We're actually in the middle of a renaissance when it comes to psychedelic drug research. Research essentially ended after the panic in response to Leary's misuse of drugs, and the association of drugs with counter-culture movements in the 60s and 70s... and then in the 80s and 90s we had the much maligned War on Drugs.

Now that it's become more widely accepted that psychedelic drugs are comparatively harmless next to opioids, there's been a HUGE amount of new psychedelic drug research. I attended Horizons (annual NYC conference on psychedelic drug research) several years ago when I was doing my neuroscience undergrad, and was really impressed with how many new studies were coming out. Interesting enough, a lot of it was focused on psilocybin (e.g. treating anxiety in end of life cancer patients), because LSD still has a bit of a bad reputation after Leary. Probably the most interesting researcher I met was a professor in Europe who was doing fMRI scans of grad students on psilocybin. Nowadays, MDMA has been receiving a lot of attention for its potential to treat those with PTSD.

Anyways, super rambling response, but there's reason to be more optimistic about psychedelic research compared to decades past.

Nothing will happen until psychedelics are rescheduled. It's a travesty that even the "natural" tryptamines (psilocybin/psilocin and DMT) can't be researched more easily.

The main barrier to more psychedelic research is funding / $$ - far more than anything else.

In the US, access to research funding is a far larger issue than scheduling. The main benefit of rescheduling would likely be through its indirect benefits on access to funding.

Source: I’ve talked with multiple researchers who are studying psychedelics.