Eddie Jacobs

I am currently based at the University of Oxford's Department of Psychiatry and Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, where in October 2020 I began begin a three-year project in empirical ethics, funded by the Wellcome Trust, to articulate a bioethical framework for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. This newly (re-)discovered treatment modality challenges a host of the core concepts of medical ethics in novel ways, and it is crucial that potential ethical hazards are properly understood and accommodated before the mainstreaming of psychedelic therapy. For early movers, this means litigation risk minimisation. For the industry in the long term, this means well-established norms in practice and policy to optimise patient outcomes without jeopardising ethical values.