공존하고 있습니다.

타니아 드 종과 그녀의 남편은 과학적, 의학적 배경이 부족함에도 불구하고 호주에서 환각제를 합법적인 의약품으로 분류하는 데 영향을 미쳤습니다.

You might not expect that the people behind a music video that looks like this would influence medical policy, let alone convince Australia to become the first country in the world to classify psychedelics as a legitimate medicine. But that's exactly what an opera singer and her former investment banker husband did. They have absolutely no scientific or medical background. The natural flavor of regulators is to say no. It's their natural inclination. The path that they took is entirely different than any pharmaceutical that's ever gotten approval in the entire world. You know, I couldn't believe it. We were dancing around our kitchen a little bit. It was like, wow. It's hard to predict where this is all going in Australia, but it really feels, it's a bit like the Wild West. There's lots of concerning things happening in the space and no repercussions associated with those deviations. Part of the reason why this was so surprising is

that Australia is traditionally seen as quite a conservative country. It's very, very rare that Australia actually would be the one that's leading the way, and in this case, we were the first country
in the world to do this. Australia has not formally approved MDMA and psilocybin for
post-traumatic stress disorder and treatment-resistant depression. What they've done is they've
rescheduled the compounds and acknowledged their medical benefits. And they're allowing psychiatrists,
approved psychiatrists, to prescribe them for patients. That's something that's not happening anywhere else in the world. Psychedelic drugs have
been used for centuries. The real breakthrough in the
West came in the 1950s when there was an article in Life
Magazine that brought it to the attention of the
pharmaceutical industry. Along with the promise of psychedelic therapies, there was a backlash. They became associated with counterculture and things like Vietnam War protests. And Richard Nixon really
cracked down in his war on

drugs. At that point, psychedelic use really went underground. More advanced tools that have
been developed over the past several years have been able to actually examine what's
going on in the brain. The belief is that
psychedelics really do increase brain plasticity. Some of the trial results
have been really astonishing. Doctors are finding patients
that have had no progress for years in trying to treat something like
post-traumatic stress syndrome or treatment-resistant
depression are actually getting to a place where their
doctors considered them cured, or at least in remission. Tania de Jong and
her husband Peter Hunt, in their spare time, they run a charity called
Mind Medicine Australia. They first became interested
in psychedelic assisted therapy when they had a legal
trip with magic mushrooms. And they found the experience
so transformational and life-changing for
them, that they decided that they were going to dedicate
their lives to the cause.

That was this extraordinary experience of oneness, of connection to self, to others. Really led us to saying, well, if this can heal us in this way, what sort of impact could this have on the people that we work with in all our other charities? When you have a problem as large as the mental illness problem that we have in Australia and treatments that really don't work very well, if at all, for a large number of people, the desire to actually change a system and enable people to live the sort of lives they should lead becomes a real driving force. There's the conversations happening around the potential of psilocybin and MDMA to be effective treatments for millions of Australians suffering from depression and PTSD. And yet, at the same time, people are dying at festivals from MDMA or other drugs that are contained in ecstasy. We haven't really got a good measure at the moment to

indicate as to who is going to respond well and who's not going to respond well, because of course some people don't respond to this treatment. Some people get worse, and we don't know how to prevent people from getting worse, and we don't know how to enhance the treatment to make it more effective, because we don't fully understand how it works. Breathing in and here we go. Ah, keep going. Ah. Above all else, I think a key part of Tania's personality is that she's an entertainer. One of the things that mind medicine has been really heavily criticized by the traditional medical community for is their affiliation with anti-masking and anti-lockdown groups. Tania started posting a few opinion pieces online with various different conservative outlets during the height of Covid, suggesting that she wasn't in favor of lockdowns and masks, even some posts kind of criticizing vaccines. They've come up against those

who have been working in this industry for years, really grinding, scientifically
proving the benefits, proving that the risks aren't
greater than those benefits, so that it could be
really rolled out widely. At first, they kind of flirted
with a few different ideas for how they would best be able to bring magic mushrooms to the world. They didn't know that they
were going to try the route of rescheduling with the TGA, our peak regulator in
Australia, the equivalent of the FDA in America. We started our first
rescheduling applications probably within the first year of setting
up Mind Medicine Australia. We were rejected at the interim stage. Some people were saying to us, you know, you're wasting your time. And our response was, no, not at all. Because when the TGA rejects,
they have to give reasons. And that meant the second
time around we knew the issues that concerned them. What was unusual about their approach is

that they completely sidestepped the scientific rigor that's generally needed in order to get a new medical treatment onto the market. To ask a regulatory body whose job is to make sure the medicines are safe and effective, to make a positive ruling when the scientific results aren't in yet, that's just a huge lift. That's lovely. Australia has a very unique system, to say the least, when it comes to rescheduling substances. The decision to reschedule a substance or not is ultimately made by an individual called the delegate. Now, the delegate is an anonymous official, a senior doctor within the TGA. Nobody knows who the delegate is to this day, apart from a handful of medical officials. Tania and Peter didn't need to convince the scientific minds and the researchers and all of the standard regulators who make these decisions. They only had to sway one person. Now, we tried hard and we were unable to find out who the delegate is.

And Tania and Peter say
they also don't know who the delegate is. In the end, that regulator was swayed and decided to reschedule psychedelics. By February 2023, Mind
Medicine would receive the news that their application actually
had been approved by the TGA, and they had succeeded in
rescheduling psychedelic-assisted therapy in Australia. We interviewed Dr. John Skerritt, who was the
head of the TGA at the time that these substances were rescheduled. He actually said, contrary
to what Tania De Jong and Peter Hunt think, their lobbying and aggressive campaigning to the TGA actually did
more harm than good in some instances. The decision to reschedule essentially
caught everyone off guard. The peak body for psychiatrists
in Australia and New Zealand and Prism had both advised
against the rescheduling. The only group of people that weren't caught off guard
were Mind Medicine itself. For years prior to the
decision being made,

they started running their
certificate in psychedelic-assisted therapy. Medical officials can come in and take this course for about
11,000 Australian dollars. As far as is this a
viable training approach, there really isn't a lot of
other training available. And this is one area where
Australia really will be able to become first in the world. Tuesday was the first time
I'd prescribed MDMA for someone to assist them with therapy,
and so it was a full day. It's pretty intense, obviously,
most intense for the patient. The patient had a lot of
interesting experiences where they could sort of
experience a lot of the feelings that they'd blocked up for a long time, pushed away some difficult
memories that they had also kind of packed away. But it
did go as I expected. I've been seeing this person
for a while in therapy, and the person definitely made some breakthroughs in that day. In retrospect, I think it
had to be someone like them.

I'm a doctor. I understand something about trauma and trying to help people with trauma and difficult emotional experiences. I don't know anything about trying to market something or networking or pushing something through. I'm cautiously optimistic about the rollout of these therapies post the TGA decision. I think we will see some negative media in the near future as either patients are harmed as a consequence of the treatment. The outcomes that they receive are not aligning with their expectations. They skipped a lot of the steps that you would traditionally take to be able to get this application put through. They didn't go through the phase three trials. They went through rescheduling instead. There is huge hope, and we'll see if the reality lives up to that hype, but we're going to get the answers.

Why Australia Is Experimenting With Psychedelics

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호주 사이키델릭 의약품 분류에 대한 예상치 못한 영향

과학적 배경이 없는 한 오페라 가수와 그녀의 남편이 호주에서 환각제를 합법적인 의약품으로 분류하는 데 영향을 미쳤으며, 이는 보수적인 국가로서는 드문 움직임입니다.

호주의 이번 결정으로 공인 정신과 의사가 MDMA와 실로시빈을 처방할 수 있게 되었으며, 이는 세계 최초의 사례입니다.

환각제의 사용은 오랜 역사를 가지고 있지만, 특히 과거 반문화와의 연관성을 고려할 때 의약품으로 분류된 것은 중요한 돌파구입니다.

첨단 도구를 통해 사이키델릭이 뇌 가소성을 증가시키고 외상 후 스트레스 장애와 우울증 치료에 놀라운 결과를 가져올 수 있다는 사실이 밝혀졌습니다.

타니아 드 종과 피터 헌트는 사이키델릭 치료에 대한 혁신적인 경험을 바탕으로 마인드 메디신 오스트레일리아를 설립했습니다.

현재 이러한 약물과 관련된 위험성에도 불구하고 우울증과 PTSD 치료에 실로시빈과 MDMA를 사용하는 것이 주목을 받고 있습니다.

마음 의학이 정신 건강 치료에 미치는 영향

마인드 메디슨의 치료법이 모든 사람에게 효과가 있는 것은 아니며, 그 효과를 높이는 방법을 이해하는 데 어려움이 있습니다.

이 단체는 코로나19 팬데믹 기간 동안 마스크 착용 반대 및 봉쇄 반대 단체와 연계되어 있다는 비판에 직면했습니다.

초기의 거부에도 불구하고 마인드 메디신 오스트레일리아는 마법의 버섯을 세상에 알리기 위한 노력을 지속했고, 결국 TGA와 함께 진전을 이루었습니다.

호주에서 사이키델릭의 파격적인 일정 변경

호주의 독특한 시스템에서는 익명의 대표단이 과학 전문가 패널을 설득할 필요 없이 약물 사용 일정을 변경하는 결정을 내릴 수 있습니다.

의료 관계자와 정신과 의사들의 반대에도 불구하고 마인드 메디슨은 환각제 사용 일정을 변경하기 위해 로비에 성공했습니다.

다른 사람들을 놀라게 한 이 결정에 대해 TGA의 전 대표는 로비 활동이 복합적인 영향을 미쳤다고 비판했습니다.

호주에서 사이키델릭 보조 치료의 부상

현재 호주에서는 환각제 보조 치료 자격증 과정을 약 11,000호주달러에 수강할 수 있지만, 호주에는 대체 교육 옵션이 부족합니다.

치료를 위한 MDMA의 사용이 증가하면서 환자에게 강렬하고 변화된 경험을 선사하고 있으며, 한 의사는 이러한 치료의 미래에 대해 조심스럽게 낙관적인 견해를 밝혔습니다.

치료법이 빠르게 출시되면서 잠재적인 부정적인 결과와 기존 임상시험 단계의 우회에 대한 우려가 제기되고 있습니다.