Absolutely.
It's important to bring up something called the special access program. That's the legal framework of the legal way to get psychedelic-assisted therapy in Canada. Psilocybin and MDMA are legal. Ketamine is completely legal.
The special access program was made for extreme circumstances. Little Timmy at CHEO has a rare form of blood cancer. He needs an experimental drug that hasn't been approved by Health Canada. You apply through a bureaucratic process called the special access program, and it allows little Timmy to get his medicine and go on.
Canada is forcing people to go through the special access program, which is meant for extreme cases of health care. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is not an extreme form of health care. It's actually defined in a ruling from the Supreme Court of Canada in a landmark case won this summer. Under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, you have rights as a Canadian under section 7 to “reasonable” health care, and “reasonable health care” are the key words. We went from extreme use to now reasonable health care.
The law asks, what is reasonable? Who determines what's reasonable? A doctor determines what's reasonable, not a bureaucratic system. You're forcing people to go through a special access program, which is a bureaucratic pathway to get an extreme version of an exotic drug, whereas in actuality you would need to create a new health regulatory system specifically for it.
None of this has to do with ethics. That's the big point we're missing here. This is all administrative. You can access this stuff. You're just telling people to jump through 50,000 hoops, which at the end of the day goes to the Supreme Court of Canada. That then gets overturned in favour of the plaintiff, because our Charter of Rights deems that we're allowed to have that care.
Australia, two weeks ago, on October 31, started funding psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy: psilocybin and MDMA. America last week just expanded their psychedelic research program to over nine veterans hospitals. We're one of the most progressive countries in the world and we're up here doing what exactly?