WE HAVE ENTERED THE ERA OF CONSERVATIVE PSYCHEDELIA
Where does this leave the hippies, heretics, and hedonists—in other words, the rest of us?
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The high holidays of Bicycle Day and 4/20 are usually a time for getting so high your brains bleed out your eyes, but this year, the news felt more disorienting than the drugs themselves. On April 18, Trump signed an executive order that lifted federal roadblocks to psychedelic research—the most monumental leap in drug policy reform since the Nixon era. The executive order, which also directly funds $50 million towards research into an obscure psychedelic called ibogaine, officially launched us out of the DARE chapter and into a new era of conservative psychedelia. No longer associated with the wacky conspirituality of the Q-Anon shaman, the right-wing psychedelic movement is now characterized by a sense of moral justness and bleeding-heart patriotism that recodes these substances as Godly and righteous.
It is mind-boggling that the cosmic Right ultimately cinched the political victory that liberal-leaning activists have spent decades fighting for. Yet, in retrospect, this was probably the only way to make psychedelic legalization a truly bipartisan issue, and get conservative Christian legislators on board the proverbial magic bus. So where does this leave the hippies, heretics, and hedonists—in other words, the rest of us?
At this point you’ve probably watched snippets of the Oval Office scene, or caught some of the countless memes. If not, it’s worth going over some of the surreal highlights. First, Joe Rogan, who helped broker the deal, stood right behind the President and opened with a speech about how the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 was actually a government attack on the Civil Rights movement—not about the dangers of the drugs themselves. This was remarkable, because it shows how the racist roots of the War on Drugs has become an accepted truth, even on the tough-on-crime Right. Another stunning admission from Rogan is that it only took a couple texts about ibogaine’s effectiveness on opioid addiction to prompt Trump’s move. While pharma companies like Lykos and Compass have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get these drugs rescheduled through the clinical-trials-to-FDA pipeline, Rogan’s influencer clout turned out to be a direct line into the President’s approval. “[Trump’s] text came back: ‘Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let’s do it,’” Rogan said. “It was literally that quick.”
Notably, ibogaine was the only psychedelic compound specifically mentioned in the executive order, which also directed $50 million towards accelerating research into the drug. Much of this will flow into Texas, which has already committed $50 million of taxpayer dollars into its own ibogaine clinical trials. Seemingly overnight, a drug that the average person has never even heard of before this week has become the dark horse frontrunner of the psychedelic movement. “Can I have some, please?” Trump joked as he struggled to pronounce the word “ibogaine.” “I’ll take whatever it takes. I don’t have time to be depressed.” Then he put his pen to paper, and boasted that this was getting done under his administration—not Biden’s.
I’d been hearing hints that this moment was coming from sources in Texas, where I spent a lot of last month reporting on conservative psychedelia and ibogaine. Austin, in particular, is becoming America’s next psychedelic frontier—a place where a fierce commitment to libertarianism and independent thinking has incubated a new wave of culture operating outside of traditional party lines. While chasing the story at SXSW (and swiping all the cringey free shit I could find), one afternoon I followed a group of policemen into a hotel where ex-Texas governor Rick Perry was moderating a panel on the wonders of ibogaine. As we rode up the hotel escalator together, I realized the cops were looking for the same talk, and expressed my surprise that they were psychedelic enthusiasts. “I’m looking for samples!” one of them laughed. Another cop told me that actually, a lot of police and first-responders have tuned into psychedelics ever since the movement shifted its focus towards PTSD and veterans; he also recommended that I check out In Waves and War, a Netflix documentary about former Navy SEALs going to Mexico to take 5-MeO-DMT and ibogaine.
Inside the darkened ballroom, Perry, who has fashioned himself into the folksy elder statesman of right-wing psychedelia in his late-stage career, discussed how Texas was able to pass a bill through its extremely conservative government. “We focus on the veterans, because the veterans population is a very sellable population to go to the legislature with,” Perry said. To his left, Americans for Ibogaine founder Bryan Hubbard embodied the soul of the movement, speaking with the fiery poetry of an evangelical preacher about how ibogaine is the antidote to this country’s spiritual famine—a way to save everyone who is “lethally estranged from their soul.” Hubbard, who cut his teeth as a lawyer in Kentucky in charge of the state’s opioid abatement program, railed against the broken healthcare system as “fictitious legal realities designed to do violence to legitimate reality” by “monetizing sustained human misery.” Delivering his elegant diatribes in a strong Appalachian twang, Hubbard sounded like the Terence McKenna of this generation.
Then Perry disclosed that he had been an “anonymous 73-year-old” who’d participated in a Stanford study on ibogaine, and afterwards, the neurosurgeon looking over his scans was shocked that the atrophy in Perry’s brain was “completely gone”—a miracle! Leaning into a sense of pathos, Perry said that even though his political consultant had warned him not to throw away his reputation on “hippie shit,” the lives of veterans, these young men and women who have served our nation, were more important than his name. “I’ve become completely convinced of the efficacy of this medicine,” Perry said slowly, drawing out each word in an East Texan drawl. “What we are on the verge of can literally change the trajectory of the world we live in. I believe that with all my heart.”
Ibogaine’s sudden star turn is a fascinating plot twist because it allowed the conservative coalition to sidestep psychedelics’ countercultural baggage. The drug is derived from a West African shrub called iboga, and has little recreational use outside of psychedelic retreats, scientific studies, and indigenous practices; unlike MDMA or mushrooms, “no one’s ever going to hear about an ibogaine rave,” as Hubbard likes to say. Hubbard also often recounts how his experience on the drug was brutal and not something he’s eager to do again. This is because an ibogaine trip is extremely, and sometimes excruciatingly, long—with an intense visionary peak within 8 to 12 hours, and lingering side effects including nausea and a sense of stimmy up-ness for up to 72 hours. Ibogaine also has a significant risk of cardiac events, including fatal arrhythmias, that has resulted in 38 documented deaths since 1990—it’s therefore physically much edgier than the classic psychedelics, making ketamine’s effects on blood pressure look like child’s play. For this reason, careful medical supervision is required, and some patients spend the entire trip in a hospital bed.
That said, I know at least one psychonaut who is into microdosing iboga root bark powder to combat addictive impulses, so “recreational” use does happen, but right now, only amongst the very deep heads. That psychonaut told me that he buys the powder on the clear web, and the drug “meets the moment as far as people’s frustrations with the compulsive energy that’s around.”
You could argue that ibogaine’s anti-recreational traits fit into the Christian model of suffering and penance for sins—this idea that one has to undergo a transformative ordeal in order to gain salvation. The pleasure of tripping balls is never mentioned by Hubbard, who in his cowboy boots and blue jeans, is about as far as you can get from the Day-Glo Pranksters guzzling acid orange juice while trying to dose the world. When Hubbard takes the pulpit, he speaks of ibogaine instead in reverent tones, positioning it as a God-given molecule that’s the antidote to the spiritual famine fueling America’s opioid crisis—an impoverished void he experienced first-hand in Kentucky. This framing, along with the grassroots veteran movement that has coalesced around it, has been key to advancing ibogaine. “Democrats early on were like, yes, we support this, but we’re not going to get tagged as the druggies,” explained Logan Davidson, Policy Director of Texans for Greater Mental Health and a key lobbyist behind Texas’ ibogaine bill. “That’s where the conservative influence provides cover. Each side gets permission from the other side to do this.”
While this week’s news was a monumental step forward for the entire psychedelic movement, there is no doubt that the conservative coalition is building on decades of cultural normalization and policy victories built by liberal activists—such as those who successfully fought for decriminalization in Oregon and Colorado, How to Change Your Mind titan Michael Pollan, and Rick Doblin the founder of MAPS, whose advocacy around MDMA trailblazed the path for what’s happening today. Yet, none of those people were in the room when Trump signed the order. Psychedelia’s swing from the vehemently anti-war era of the 60s to its contemporary framing as a patriotic duty to veterans—at a time when the United States is engaged in multiple high-stakes global conflicts—is particularly complex. Trump himself pivoted to Iran in the middle of signing the order, mentioning that roadside bombs that maimed many American veterans were supplied by the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who was killed in a 2020 drone strike he’d ordered—“that was Iran that did that,” he said, before going back to the issue at hand. While none of the leftists I’ve spoken to over the last few months have advocated for denying veterans psychedelic care (in fact, many are actively involved in veterans groups), the increasing militarization of psychedelics is an issue that few seem to have a coherent stance on. Most are choosing to have a “wait and see” approach around what comes next.
On the same weekend that Trump’s executive order was issued, many members of the psychedelic left gathered at Psychedelic Culture, a conference in San Francisco organized by the Chacruna Institute, a non-profit that describes its mission as “[advancing] psychedelic justice through… uplifting the voices of women, queer people, Indigenous peoples, people of color, and the Global South.” On the last day of the conference, at a closing panel that featured MAPS leadership Rick Doblin, Ismael Ali, and Betty Aldworth, a small group of protestors disrupted the conversation to question MAPS’ ongoing work in Israel, where researchers have been conducting group MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for survivors of the Hamas attacks as well as IDF veterans with PTSD. I was not at the conference, but I’ve watched a video clip of the incident, and news of the disruption trickled its way to me via friends who were present—the TLDR, they said, was that the protestors were trying to get Doblin to denounce what’s happening in Gaza as a genocide. Doblin refused to use the “g” word, but Ali, a Muslim-American who took over as co-Executive Director of MAPS last year, stepped forward and did use the term while the audience erupted in applause.
Of course, this incident didn’t capture the full breadth of the discourse at the Chacruna conference, and protestors holding leaders’ feet to the fire is generally a good thing. But the contrast between typical leftist infighting—over the use of a word—while the Right stood in the White House scoring a historic win was too-perfect of a snapshot of the moment. The next day, I called Ali to discuss the disruption, and he told me he’d had an extended conversation with the protestors about MAPS’ work in both Israel and the West Bank. Then Ali cited Doblin’s remark in 2023, after MAPS’ own conference was disrupted by protestors around indigenous issues. “[Rick] was like, it’s a good sign that protests are happening, because it shows there’s still a revolutionary spirit in the movement.”
Our conversation then turned to the executive order. Ali noted that some people at the conference were upset that MAPS’ pioneering work is being sidelined; neither Doblin nor Ali were included in the White House’s official press release which featured statements from many industry and government leaders applauding the move. “We didn’t have to be in the room to have set the groundwork to make that possible,”Ali said. “This was a threshold moment in the field. Trump, in a backhanded sort of way, interrupted the partisan cycle around drug policy.”
Yet, even though MAPS released its own statement applauding the federal action, Ali’s comments at the Chacruna conference were more candid. Responding to the protestors, he said that he and Doblin have spent years debating with each other about what happens when psychedelic therapists work with active duty soldiers—are they just making it ok for them to go back to war? One of the insights from their studies, he noted, is that many veterans who go through psychedelic healing realize they were going to war on behalf of a system that never really cared about them. “That doesn’t mean they all become peaceniks,” he said, “But a lot of them do.”
Ali then spoke to the predicament that he and the leftist movement’s leadership are facing. “When you’re trying to appeal to the worst people in the world, it’s really important that you don’t tell them that people who commit violence regret it after taking psychedelics,” he said. “If we’re really trying to change culture with psychedelic science, it’s really giving master’s tools, master’s house.”
However, when I pressed him further on where these recent developments leave the psychedelic left, Ali deferred—he’d had a long day full of interviews, and admittedly, my brain was starting to hurt too. Instead, he left me with an open-ended question: “We’ve appealed to the worst people in the world,” he said. “Congratulations, we’ve succeeded. Is that really what success is?