Community Uses of Psychedelics & Safety (CUPS)

Expanding the Community Uses of Psychedelics and Safety (CUPS) Project 

CUPS is a multiyear, interdisciplinary, and interweaving collection of community-engaged and observational studies that seek to understand the real world safety profile, risk factors, and time-tested safety practices of psychedelic users in non-medical settings. 

CUPS recognizes the expertise of psychedelic-using communities (of both harms and benefits) and seeks to serve as a bridge between these communities and the wider public by... 

  1.  Collaboratively sharing the hard-won knowledge that these communities have gained over decades, 

  2. Developing better methods for assessing the lessons on harm and risk that these communities are learning in real time as psychedelic policies and practices shift. 

This project was initially funded by a 3-year regulatory science contract with the US FDA (BAA 75F40122C00116), but its progress was hampered by the federal Paperwork Reduction Act and also subsequent federal budget limitations; the contract ends September 2025, but these studies can continue with additional financial support. 

To date, the CUPS project has, among other results, succeeded in:

  1. Establishing a community advisory board (CAB) of individuals associated with long-standing US psychedelic churches and has successfully worked with the CAB to collect ethnographic and interview data on safety procedures and outcomes in 4 churches around the country; 

  2. Collaborating with psychedelic-supportive 12 Step fellowships to gather quantitative and qualitative data on how the intentional uses of psychedelics can affect addiction recovery in these communities; 

  3. Created first-of-its-kind dataset of electronic health records from 14 emergency rooms in Oregon to assess changes in psychedelic-related ER visits over time relative to psychedelic policy changes; and 

  4. Helped launch a 3-language, international survey of the health outcomes of regular ayahuasca use. Philanthropic donations will support the expansion of this important work.  

Additional philanthropic funding will support the rapid analysis and dissemination of novel data and measures of psychedelic-related health outcomes in Oregon. 

Current methods for assessing population-level health impacts of psychedelic use are very limited in their sensitivity and specificity, and recent restrictions in the US’ public health research infrastructure have made this problem worse. 

Further support for our research will allow our group to validate and share improved methods for assessing psychedelic-related impacts on public health and how these can change with respective to psychedelic policy developments at the municipal, state and federal level.