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No psychiatric treatment has attracted quite as much cash and hype as psychedelics have in the past decade. Articles about the drugs’ surprising results—including large improvements on depression scores and inducing smokers to quit after just a few doses—earned positive coverage from countless journalists (present company included). Organizations researching psychedelics raised millions of dollars, and clinicians promoted their potential to be a “new paradigm” in mental-health care. Michael Pollan’s 2018 psychedelics book, How to Change Your Mind, became a best seller and a Netflix documentary. Psychedelics were made out to be a safe solution for society’s most challenging mental-health problems.But the bubble has started to burst: It’s been a bad year for fans of psychedelics.A few months ago, two articles appeared, one in The New York Times and another in Business Insider, that portrayed major figures in psychedelics research as evangelists whose enthusiasm for the drugs compromised the integrity of their findings. In August, the FDA rejected the first application for therapy assisted by MDMA, the drug commonly known as ecstasy, saying that it “could not be approved based on data submitted to date,” according to the company that brought the application, Lykos. And five people, including two doctors, were recently charged in the death of the Friends actor Matthew Perry, who was found unconscious in his pool after he took large doses of the psychedelic ketamine. (Three of the five have reached plea agreements; the other two pleaded not guilty.)These incidents, though unrelated, point to a problem for psychedelic research: Many of the studies underpinning these substances’ healing powers are weak, marred by a true-believer mentality among its researchers and an underreporting of adverse side effects, which threatens to undermine an otherwise bright frontier in mental-health treatment.[Read: Psychedelics open your brain. You might not like what falls in.]Psychedelics are by nature challenging to research because most of them are illegal, and because blinding subjects as to whether they’ve taken the drug itself or a placebo is difficult. (Sugar pills generally do not make you hallucinate.) For years, scientific funding in the space was minimal, and many foundational psychedelic studies have sample sizes of just a few dozen participants.The field also draws eccentric types who, rather than conducting research with clinical disinterest, tend to want psychedelics to be accepted by society. “There’s been really this cultlike utopian vision that’s been driving things,” Matthew W. Johnson, himself a prominent psychedelic researcher at Sheppard Pratt, a mental-health hospital in Baltimore, told me.Johnson, who has published many studies on psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, recently left his lab at Johns Hopkins after a dispute with Roland Griffiths, a senior researcher with whom he worked closely. Griffiths, who died last year, said in talks that psychedelics might be “critical to the survival of the human species.” He also behaved like a “spiritual leader,” according to a complaint by Johnson obtained by The New York Times, ran “his psychedelic studies more like a ‘new-age’ retreat center,” and recommended spiritual literature and meditation classes to study participants. Johnson argued that Griffiths’s emphasis on the metaphysical risked steering study participants toward his desired outcomes.Albert Garcia-Romeu, the current associate director of the Hopkins psychedelics lab, disputes this description of Griffiths and the lab in general. “I never saw him behave like a ‘spiritual leader,’ or running the lab like a ‘new-age retreat center,’ whatever that means,” Garcia-Romeu told me. He noted that researchers have long used psychedelics to explore spiritual experiences but that “there was no imposition of any particular beliefs going on.”Still, Griffiths isn’t the only one who zealously promoted psychedelics. Take Rick Doblin, the founder of an organization called the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. He, too, is prone to grandiose thinking, saying he believed psychedelics could be “an antidote to evil” or might lead to a more “spiritualized humanity.” Doblin also encouraged marijuana use at work, arguing that there are “smokable tasks,” which some people “do better while under the influence of marijuana, such as working on complicated spreadsheets.” (Betty Aldworth, the director of education at MAPS, told me that Doblin was “adamant about the science being valid and proving out the answers to these questions through clinical trials.” Doblin did not reply to a request for comment.)Neşe Devenot, a Johns Hopkins writing instructor and a former MAPS volunteer, told me that many people in the psychedelics field let their political and spiritual beliefs “influenc[e] the type of data that is being collected. The researchers should have more clinical equipoise and not be so assured of what works.”Inside Lykos, a MAPS spinoff, many staffers were sold on the presumed benefits of MDMA, according to Stat News. One trial participant said her Lykos therapists told her she was “helping make history” and was “part of a movement.” The company failed to collect data on some of the side effects of MDMA, such as euphoria, that might have revealed the drug’s potential for abuse, Stat reported. (In a statement to Stat News, the company stood by its studies, saying that they were conducted with appropriate checks and balances and that the company did add data on positive side effects to some protocols.)Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that several participants in the Lykos studies said they felt pressured to report only good outcomes. Three of them said that their thoughts of suicide worsened after they took the MDMA, but that these deteriorations weren’t captured by the study results. (In response to the Journal, Lykos said it reported any significant increases in suicidality to the FDA.)The FDA is reportedly now looking into Lykos’s data, and the journal Psychopharmacology retracted three papers stemming from MAPS’ early MDMA trials because of “protocol violations amounting to unethical conduct.” (MAPS’ Aldworth says the studies should have been revised instead of retracted. Lykos did not respond to a request for comment.)The underreporting of adverse events and overhyping of tepid data appear to be widespread in psychedelic research. One review concluded that in many studies of psychedelics, adverse events “were not systematically assessed” and are therefore probably underreported.And although esketamine (a ketamine-like nasal spray) was approved by the FDA in 2019, one 2021 review noted that there is “a paucity of data concerning long-term safety” of ketamine and esketamine, and a 2023 review found that esketamine’s negative side effects have been systematically underreported in journal articles. Some researchers overstate ketamine’s benefits and underplay its risks, according to a recent review article.Many people taking ketamine for mental-health issues use the drug repeatedly for weeks or months, but little long-term safety data on the drug exist, says Boris Heifets, an anesthesiology and psychiatry professor at Stanford. For some, the drug’s dissociative effects can become addictive—Matthew Perry was injecting the drug six to eight times a day, prosecutors said, and he spent $55,000 on it in the month before he died. “You’re giving a drug that most definitely has abuse potential, and you’re giving it out online, without supervision, to anybody who can convince you they’re depressed,” Heifets told me. “It’s honestly a little fucked up.”[Read: A new chapter in the science of psychedelic microdosing]In a recent study conducted by Heifets, surgeons administered ketamine or a saline placebo to patients who were undergoing surgical anesthesia. Unlike patients in many psychedelic studies, these were truly blinded: They were unconscious, so those who got ketamine didn’t have a ketamine trip. It turned out that about half of both groups, ketamine and placebo, felt less depressed afterward. And those who felt less depressed assumed they had gotten ketamine.In other words, ketamine did work, a little. But so did the placebo. Heifets attributes this effect to the extensive care and attention that all the study participants received before the procedure. The researchers told them that their mental health is important, and listened to them talk about their problems—in some cases, for hours. They told them that ketamine might make them feel better. To Heifets, this shows that rather than jumping to ketamine, doctors would do well to connect depressed people with caring, attentive therapists as a first step. (But “good luck finding one,” he acknowledged.)These scientific shortcomings don’t seem to be dampening the enthusiasm about psychedelics. Hundreds of ketamine clinics across the country purport to treat conditions as varied as anxiety and chronic pain, and online services will send ketamine to people’s homes. An initiative to legalize psychedelics will be on the ballot in Massachusetts in November. Veterans’ groups and others are clamoring for the legalization of psychedelic therapies. This is understandable, because these drugs do show promise, especially for treating depression, PTSD, and certain types of addiction. The alternatives—bouncing between SSRIs or scrambling to find an in-network therapist—are bleak, and they fail plenty of desperate people. No new PTSD treatments have been approved in two decades. Some people truly have been cured of their ailments with short, monitored courses of psychedelics.But the intense interest in psychedelics makes it only more important that the science behind them is as rigorous as possible, untainted by the personal views of researchers. Suggesting that people should get off proven medications in order to try MDMA or psilocybin is dangerous unless those drugs are backed by airtight evidence. And when dealing with psychologically vulnerable people, researchers would do well to align expectations with the reality of what psychedelics can actually accomplish.

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Hurricane Milton rapidly intensified before it made landfall. How much did climate change play a role in its devastation? The deadly and destructive hurricanes this year have torn through enormous swaths of the country and reached places where people have never experienced such disasters in their lives. Beryl, Debbie, Francine, Helene, and Milton all made landfall in the continental United States in a season that’s shaping up to be well above average and may set all-time records for hurricane activity. The storms have stunned and alarmed experts who have been tracking these cyclones for decades. And there’s still more than a month to go in the season.  What you’ll learn in this story • How climate change is contributing to increasing hurricane risk. • What climate change cannot be blamed for. • The other ways in which human activity is contributing to more severe hurricanes. Several factors converged to make 2024 so fertile for tropical storms. Hurricanes feed on warm water, and the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico provided ample nourishment as they reached record-high temperatures. Wind shear — where air currents change speed and direction with altitude — tends to rip apart tropical storms before they can form hurricanes, but there was little of that this year due in part to the ripple effects of the shift to La Niña in the Pacific Ocean.  In a warming world, it’s reasonable to ask how climate change is affecting the storms we’ve seen: How much of the damage can we trace back to our ravenous appetite for fossil fuels? And how much worse are storms like these going to get?  There are strengthening links between climate change and the most deadly aspects of hurricanes, but climate change isn’t the only way humanity is enhancing the devastation of these disasters.  How hurricanes work, and how climate change can make them worse Some types of extreme weather have a robust connection to climate change. As average temperatures rise, heat waves get hotter, for example. But severe weather events like hurricanes are more complicated, arising from local, regional, and global ingredients, making humanity’s specific role harder to discern.  One way to model a hurricane is as a heat engine, a device that harnesses a temperature gradient to do work. Your car likely has a heat engine that uses gasoline to heat air inside a cylinder that presses on a piston to turn your wheels. Hurricanes are heat engines that use hot water to move air.  When warm water evaporates from the surface of the ocean, it cools down the surrounding water, similar to how evaporating sweat cools your skin. As low atmospheric pressure settles over an area of hot ocean water, convection elevates that evaporating water up to high, chilly altitudes, where it then condenses and warms the air around it, forming a convective storm. The warm air surrounded by cooler air creates a temperature gradient that generates wind. If it’s large enough, the Earth’s rotation induces a spin into the storm.  The stronger the contrast between the hot and cool portions of the storm, the more intense the cyclone.  Higher temperatures across the planet from the rising concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere mean oceans can accumulate more heat, and warmer air can hold onto more moisture, encouraging more evaporation.  “The more greenhouse gas, the more potential there is for stronger winds and hurricanes,” said Kerry Emanuel, an emeritus professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the most prolific researchers studying the links between climate change and hurricanes. “For every degree centigrade that you raise the ocean temperature, the wind speed in the hurricane goes up between 5 and 7 percent.”  The other way that climate change can influence hurricanes is through water. While we rank hurricanes by their wind speed, the flooding that they leave in their wake is what tends to cause the most fatalities and property damage.  Warming across the planet is causing ice on land to melt, increasing the quantity of water in the oceans. The water is also expanding as it heats up. These two phenomena cause sea level rise. So when a hurricane makes landfall, particularly with high winds, it can push water further inland and cause storm surges to reach greater heights. And again, warmer air can hold onto more moisture. For every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) increase in air temperature, air can retain 7 percent more water. That means when a major storm occurs, it can dish out more rain and cause greater flooding.  So climate change can increase the destructive potential of hurricanes. But having all the raw materials present needed to build a dangerous hurricane doesn’t mean that one will be assembled. Compared to weather events like thunderstorms and heat waves, hurricanes are relatively rare; there are only a couple dozen tropical storms in the Atlantic Ocean in a given year and a smaller subset of them ever reach hurricane strength.  Hurricanes demand a precise sequence of actions to form, and there’s a lot that can disrupt this choreography, such as wind shear, atmospheric stability, or dust from the Sahara Desert.  And scientists still aren’t clear what governs the total number of cyclones across Earth. Even in 2024, when there was ample high-octane fuel for hurricanes all season in the Atlantic, there was a lull in cyclone activity before gargantuan storms like Helene and Milton erupted.   “Conditions have to be kind of perfect for that to happen,” Emanuel said. “But they do become perfect once in a while.” Climate change does not seem to be changing the number of hurricanes The world has already heated up by about 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. There’s some evidence of this warming playing out in various hurricane traits, but there are also places where it’s absent.  “There’s never been a consensus among the scientific community who actually studies hurricanes about the overall frequency of hurricanes when it comes to climate change,” Emanuel said.  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international team of climate scientists convened by the United Nations, put out their latest comprehensive assessment of the body of climate science last year. It was the sixth iteration of the report, but for the first time, authors included a chapter on weather extremes. When it comes to tropical cyclones like hurricanes, they found that there wasn’t an increase in the overall number of these storms, particularly when looking at the ones that made landfall in the United States.  “A subset of the best-track data corresponding to hurricanes that have directly impacted the USA since 1900 is considered to be reliable, and shows no trend in the frequency of USA landfall events,” according to the IPCC report.  Hurricanes are relatively infrequent weather events, and their numbers naturally vary year to year and decade to decade, making it harder to suss out a specific trend due to climate change. There has been an increase in hurricane activity in the Atlantic since the 1980s, with more cyclones and an increase in stronger hurricanes. However, it’s not clear how much of this is due to a normal pattern of high and low activity versus human-caused warming.  The IPCC authors also note that there isn’t great data on hurricanes going back over the whole time humans have been burning fossil fuels since the mid-18th century. “This should not be interpreted as implying that no physical (real) trends exist, but rather as indicating that either the quality or the temporal length of the data is not adequate to provide robust trend detection statements, particularly in the presence of multi-decadal variability,” they wrote. Which is to say, scientists need more observations and more time to confirm whether climate change is having any influence on the number of hurricanes.  Global warming is making the most worrying parts of a hurricane more dangerous That said, the IPCC report does show hurricanes changing in ways beyond their overall numbers. One is that hurricanes in recent decades have likely been shifting toward the poles, farther away from their normal habitat in the tropics. That makes sense knowing that hurricanes need warm water, around 80 degrees Fahrenheit, so hotter oceans mean these storms can have a greater range.  Another changing trait is that hurricanes appear to be moving slower. That means the storms that make landfall spend more time parked over a given region, forcing the area to endure more wind and rainfall. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 was an exemplar of this as it sauntered along the Texas coast at 5 miles per hour and drenched Houston.  Rapid intensification is a climate change hallmark as well. This is where a tropical storm gains 35 miles per hour or more in windspeed in 24 hours. Hurricane Milton rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane with winds up to 180 miles per hour in just one day. The IPCC found that the global frequency of rapid intensification in tropical cyclones has likely increased over the past 40 years to an extent that can’t be explained by natural variability alone.  One of the strongest signals of climate change in hurricanes is rain. The average and maximum rainfall rates from hurricanes are increasing, largely a function of rising water and air temperatures. More recently, some researchers have begun to connect the increase in rainfall from individual hurricanes to climate change. The World Weather Attribution research group analyzed the rain from Hurricane Helene. They found the precipitation from the storm was 10 percent heavier due to climate change and that such extreme rain is now 40 to 70 percent more likely because of warming. Looking at Hurricane Milton, the researchers reported that heavy one-day rain events like those spawned from the storm are at least 20 to 30 percent more probable.  Emanuel, however, is hesitant to read too much into the precision of these direct attribution studies for individual storms, particularly when it comes to rainfall. For one thing, rain is much harder to measure than temperature. The amount of rainfall can vary a lot over a short distance and rain gauges aren’t spread out evenly, so ground-based measurements are patchy. Meanwhile, radar is a coarse measure of precipitation.  “The theory is crystal clear, and if you treat this as a problem of risk, undoubtedly these storms have produced more rain than they would have if the atmosphere were cooler. It’s a slam dunk,” Emanuel said. “To be able to say in a particular storm, ‘So much of the rain was caused by climate change,’ I think that’s going out on a limb.” However, as average temperatures continue to rise, many of these hurricane trait knobs will continue to turn to higher levels and more robust signs of humanity’s role will likely emerge. There’s an upper limit to how strong a hurricane can get, but the Earth hasn’t hit that ceiling yet. “The potential intensity can still go up,” Emanuel said. “We might see records being broken 50 years from now, we might have 220-mile-per-hour hurricanes.”  Climate change isn’t the only way we’re increasing hurricane threats If you expand the question of “How does climate change affect hurricanes?” to “How do people affect hurricanes?” there are other variables to consider as well.  One factor is aerosols, tiny particles suspended in the air. These aerosols can come from natural sources like dust, but they can also rise out of smokestacks and tailpipes attached to generators and engines burning fuels like coal and diesel. In the atmosphere, their presence can suppress hurricane formation. They can also block out enough sunlight to cause a measurable drop in the temperature below. Higher concentrations of aerosols can thus lead to fewer hurricanes.  As governments across North America and Europe implemented new air pollution regulations over the past 40 years, the amount of aerosols over the Atlantic Ocean declined. That helped drive the rise in tropical cyclones in the Atlantic over this time period, according to a 2022 study in the journal Science. More recently, the International Maritime Organization imposed new pollution regulations on ships in 2020 that led to a 10 percent drop in sulfur dioxide aerosol pollution around the world. That may have helped push the Atlantic Ocean to record high temperatures.  The other major variable is that a growing number of people and properties are now in the paths of these storms, even far away from coastlines. That means when a hurricane makes landfall, it threatens to kill more people and destroy more homes. The rising exposure to extreme weather coupled with inflation means that extreme weather events in general are extracting a far higher price in lives and livelihoods.  Conversely, it shows there are ways to reduce the harm from hurricanes, even as they spool up faster, pour out more rain, and linger longer. It demands careful planning and sound policies, as well as some difficult decisions about where people can live. And it remains prudent to curb climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible, as fast as possible. 

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