Two Postdocs Are Telling the DEA That Schedule I Is Not a Place to Park Uncertainty

Dr. Benjamin Cummings and Dr. Janelle Lanham are early-career scientists, and this week they put their names on a legal filing against the Drug Enforcement Administration. Cummings’ reason fits in one sentence: “Schedule 1 designation increases barriers to research, harming in-need patient populations by preventing care.”

Schedule I is where the government files drugs it says have no accepted medical use and a high chance of abuse, and it should not be where it files things it hasn’t finished studying.

The DEA published its proposal on September 23 to place five compounds there: 4-OH-DiPT, 5-MeO-AMT, 5-MeO-MiPT, 5-MeO-DET and DiPT. These are chemical cousins of psilocybin, the active compound in mushrooms. The comment and hearing-request deadline was October 23. Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Mindstate Design Labs and the two scientists filed a request for a formal hearing, arguing that psychoactivity is not proof of high abuse potential and that the DEA has to show each compound meets the legal test on its own. The DEA has not said whether it will grant a hearing.

The implementation gate matters here. This is a proposal, not a final rule. Psilocybin, MDMA, ketamine and 5-MeO-DMT are not in it, and none of the five is an approved medicine. The DEA first proposed the same listing in January 2022 and withdrew it after pushback from researchers and legal advocates. If you run a ketamine or Spravato clinic, nothing about your day changes.

What would change is who gets hit first. A Schedule I listing puts anyone who researches the compounds under a heavier federal registration burden, which adds cost and delay that a funded lab can absorb and a graduate student cannot. SSDP says one of the five, 4-OH-DiPT, is the parent of luvesilocin, a Reunion Neuroscience drug that already carries FDA Breakthrough Therapy Designation for postpartum depression and is moving toward Phase 3 trials. That is SSDP’s account, and SSDP is an advocacy group with a stake in the outcome, so read it as a claim to check against Reunion’s filings and the FDA, not a settled fact. The group’s argument is that the DEA is about to restrict the raw material of a treatment another federal agency has fast-tracked.

For anyone who works with patients, there is one practical piece. If a patient mentions a psychedelic they bought online, it may not be what the label says. Ask for the name, the amount and where it came from, and write it down as reported, not as confirmed.

The people most likely to lose something in this fight are not the ones in the room. They are the mothers waiting on one more option for a depression that arrives with a newborn, and the graduate students who would have run the trials.