The Fight to Reschedule Psilocybin in the UK

Psilocybin is still in Schedule 1 of the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001, the list for drugs with no recognised medical use, and the government's stated position is that it has no plans to move it. That is where psilocybin rescheduling in the UK stands: a fight over which list the drug sits on, not over whether it should be legal. The people pushing want it in Schedule 2, so universities and hospitals can work with it more easily and doctors could one day prescribe it. Its Class A status, and every penalty attached to it, would stay exactly where it is.

The gap between those two things is the whole story. Rescheduling gets reported as a step toward psilocybin legalisation in the UK, and it is nothing of the kind. It is magic mushroom law reform aimed at the lab, with the high street left exactly where it was, so it is worth getting the mechanics straight before anything else.

What would rescheduling psilocybin actually change?

UK drug law runs on two separate systems, and most coverage blurs them. The class, set by the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, decides the penalties. Psilocybin is Class A: up to seven years for possession, up to life for supply. Fresh mushrooms have been caught too since section 21 of the Drugs Act 2005 closed the old loophole that only covered prepared or dried ones.

The schedule is a different question. Schedule 1 of the 2001 Regulations decides who can lawfully hold a drug and for what. A Schedule 1 drug cannot be prescribed by anyone, and a researcher who wants to study one needs a separate Home Office licence on top of every ethics and safety approval a trial already needs. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs collected case studies on what that costs in practice: a licence fee of over £3,000, an inspection fee of £1,371, £326 a year to renew, and about twelve months from application to approval.

Schedule 2 is where morphine and cocaine live. Tightly controlled, still prescribable, and handled in a hospital under the ordinary controlled-drug rules with no extra licence. Moving psilocybin there would cut the licence, the fees and most of that year of waiting.

It would not touch the street. Possession would still be a Class A offence, supply would still carry life, and there would still be no local exception in London or anywhere else. We cover the current law in full in is psilocybin legal in the UK; this post is about the list.

Who is pushing for psilocybin to be rescheduled?

Researchers first. Groups running psilocybin trials in the UK have argued for years that Schedule 1 adds cost and delay to legitimate science without making anything safer, since trial supply is logged to the milligram either way. A cross-party set of MPs took the argument into Parliament, with the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group among the loudest voices.

The public route got a flat answer. A 2022 petition to reschedule psilocybin for medical research closed with 11,824 signatures, well short of the 100,000 that triggers a debate. The Home Office replied in October 2022: "There are no plans to reschedule psilocybin to Schedule 2 of the 2001 Regulations."

Then in 2023 the Commons Home Affairs Committee, at the end of a long inquiry into drug policy, recommended that the government "urgently" move psychedelic drugs to Schedule 2 to make research on their medical value easier. That was not a campaign group or a backbencher with a private member's bill. It was a select committee of MPs, saying so in a formal report the government was obliged to answer. The government answered, and still did not move it.

What has the government actually agreed to?

Something smaller, and more interesting than it sounds.

In December 2022 the Home Office asked the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs how to reduce the barriers to research on every Schedule 1 drug. The ACMD reported in December 2023. Its headline recommendations were that universities and hospitals, and clinical studies holding Health Research Authority or MHRA approval, should be exempt from the Home Office domestic licence and operate under Schedule 2 rules instead. It did not recommend rescheduling psilocybin, or any named drug. Moving individual drugs from one schedule to another appears in the report only as a longer-term option for government to consider.

The government responded on 16 July 2025. It accepted both exemptions in principle, to be tried through a pilot, accepted the ACMD's points on fixing the licensing system and measuring the effect, and rejected a third recommendation on manufacturers as drafted. Import and export would still need a licence. The response set no start date for the pilot.

Read that closely and the shape is clear. For a university lab or an approved hospital trial, the plan gives psilocybin most of what Schedule 2 would give it, without moving psilocybin to Schedule 2. The label stays. The paperwork, for qualifying research, goes. That lets the government ease the research complaint while keeping the formal position that psilocybin has no recognised medical use, which is the one statement campaigners most wanted changed and the one the Home Office has never conceded.

Whether that counts as a win depends on what you wanted. For a trial team waiting a year on a licence, it is most of the prize. For anyone hoping rescheduling would lead toward prescriptions, it is a detour round the question rather than an answer to it.

Why won't the Home Office just move it?

Because its stated order of events runs the other way. The 2022 petition response set it out: a psilocybin product would first need a marketing authorisation from the MHRA, the medicines regulator, and only then would the ACMD consider where it belongs in the schedules. Licence first, list second.

There is precedent for that order. Sativex, the cannabis-based mouth spray in our look at medical cannabis in the UK, was moved into Schedule 4 in 2013 after it had been licensed as a medicine. The schedule followed the licence.

Campaigners call this a loop. A licence needs large trials, and the trials are slower and dearer because the drug is in Schedule 1. The research exemption is the government's attempt to cut that loop without conceding the principle, which is probably why it got further than any rescheduling request did.

The loop can also be skipped when the politics demand it. In 2018 cannabis-based products for medicinal use went into Schedule 2 within months, after cases involving children with severe epilepsy dominated the news, and without waiting for a licensed product. Australia took its own route in July 2023, letting specially authorised psychiatrists prescribe psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression under tight controls. Both were policy choices. Neither says anything about what the evidence will show, and neither has a UK equivalent in motion for psilocybin today.

What should you watch for next?

Three things would tell you the position has moved, and none of them is a headline about a trial result.

• Regulations laid before Parliament amending the 2001 Regulations to create the research exemption. Until that statutory instrument exists, the pilot is a commitment on paper.
• An MHRA marketing authorisation application for a psilocybin medicine. On the Home Office's own logic, that is what reopens the scheduling question.
• A Home Office commission to the ACMD on psilocybin specifically, rather than on Schedule 1 in general.

None of these changes anything for someone found with mushrooms outside a licensed study. The rescheduling fight is about the lab and, eventually, the clinic. Adult legalisation is a different and much longer argument, and as with cannabis, nobody honest can give you a date for it.

High in Hackney is a waitlist for the day UK law changes for adults, for cannabis and for psilocybin. Nothing is sold here and nothing can be until Parliament acts, but the people on the list hear first when it does. Join the waitlist