How Australia Legalized Psychedelic Therapy

In November 2022, the head of Australia's drug regulator predicted that ten or fifteen people would show up to hear a pitch about legalizing psilocybin and MDMA for mental illness. A hundred and forty people came, some in the room, some on Zoom, all staff from the Department of Health and the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), Australia's version of the US Food and Drug Administration (39:35). That gap between what officials expected and what actually happened is a fair summary of the whole story that follows: an outsider's project that kept outgrowing everyone's estimate of it.

The outsider was Tania de Jong, a singer and social entrepreneur who says she had never taken alcohol, coffee, or any drug at all until she read a 2015 New Yorker article called "The Trip Treatment," by journalist Michael Pollan, about a Johns Hopkins trial using psilocybin for depression (03:55). She and her husband Peter could not get into a clinical trial, so in 2016 they flew to the Netherlands and took a large dose of psilocybin combined with Syrian rue, a plant that contains MAO inhibitors, chemicals that slow the breakdown of psychedelic compounds and can intensify the experience (61:35, 63:41). De Jong was frightened enough beforehand to email her accountant a letter of last wishes (05:48). What followed, she says, changed how she saw everything afterward, down to "every seashell, cloud, leaf, blade of grass" (06:55).

Two years and a second trip later, the couple, who had already founded five charities together, decided to apply what had happened to them at a national scale. In 2018, Rick Doblin, founder of the MDMA research group MAPS, told de Jong she should start a charity in Australia. She and Peter launched Mind Medicine Australia (MMA) in February 2019 (10:39, 12:52). Their target was the TGA, which controls what drugs can be prescribed in Australia the way the FDA does in the United States. Psilocybin and MDMA sat in Schedule 9, the prohibited category; MMA wanted them moved to Schedule 8, a controlled category used for medicines available by prescription (13:57, 14:30).

A campaign built like a franchise

The first two applications to the TGA were rejected, at both the interim and final stages (14:30). Rather than walk away, de Jong's husband rewrote the case to answer the regulator's specific objections point by point, and the couple built out a machine to support the next attempt. They opened more than 30 volunteer chapters around the country, from Byron Bay to Perth, each supplied with the same templates and precedents so ordinary Australians could file effective public submissions (21:00, 22:11). Alongside that grassroots layer, MMA had already begun training clinicians in 2021 through a certificate in psychedelic-assisted therapy; that program has since trained more than 750 psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, nurses, and other practitioners (22:36). Those clinicians pressured their own professional bodies, adding institutional weight to the public campaign.

De Jong also built what she calls a world-leading advisory panel of about 75 researchers and clinicians, recruited largely through conferences and a chain of introductions that started when she spoke and sang at a 2018 event hosted by psilocybin developer Usona in Madison, Wisconsin (26:29, 29:29). That is how she met Robin Carhart-Harris and David Nutt, the Imperial College London neuropsychopharmacologist who became one of MMA's most visible allies. In 2022, MMA flew Nutt to Australia for a public roadshow through Byron Bay, Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne, then brought him into the TGA itself to present the clinical evidence directly to regulators (24:14, 39:01). Ahead of Nutt's TGA presentation, MMA arranged for a widow named Vanessa to speak first. Her husband, Franco, had developed severe depression with no prior history, tried every available treatment, and died before Australia rescheduled the medicines (40:16). De Jong recalls the argument that mattered most to regulators that day:

"There's a risk to not doing anything... if you don't reschedule these medicines, that's actually a risk because patients who've tried everything, like Franco, might end up taking their own lives." — Tania de Jong [45:29]

On February 3, 2023, the TGA rescheduled psilocybin and MDMA from Schedule 9 to Schedule 8, making Australia the first country to allow prescription use of both drugs for psychiatric conditions (42:53). The submission process behind that decision drew more than 13,000 public comments, the largest response the TGA had ever received for a rescheduling matter, with roughly 98 percent supporting the change (16:07).

The data, the cost, and what comes next

Rescheduling was the opening, not the finish. Psychiatrists now have to apply individually to the TGA for what is called authorized prescriber status, submitting protocols covering dosage and setting, which are reviewed by both the TGA and an independent ethics committee (44:06). As of the interview, more than 120 psychiatrists held that status, up from one or two in early 2024, and roughly 400 patients had been treated across more than 20 clinics (53:06, 44:38). Early prescribing skews toward MDMA for trauma over psilocybin for depression, roughly 70 to 30, partly because clinicians found MDMA more manageable to start with (47:41). Reported remission rates in Australian clinics run 60 to 80 percent, compared with 10 to 15 percent for standard antidepressant and PTSD treatments, with no serious adverse events reported to the TGA so far (47:16, 57:24). De Jong points to another pattern that distinguishes the therapy from long-term medication: after two or three doses, remission tends to keep climbing during the months of talk therapy that follow, rather than plateauing the way antidepressant response often does (85:00).

None of this comes cheap. A full three-to-four-month course, including screening, dosing sessions, and integration therapy, runs to roughly $15,000 in US dollars, a figure driven almost entirely by therapist time rather than the cost of the drugs themselves (93:00, 94:27). To close that gap, MMA has recruited payers including Australia's Department of Veterans' Affairs, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and the insurer Medibank, whose Gold-tier members can have most of the cost covered (58:19). MMA is also raising 2.5 million Australian dollars for its own patient support fund to subsidize treatment for veterans, first responders, and others who cannot pay upfront (115:00).

De Jong is candid about what went wrong along the way. Some researchers who had built careers on years-long trial timelines saw the push for faster access as a threat to their work and attacked the campaign personally; some volunteers who joined MMA because they were themselves suffering were not, in de Jong's words, in a stable enough place for high-pressure advocacy work (75:07, 78:17). She also allows that her own persistence sometimes tipped into being simply too pushy, prompting one regulatory adviser to complain publicly about the volume of MMA's outreach (109:20). Looking back, she does not think a softer approach would have worked, but she has scaled back the instinct to keep knocking on doors that are clearly shut.

What she keeps returning to, though, is not strategy but what the medicines themselves taught her, borrowed from a phrase she heard from the late Harvard psychologist turned spiritual teacher Ram Dass:

"We're all walking each other home, and I think that's one of the really most important things that these medicines teach you." — Tania de Jong [120:08]

Australia's rescheduling is not final in the sense of settled; it is open-ended, with MMA still negotiating bureaucratic limits like which clinicians can lead dosing sessions. But other regulators are watching. With companies like Compass Pathways and Usona expected to bring psilocybin toward registration elsewhere, and with de Jong's own advisory panel now fielding trainees from Europe, the Gulf, and Asia, the Australian playbook, cold emails, a borrowed choir voice, a widow's testimony, a stubborn refusal to accept no, looks less like a local anomaly and more like a template other countries are starting to copy.