NYU launching $10M Center for Psychedelic Medicine in Manhattan

New York University wants to expand our minds — but in a trippy new way.

NYU Langone Health’s Department of Psychiatry plans to establish a Center for Psychedelic Medicine, a hallucinatory hub that will support research on treating addiction, chronic pain, opioid addiction and “existential distress” — among other physical and emotional maladies — using psychedelics. NYU researchers are already involved in studies on the treatment of alcoholism, anxiety and major depressive disorder with psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) and the treatment of severe PTSD with MDMA (also known as ecstasy and molly).

The program, announced Wednesday, will also be the home base for NYU’s new Psychedelic Medicine Research Training Program, which will attempt to make psychedelic medicine more mainstream and increase the number of experts in the field.