Psychedelic research timeline
Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD): the psychedelic research timeline
Alcohol research runs through both eras of psychedelic medicine: controlled LSD studies in the 1960s, decades of near-silence, and a modern field testing psilocybin, ketamine, DMT, 5-MeO-DMT and iboga alkaloids.
Milestones are editorially selected from Blossom’s research catalogue. Future markers are limited to important trials with dated public guidance and are shown as planned, not promised.
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The first clinical era
1966 to 1970Alcohol dependence is an early LSD indication.1966-01
Controlled LSD studies in alcoholism begin
One of six randomised studies later pooled in the modern meta-analysis begins, making alcohol dependence one of the earliest clinical indications tested with LSD.
The long gap
1971 to 2011Clinical work largely stops; observational records accumulate.1993
Hoasca Project
Long-term ayahuasca users enter biomedical research
The Hoasca Project starts the observational record that later reports drinking behaviour alongside health and psychological outcomes.
The Hoasca Project did something no clinical trial can do. It examined people with a decade or more of regular, supervised exposure, and compared them with matched non-drinking controls on psychiatric, neuropsychological and physiological measures. The findings were broadly reassuring: no evidence of cognitive deterioration or psychiatric deterioration, and in several domains the drinkers scored better than the controls.
Be precise about what that can and cannot establish. It is a cross-sectional comparison of a self-selected group. People who stay in a demanding religious community for ten years are not a random sample of the people who joined it, and anyone harmed by the practice is disproportionately likely to have left before the researchers arrived. Survivorship works in exactly the direction that would produce this result even if the drink did nothing.
What it does establish is the absence of gross harm in a population where gross harm would have been visible, which is genuinely useful and was not previously known. The project also produced the first human pharmacokinetics of the brew, and a follow-up assessment of regular users two decades later. This is the shape the ayahuasca literature takes: careful observation of people who were going to drink anyway.
The indication returns
2012 to 2022Old LSD data are revisited and several compounds reach trials.2017-11
A global naturalistic record opens
The Global Ayahuasca Survey begins collecting outcomes across countries, including problematic alcohol use. These associations are not treatment effects.
This is how the ayahuasca literature grew to 250 papers without 250 trials. A self-selecting online cohort cannot demonstrate that ayahuasca causes anything, but it can do things no trial can afford: describe who drinks and why, map settings from indigenous ceremony to European neo-shamanic circle, and count events too rare for a trial of thirty people to see.
Successive analyses from it have reported associations with lower problematic alcohol use, differences in outcome by context and setting, and long-term wellbeing measures in people who continue drinking. Read every one of those as a description of a population, not as an effect of a drug. People who feel a practice is helping them are the ones who keep doing it and the ones who answer surveys about it.
The survey has been most valuable where trials are weakest, which is on harms. That is the next marker.
2020-10
University of Exeter
The first registered DMT trial
UNITy tests whether DMT changes drinking behaviour in alcohol use disorder, and studies the neuroplasticity that might explain it. Eighty-nine years after the synthesis.
The clinical record for DMT starts here, in October 2020, and it starts with a hard indication rather than an easy one. Alcohol use disorder is a condition where the standard of care is weak, relapse is the norm and the placebo response is large, which makes it a demanding place to look for a signal.
The design pairs the behavioural question with a mechanistic one, asking not only whether drinking falls but whether markers of neuroplasticity move with it. That is the hypothesis underneath most of the modern psychedelic field: that a brief pharmacological event opens a window in which learning is easier, and that the therapy rather than the drug does the work inside it.
It is also the longest-running study on this canvas, listed to complete at the end of 2027. Seven years for a single academic trial is a fair measure of how difficult this work remains even after the compound has become fashionable.
2021-10
Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP)
Randomised ibogaine trial in AUD
A Brazilian Phase II in alcohol use disorder is the only randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled ibogaine trial in the database.
One trial. Out of nine, across sixty-four years, this is the single study in Blossom’s ibogaine record that randomises participants, blinds them and includes a placebo arm, and it is in alcohol use disorder rather than in the opioid indication the compound is famous for.
It also uses an escalating-dose design, which is a serious attempt to find the point where benefit and cardiac risk trade off rather than assuming a single dose is right for everyone. Run by a public university in São Paulo, completing at the end of 2024.
Set this against the 5-MeO-DMT canvas, where a randomised readout arrived seven years after the first trial and a $2.8bn acquisition followed. Ibogaine has had six decades and one randomised trial. The question that raises is not whether ibogaine works. It is why nobody with money has been willing to find out.
2022-01
American Journal of Psychiatry
KARE reports in alcohol use disorder
96 patients, ketamine plus a targeted therapy protocol, 86% abstinence at six months.
One of the largest effect sizes reported in alcohol use disorder treatment, from a UCL trial pairing ketamine with therapy aimed at reward memories. Relapse risk came out 2.7 times lower than control.
Effect sizes that large in a small trial should raise an eyebrow as well as hopes; they shrink more often than they hold. The result was strong enough to attract MRC and NIHR co-funding for a Phase 3, which is the appropriate response to a promising small trial.
2022-10
JAMA Psychiatry
Alcohol use disorder result in JAMA Psychiatry
A randomised trial reports a large reduction in heavy drinking days, opening a second serious indication.
Michael Bogenschutz and colleagues at NYU report that psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy substantially reduced the percentage of heavy drinking days compared with an active placebo. It is the strongest randomised evidence for psilocybin outside depression.
Alcohol use disorder matters here for a reason beyond the numbers. It is enormous, poorly served by existing medication, and it gives the field a second commercial story to tell if depression proves crowded. Several programmes on this canvas, including Clairvoyant’s 154-patient Phase 2b and a planned Ceruvia Phase 2b, exist because of this result.
A phase 2 relapse-prevention trial published in 2025 was more equivocal. One strong randomised result is a starting point, not a conclusion.
A multi-compound field
2023 onwardsThe question is no longer attached to one psychedelic.2023-02
Nature
Safer iboga analogues reduce drinking in animals
A new class of iboga alkaloids reproduces the anti-addiction effect in animals while dropping the hERG activity that makes ibogaine dangerous.
This is the most important scientific development on the canvas, and it is easy to under-read. Chemists rebuilt the molecule to keep the kappa-opioid and neuroplasticity effects while removing the potassium-channel block responsible for the QT prolongation. In animals, the anti-addiction behaviour survives the surgery.
If it holds in humans, ibogaine’s central dilemma dissolves: you would have the effect without the arrhythmia risk, and a patentable molecule that a company can afford to develop properly. Follow-on work through 2026 extends the same approach to alcohol drinking.
The caution is the usual one, and it is not small. Animal models of addiction predict human results badly, and a compound that is safer on paper still has to prove it works. Note also what this does to the ibogaine question itself: if the analogues succeed, the parent compound may never get the trial it has been waiting sixty years for.
2023-05
AtaiBeckley
Alcohol use disorder
A single-dose open-label study widens the indication surface beyond depression.
Evidence that the sponsor treated BPL-003 as a platform rather than a single-indication asset, which is relevant to how the acquisition was valued.
Alcohol use disorder is a large market with few effective pharmacological options, so an early signal there raises the ceiling on a compound whose lead indication is crowded. The study is small and open-label, so it establishes feasibility rather than efficacy.
2024-08
Solvonis Therapeutics
MORE-KARE Phase 3 opens in the NHS
The first Phase 3 of ketamine-assisted therapy for alcohol use disorder, co-funded by MRC and NIHR at about £2.4m.
Around 280 patients across seven or eight NHS trusts. Public co-funding matters here for the same reason it mattered at NIMH twenty years earlier: generic ketamine has no patent to defend, so someone other than a sponsor has to pay for the pivotal work.
Running inside the NHS also means the evidence lands directly where a commissioning decision would be made, rather than needing to be translated into a different health system afterwards.
2025-12
Addiction
Alcohol use disorder results published
The open-label Phase 2 proof-of-concept in alcohol use disorder reports in Addiction.
The 2023 alcohol study reads out in print two years after it closed. Proof-of-concept and open-label, so it establishes feasibility rather than efficacy, but it moves the second indication from claim to published record.
Publication lag is worth noticing across this canvas. Trials finish long before anyone outside the sponsor can read the numbers, which means a valuation can move on data the field has not yet seen.
2026-01
DemeRx
Noribogaine clears a Phase 1 on cardiac safety
A double-blind Phase 1 in fifty-five healthy volunteers reports DMX-1001 safe and well tolerated, with QT effects judged not clinically relevant.
Twelve years after the first noribogaine studies, a multiple-ascending-dose Phase 1 across a 20 to 80 mg range reports that the QT effect is not clinically meaningful at therapeutic doses. For a compound in this family that is the milestone that matters most, because the cardiac question is the one that has blocked everything else.
Healthy volunteers are not the population of interest, and a clean Phase 1 says nothing about whether the drug reduces drinking or drug use. A Phase 2 in alcohol use disorder is planned. Until it reports, this is a safety result in search of an efficacy one.
Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD)
The psychedelic research story in alcohol use disorder
Research Landscape
What the registered trials connected to Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) look like when you line them up. Counts come from Blossom’s trial records as of August 2026.
How fast is Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) research growing?
SourcedRegistered trials by recorded study-start year; 4 earlier trials began before 2012. Click a year for the running total.
Don't read as total research effort: only registered trials with a recorded start date are counted (45 of 45 tracked). Recent years under-count because of registration lag; striped bars are still filling in or are planned starts.
What's live right now, and what stopped?
SourcedRegistry status of all 45 Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) trials Blossom tracks. Orange marks trials recruiting or opening.
- Recruiting or opening
- 1738%
- Underway, not recruiting
- 613%
- Completed
- 1942%
- Stopped early
- 24%
- Unknown / other
- 12%
Don't read stopped trials as failures: trials end early for funding, recruitment, and strategy reasons too. Status is as last synced from the registry; some 'recruiting' trials may already have finished.
Which compounds carry the Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) research?
SourcedTrials per compound. Orange marks the most-studied compound.
Don't read shares as adding to 100%: a trial testing several compounds counts once per compound, and placebo comparator arms are not shown. Trial volume signals research attention, not evidence quality.
Publication Landscape
How the 114 papers Blossom links to Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) line up by year, compound and journal. This is the psychedelic-relevant literature in Blossom's records as of August 2026, not the condition's full medical literature.
How has Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) research grown?
SourcedTracked papers by publication year; 16 earlier papers published before 2012. Click a year for the running total.
Don't read as total output: only the 114 of 114 tracked papers with a recorded publication date are counted, and these are the psychedelic-relevant papers Blossom tracks, not a complete bibliography. The current year is still filling in.
Which compounds shape Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD)?
SourcedTracked papers per compound. Orange marks the largest literature.
A paper studying several compounds counts once per compound, and placebo comparator arms are not shown. These are the psychedelic-relevant papers Blossom tracks.
Where is Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) research published?
SourcedTracked papers per journal. Orange marks the most-used journal.
Counts the journal recorded on each tracked paper; papers without a journal on file are omitted. Blossom tracks psychedelic-relevant papers rather than each journal's full catalogue.