How much should psychedelics researchers disclose about their personal use?

Personal psychedelic experience among researchers and therapists raises ethical tradeoffs in clinical trials. Disclosing personal use can build empathy, reduce stigma, and strengthen trust with patients, but it can also introduce expectancy and bias that affect outcomes, weaken blinding, and shape participants’ judgments of scientific credibility. The suggested solution is “scoped transparency,” a limited, standardized approach to sharing relevant personal use and advocacy through institutional channels like conflict-of-interest forms, ethics review, and trial role decisions. The aim is to reduce ad hoc public disclosure that contaminates results while still managing bias risk and protecting study integrity through procedures such as limiting direct answers about personal use during dosing and outcome visits. The essay argues that funders, regulators, and journals should require protocols to spell out how expectancy and staff experiential conflicts will be measured and managed.