MAGA’s favorite psychedelic

The Trump administration has a surprising new agenda item: It’s all-in on legalizing a psychedelic drug called ibogaine. 

Ibogaine is classified as a Schedule I drug, which means it’s illegal on the federal level. But some studies show it may be able to treat opioid addiction, and researchers are also hopeful that it can help with PTSD.

It’s that second use that has caught the White House’s ear. Veterans and veterans’ groups have been lobbying hard for ibogaine as a way to treat PTSD and traumatic brain injuries. Last month, they made some headway on that project when President Donald Trump signed an executive order to fast-track the Food and Drug Administration review process.

Mattha Busby, a freelance journalist writing about drug policy and other topics, told Today, Explained guest host Jonquilyn Hill that, naturally, podcaster Joe Rogan was also involved. Busby spoke with Hill about what ibogaine does, how the right got into psychedelics, and whether the FDA could soon approve some of them for use.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

When did Trump become interested in psychedelics?

Well, he’s famously never smoked a cigarette, had a drink, certainly not had a trip. So in the Oval Office the other week, he’s kind of joking about taking ibogaine. There’s a lot of bravado there, but ibogaine is an incredibly potent psychedelic. It famously gives people sort of recalls of every traumatic moment in their life.

It’s an extracted molecule from a West African — Gabonese, specifically — root bark from a shrub, and basically became known as being able to rid opioid addicts, heroin addicts, of withdrawal symptoms in one trip. 

Ibogaine and psychedelics have now entered the mainstream conversation with the Trump administration talking about legalizing certain psychedelics. How did we get here?

Psychedelics have obviously long belonged to the cultural left, the counterculture, but it seems now there’s almost like a counter-counterculture with these right-wing, mostly Christian former special forces fighters, soldiers in the US Army, that are suffering from really debilitating conditions — from PTSD and [traumatic brain injuries] — and they’ve basically figured out that ibogaine and other psychedelics provide them the relief that conventional medicines don’t.

How is Joe Rogan involved in the policymaking here?

He’s had figures talking about psychedelics on his podcast since it began. The original sort of bro-cast dude, Aubrey Marcus, he’s had the former Texas governor and Trump’s first energy secretary, Rick Perry, on his podcast twice, along with a Kentucky lawyer and ibogaine advocate named Bryan Hubbard, who sounds like a Christian Southern revivalist and always quotes his favorite passage out of Isaiah.

Joe Rogan had this unlikely duo — who have both done ibogaine and are waxing lyrical about the benefits — on his podcast like three weeks before the executive order and they basically said, “Look, Joe, we need to make this happen.” So Joe texts Donald Trump, and apparently Donald Trump responds almost instantaneously saying, “Sounds good. Do you want FDA approval?”

This culminates with Joe Rogan actually going to the White House to attend the signing of an executive order about psychedelics. What’s in that executive order?

The thing about the executive order is it is sort of shouting into the wind a bit, but there is this money to go into the research side.

It has five or six prongs. One of the main ones is that now under [the Right to Try Act] that Trump [signed] in his first term to allow end-of-life patients to try experimental drugs. That will be extended to psychedelics, so long as the DEA doesn’t try and obstruct that process.

There’s $50 million for psychedelic research, most of which it seems is going to support state-led initiatives to investigate ibogaine and allow a US-first human trial. It’s also accelerating the path to a potential approval for psychedelic drugs. Three candidates that just submitted their data got fast-tracked for potential approval, so their applications will be considered more quickly. This would open the floodgates more widely to research.

Do you expect the FDA to say, “This is great, go ahead, use psychedelic drugs, they will help you.”

It’s quite likely really, within this presidency, to see several psychedelic drugs approved now. There was talk about [Joe Biden] setting up a federal task force and helping stuff along, and he didn’t seem to put any political will behind it. Trump has really seized the mantle here and he’s surfing the zeitgeist, as he weirdly seems to be able to on certain topics, all the while outraging and provoking us along the way.

There does seem to be some dissonance here, though. The GOP traditionally was all about the war on drugs.

There’s a lot of dissonance. I think that broadly, we’re seeing the war on drugs coming to an end little by little, despite the rhetoric, and I think this is a significant threshold moment. 

Trump’s always been kind of outside the Republican Party establishment compared to some previous presidents. It is not like it’s been some sort of topsy-turvy issue. The Democrats, when they’ve come in, there have been piecemeal changes. Joe Biden himself introduced the law when he was a senator to make the punishments for crack cocaine, which is more likely used by people of color, is like 30 times more stringent than for powder cocaine, which is used more often by white people. I think that there’s been a bipartisan war on drugs.

Do we know who’s using psychedelics?

I think the interesting thing with psychedelics now, as opposed to maybe 10 or 15 years ago, is that they’ve crossed the political divide. A lot of people from unexpected segments of society are getting turned on because they are seeing, broadly, the benefits, even while there are serious risks, especially with ibogaine.

There was only one drug named in that executive order: ibogaine. Why?

The veterans. These stories from veterans about the transformative effects of ibogaine have been really difficult to refute politically. Twenty-two veterans, on average, are committing suicide in the US every day. And Trump in the Oval Office, when he signed the order, said that “Since 9/11, we’ve we’ve lost over 21 times more veteran lives to suicide than on the battlefield.”

There are so many [representatives] and senators who are veterans themselves. There was a study from Stanford a couple of years ago that looked at 30 ex-special forces [soldiers] and found that a dose of ibogaine reduced all of their traumatic brain injury significantly.

But we shouldn’t be under any illusions. This is a seriously potent and dangerous psychedelic when used improperly, and there’s been a whole spate of deaths. Indeed, the deaths are probably underreported because the drug disrupts the QT interval in the heart and can lead in some cases to fatal cardiac arrest.

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