The DEA Asked for a Psilocybin Review Three Years Ago. It's Still Sitting There.

Dr. Sunil Aggarwal, a Seattle physician who treats terminally ill patients, first asked the DEA in February 2022 to move psilocybin one notch down the Controlled Substances Act — from Schedule I, “no accepted medical use,” to Schedule II, the category that holds fentanyl, oxycodone, and cocaine: dangerous, tightly controlled, but prescribable. It took three and a half years of litigation before the DEA, in August 2025, finally forwarded the petition to HHS for the scientific review that’s supposed to precede any rescheduling decision. That review has now been sitting since last fall.

Marijuana got its rescheduling this year. Psilocybin, with the weaker political enemies and the stronger recent clinical data, did not — and that gap is the story.

In April, with Todd Blanche serving as acting attorney general, the Department of Justice issued a final order moving both DEA-approved cannabis medications and state-licensed medical marijuana down to Schedule III. Psilocybin, despite Aggarwal’s petition sitting in the same DOJ pipeline and despite a stronger recent evidence base — priority-voucher-backed trials for treatment-resistant depression, major depressive disorder, and PTSD are already underway — wasn’t included. Kathryn Tucker, co-counsel on Aggarwal’s petition, has said the delay looks less like careful science and more like an agency that moved on the politically comfortable substance first and parked the harder one.

The DEA answers, ultimately, to the attorney general, which means a scheduling decision this consequential is never purely a medical judgment — it’s a political one wearing a lab coat. That’s not a conspiracy theory; it’s just how the Controlled Substances Act is structured; every rescheduling since marijuana’s own decades-long fight has run through the same chokepoint. The FDA, for its part, has kept moving on the treatment side regardless of what DEA does with scheduling — it held a public hearing on psychedelic therapeutics on September 14, and companies are still allowed to run Schedule I clinical trials under existing DEA research registrations. Schedule I status doesn’t block research. It blocks the doctor down the street from ever being able to prescribe what the research eventually proves out.

For a reader with treatment-resistant depression watching this from the outside, the practical read is unglamorous: nothing about your access to psilocybin changes today, in either direction, and it won’t until HHS finishes a review with no public deadline attached to it. The trials keep running. The prescription pad stays empty. That’s the whole update — and if you’re waiting on this one, waiting is, for now, still the only available treatment plan.