Our field now rests on a substantial and expanding bedrock of clinical efficacy and safety data. Yet, the full transformative potential of psychedelic therapies for public health hinges on a crucial factor: Affordability and cost-effectiveness. Payers' perception of value for money will dictate the extent of access to these groundbreaking interventions, and by extension, their impact on the mental and behavioral health crises in the United States. Insufficient attention has also been paid to estimating the potential impact of psychedelic therapies, as they scale up, on the epidemics of mental health and behavioral health disorders in the United States. Our group, the UC Berkeley Collaborative for The Economics of Psychedelics, aims to address these deficits. 

This presentation will delve into pressing economic questions, crucial for the adoption of these therapies by third-party payers and for access at scale. We review the current, updated findings on the economics of MDMA for PTSD including the role of group therapy, results on the economics of psilocybin for major depression, the extension of both analyses to include societal productivity benefits i.e., the enhanced economic output as symptoms of PTSD or depression are resolved or decline. We will also present early results on the economics of psilocybin-assisted therapy for smoking cessation.

We will close with an overview of the future agenda for economic analysis, next steps for our group at Berkeley, and for the field more broadly.