Skip to Content

June 2023 (Abstracts due: November 3, 2023 - Closed)

 

 

 

Deadline extended to November 3, 2023

Petrie-Flom Center 2024 Annual Conference: Law and Policy of Psychedelic Medicine

Call for Abstracts

Spring 2024

Harvard Law School Petrie-Flom Center Annual Symposium and Potential Edited Volume Editors: I. Glenn Cohen, Mason Marks, Amy McGuire, Susannah Baruch

The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School is pleased to announce plans for our 2024 annual conference: “The Law and Policy of Psychedelic Medicine.”

This year’s conference is organized by the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR) at the Petrie-Flom Center in collaboration with Mason Marks, Florida Bar Health Law Section Professor at the Florida State University College of Law and Senior Fellow and Project Lead on the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation at the Petrie-Flom Center, Amy Lynn McGuire, Leon Jaworski Professor of Biomedical Ethics and Director, Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine, and the Baylor College of Medicine Ethical Legal Implications of PSychedelics In Society (ELIPSIS) Program with support of the Saisei Foundation, Tim Ferriss and Matt Mullenweg.

Conference Description

A major sea change seems likely on the legal treatment of psychedelic medicines – including psilocybin, a substance produced by many species of fungi, 3,4-Methyl​enedioxy​methamphetamine (MDMA), a synthetic substance colloquially referred to as ecstasy, and mescaline, produced by several species of cactus, including peyote, a sacrament of Native American churches. As Phase II and III psychedelic trials near completion, the FDA may soon approve psychedelic medicines for treating post-traumatic stress disorder and treatment-resistant depression. This represents a paradigm shift for the agency, which recently released draft guidance on conducting psychedelic clinical trials.

At the same time, other federal agencies are changing their attitudes toward psychedelics, and Congress is considering reducing barriers to psychedelic research.

With these changes come a myriad of legal and ethical issues. This conference, which will seed a book, seeks to explore the law and policy challenges and opportunities resulting from increased clinical research, private investment, and political interest in psychedelic medicines.

Call for Abstracts

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 their 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.

We currently anticipate that this 1-day conference will be in-person, on the Harvard Law School campus, during the last two weeks of June 2024. We will pay travel expenses for one presenter per paper who must travel to Cambridge; co-authored papers must name the single presenter. If we are unable to host the conference in person, we will work to translate these materials into a virtual event to be held in early June 2024.

In the past, we have successfully turned several of our conferences into edited volumes (e.g., with Cambridge, MIT, Johns Hopkins, and Columbia University presses). It is possible, although not guaranteed, that conference presenters will publish their papers with us in an edited volume whose chapters will be limited to 5,000 words, including references. All presenters should plan on contributing their submission to any subsequent volume arising from the conference and should not submit an abstract if they anticipate this will be a problem. Previous conference participants have been able to publish their submissions in different formats in multiple venues, for example, both as a short book chapter and a longer law review article. However, the version that will be used for the edited volume should not have been published previously or accepted for publication separately.

How to Register

Attendance will be free and open to the public, most likely virtually. Stay tuned for the conference agenda, which will be posted to our website once abstracts have been selected. Register now to be notified of the attendance format and other conference updates.

Questions

Please contact the Petrie-Flom Center with any questions: petrie-flom@law.harvard.edu.

Sponsored by the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR) at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, with support from the Saisei Foundation, Tim Ferriss, Matt Mullenweg, and the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund at Harvard University.

Download the Call for Abstracts.