Most U.S. voters want to make it easier to study psychedelics, and almost half think psychedelics should be legalized for therapeutic use, a new survey finds. The results suggest a broad surge in support for loosening restrictions on research into substances such as psilocybin and MDMA to probe their potential for medical use.
The poll included more than 1,500 U.S. voters and was conducted by the U.C. Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP) at the University of California, Berkeley, in April 2025. Some 63 percent of respondents said they “strongly support” lowering the barriers to study psychedelics—a jump of about 14 percent from a similar poll conducted in 2023, when 49 percent of respondents reported the same.
And 46 percent of voters also said they “strongly support” making the therapeutic use of psychedelics legal compared with 36 percent in 2023. Forty-one percent said they’d strongly support making psychedelics available by prescription, which polled at just 29 percent in 2023. Support for decriminalizing psychedelics, meanwhile, has remained relatively flat at around 28 percent. Currently, possession of psychedelics such as LSD, MDMA and psilocybin is illegal at the federal level in the U.S.
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Amanda Montañez; Source: A Rising Tide of Cautious Support. Tyrone J. Sgambati et al. U.C. Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, University of California, Berkeley, May 13, 2026 (data)
The findings reflect “increasing public acceptance” of psychedelic treatments, says Mason Marks, a senior fellow of a project on psychedelics at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. But he notes that concepts such as “decriminalization” and legalization for “therapeutic use” may hold distinct meanings to different people, and further research could seek to understand why people answered those questions the way they did.
“People are being flooded with information, and increasingly so, it seems, about psychedelics,” says Tyrone Sgambati, a co-author of the report and a postdoctoral research scientist at BCSP. “I think that kind of piques people’s curiosity and spurs a desire for more information and potentially to better understand purported benefits.” Still, the findings suggest there doesn’t seem to be as great of an appetite for changing these drugs’ status under the law, he says, which suggests some caution remains.
More information as to these substances’ potential could be coming. In April President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at boosting research on psychedelic therapies, which experts say could help lower barriers to studying psilocybin, MDMA, ibogaine, and more.
Although the survey was conducted before Trump’s executive order in April, the results indicate that, from 2023 to 2025 at least, there was “increasing public appetite” for the kind of policies laid out in that order, Sgambati says. “They do seem to be pointing in the same direction.”
