MAPS has spent four decades running clinical trials, lobbying regulators and building the case for psychedelic medicine. It had never partnered with a cannabis company until now.
Cannabis and psychedelics have spent most of the last two decades in adjacent rooms with the door closed. Same prohibition, same schedule, largely the same argument, and almost no overlap in the people making it. Psychedelics went to the clinic. Cannabis went to retail. The two movements rarely showed up in the same building.
Which is what makes a small announcement out of Bergen County, New Jersey, worth a minute of attention.
The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the nonprofit Rick Doblin founded in 1986 and the organization that carried MDMA-assisted therapy through decades of clinical trials, has entered into a collaboration with HoneyProjects, a New Jersey cannabis operator. According to the announcement, it is the first time in MAPS’ forty-year history that the organization has partnered with a cannabis company.
The partnership launched alongside the opening of HoneyGrove Elmwood Park on August 29, at 294 Route 46 East, the company’s third dispensary in New Jersey and its first in Bergen County. It joins HoneyGrove Gloucester Township and HoneyStash, the first licensed dispensary in Metuchen. The collaboration, as described by the companies, involves ongoing resources and activations at the stores rather than research or clinical work.
That distinction matters, and it is worth stating plainly: this is education and outreach at retail, not a research agreement. Nobody is studying anything at a dispensary counter in Elmwood Park.
But the choice of venue is the point. MAPS has always argued that the two prohibitions are one prohibition, and that ending it means reaching people where they already are. In the United States, where they already are is a dispensary. Somewhere north of seventeen percent of American adults …
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Author: High Times / High Times
