On a Tuesday morning in September 2023 in a medical clinic just outside of Tijuana, Mexico, Rick Perry, the former Republican presidential candidate, energy secretary and Texas governor, lay down on a mattress, put on an eye mask and soon began to believe that he was hurtling through space.
Objects flew past him. Some of them appeared to resemble Maya hieroglyphics. He saw an arm reaching out for him, and attached to it was a figure with horns. “Satan, get behind me,” he heard himself say. The figure instantly disappeared.
Mr. Perry’s hallucinations, induced by the powerful psychotropic drug ibogaine he had taken about 45 minutes before putting on his eye mask, continued for more than 12 hours. The experience was an ordeal. He vomited intermittently and lost much of his body coordination. It took all of Wednesday to recover.
But on Thursday morning, Mr. Perry recalled in describing his experience publicly for the first time, “I woke up very clearheaded, with this very warm feeling in my body. I was as calm and as happy as I’d been in memory.”
Since that experience, Mr. Perry, 75, a social conservative, has emerged as a leading champion of ibogaine as a potential treatment for brain trauma, addiction and even cognitive decline.
He was an unlikely keynote speaker at the Psychedelic Science Conference in Denver in June. His allies in the effort include the former senator Kyrsten Sinema, a progressive on social issues who underwent ibogaine treatment in May with the aim of preventing dementia of the sort that claimed her grandmother a few years ago. In an interview, Ms. Sinema described Mr. Perry as “one of the few very conservative individuals in this space, with high credibility among what I’d call a nontraditional audience for psychedelic medicine.”
To Mr. Perry, Ms. Sinema and several others who described their ibogaine experiences for this article, the psychoactive compound derived from the bark of the Tabernanthe iboga plant, a Central African rain forest shrub, is a kind of miracle drug. They say it can arrest substance abuse, reduce suicides, reverse neurodegenerative disorders, extend brain life and even reconnect individuals to their spirituality.
“It has literally given people their lives back,” Mr. Perry said. Small recent studies have suggested the drug holds unusual therapeutic potential. One treatment with ibogaine has been shown to achieve significant results.
But the powerful drug comes with risks. Because ibogaine lengthens the time between heartbeats, a user who gets the wrong dosage, is taking other drugs, or whose heart rate is not being monitored during treatment, can go into cardiac arrest. Even under the most scrupulous of circumstances, ibogaine therapy is a long and grueling inward journey that Ms. Sinema described as “the opposite of a pleasant experience.”
It is because of the drug’s potency that Mr. Perry, Ms. Sinema and other ibogaine advocates have adopted a baby-steps approach. Rather than promote wholesale decriminalization, or even widespread availability, they are seeking public funding for the development of an ibogaine compound in the United States, with the initial aim of treating military veterans.
Mr. Perry helped lead a successful effort earlier this year to make Texas the first state to appropriate funds to research the clinical treatment of veterans with ibogaine. During the same time period, Ms. Sinema worked with an Arizona Republican state legislator, Justin Wilmeth, to make Arizona the second state to provide public funding for clinical trials.
Other states, including Mississippi and South Carolina, have discussed scheduling hearings to consider similar ibogaine research. Political leaders in both states have received strategic support from Mr. Perry, who has co-founded the nonprofit Americans for Ibogaine. Mr. Perry, who said he has no financial stake in the effort, now describes his ibogaine crusade as “my life’s mission.”
‘Oops’ and Anxiety
A veteran of 11 local, state and federal campaigns, Mr. Perry still possesses a flair for retail politics. At a cafe in the pint-size Texas town of Round Top near his home, Mr. Perry asked the name and shook the hand of every customer, lingering with those who, like him, wore a Texas A&M class ring. Without looking at the menu, he ordered a cheeseburger from the waitress, whom he addressed by her first name. When the food arrived, Mr. Perry commented favorably on the burger’s Olympian dimensions, then blessed the meal with a short prayer before diving in.
Over lunch, Mr. Perry described his personal journey that led him to become ibogaine’s most prominent ambassador.
His otherwise “bucolic” adolescence on his parents’ farm in Paint Creek, a dot of a town on the plains of West Texas., was marred by three severe concussions, two on the football field and one while unloading a trailer of horses. “I was knocked out for over one minute each time,” Mr. Perry recalled. The concussions “led to some damage to my brain,” he said.
Mr. Perry said that he experienced episodes of “mild to moderate anxiety and insomnia” beginning in 1972, when he was in pilot training for the Air Force. Later, after winning his first race for the Texas State Legislature in 1984, “I came to realize that I’d picked an avocation that tended to exacerbate the anxiety.”
As a three-term Texas governor, Mr. Perry exemplified the Marlboro Man swagger that had been popularized by his predecessor, George W. Bush. “I managed my anxiety,” Mr. Perry said. “No one knew about it, other than my wife and a chief of staff or two.”
But in trying to follow in Mr. Bush’s footsteps by running for president, Mr. Perry said that his anxieties likely got the better of him. During a Republican candidate debate in November 2011, the Texas governor boasted that he would eliminate three federal agencies and proceeded to mention the department of commerce and education. Mr. Perry then froze. Unable to recall his third intended target, the Department of Energy, he weakly mumbled, “Oops.”
The moment became an instant punchline. Two months later, Mr. Perry suspended his presidential campaign.
By then he had concluded that the U.S. government had “absolutely failed” to address the well-being of the troops it had sent into combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. As governor, he often visited the Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, where he encountered veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan with brain injuries, severe burns and PTSD. “The staff would give these kids lollipops to suck on, and the lollipops contained opioids,” he said.
One veteran Mr. Perry became close to was Marcus Luttrell, a former Navy SEAL who moved into the governor’s mansion in Austin. “I had nowhere else to go,” Mr. Luttrell said in an interview. At one point, Mr. Luttrell said that he frantically searched the medicine cabinet of Mr. Perry’s wife, Anita Thigpen Perry, for painkillers and then asked her if she would order a prescription of the powerful opioid OxyContin.
“That’s when I realized how bad this addiction problem was among our veterans,” Mr. Perry said.
In 2017, Mr. Perry became Mr. Trump’s first-term energy secretary — the head of the department he had forgotten to include in his debate litany — and brought on Mr. Luttrell’s twin brother, Morgan Luttrell, another Navy SEAL and a neuroscientist, as part of his team. The following year, Morgan Luttrell told Mr. Perry he would be taking time off to go to Mexico for ibogaine treatment for persistent psychological issues he had faced since returning home from combat.
Morgan Luttrell said that several other Navy SEALs had undergone the treatment and that it had changed their lives for the better.
It was the first Mr. Perry had heard of ibogaine. “Morgan, you need to be careful with that kind of stuff,” Mr. Perry told him.
A Shrub in Gabon
Ibogaine was on a journey of its own.
For centuries, the iboga shrub had been considered a sacred plant among tribes in Gabon, who used it in spiritual ceremonial rites. It was not until the early ’60s that an American, Howard Lotsof, took a powdered form of ibogaine in hopes of curing his addiction to heroin. Immediately afterward, Mr. Lotsof said he his addiction ceased. He became a prominent advocate for the drug.
Despite the efforts of Mr. Lotsof, who died of cancer in 2010, ibogaine became illegal in the U.S. under the 1970 Controlled Substances Act. It was deemed a Schedule I drug, both dangerous and with no medical usage. Over the next decades, ibogaine lurked in the underground psychedelic community.
By 2017, it was on its way out of the shadows. A small study in New Zealand, where ibogaine is legal, found that the drug drastically reduced opioid dependence. In 2021, a Canadian, Trevor Millar, and two business partners established Ambio Life Sciences, the ibogaine treatment clinic near Tijuana where Mr. Perry would experience the drug. Later that year, Stanford University’s Brain Stimulation Lab began conducting a clinical trial, which included 30 veterans from U.S. Special Operations Forces.
Mr. Perry learned of the Stanford trial in 2023 and asked to participate, but was told it was close to completion. Instead he headed to Mexico for his encounter with ibogaine.
An M.R.I. before he left showed evidence of slight brain atrophy, not uncommon for a 73-year-old man. Six months after his ibogaine experience, in March 2024, a second brain scan showed that all atrophy had vanished. Dr. Charles Gordon, a Texas neurosurgeon and a skeptic of hallucinogenic treatments, had viewed the results with him.
“You have the brain of a 40-year-old,” Dr. Gordon recalled telling Mr. Perry.
Mr. Perry and W. Bryan Hubbard, the co-founder of Americans for Ibogaine, discussed the drug in a two-hour episode with the podcaster Joe Rogan released Jan. 2. Mr. Perry did not disclose his own experience, but he denounced the historical “just say no to drugs” posture of the Republican Party and declared himself to be “the Johnny Appleseed” of clinical ibogaine usage.
Shortly after the podcast aired, Mr. Perry, Mr. Hubbard and the nonprofit Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions, or VETS, helped lobby the Republican-controlled Texas statehouse to allotted $50 million in matching funds for ibogaine research in legislation that passed both chambers with large bipartisan majorities. Gov. Greg Abbott signed the bill into law on June 11. Less than three weeks later, Arizona passed its own $5 million ibogaine matching fund allocation.
A Complicating Phone Call
The ibogaine movement’s glide path may soon encounter turbulence.
Conservative religious groups have lobbied against legislation endorsing psychedelic treatment in the past. Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, said in a statement that although he had not done enough research into ibogaine to have an opinion on the drug, “we have expressed opposition to the use of psychedelics because of longstanding spiritual, theological and ethical concerns about mind-altering drugs that open individuals up to mystical or transcendent experiences that are not in line with orthodox teaching of scripture.”
Morgan Luttrell, the former energy staff member for Mr. Perry, is now a two-term U.S. congressman and the only known member of the House to have undergone ibogaine treatment. Last month, the Republican-controlled House Rules Committee blocked his amendment to a spending bill that would allot $10 million for the Department of Defense to conduct clinical trials on ibogaine. The drug’s opponents, he said, “don’t want to see this thing hit the ground, spread uncontrollably and become like the opioid crisis.’’
But the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has long supported psychedelics as an alternative medical treatment. Doug Collins, the veterans affairs secretary, said in a podcast last month that he supported using ibogaine and other psychedelics to treat veterans. Dr. Martin Makary, the head of the Food and Drug Administration, has said that assessing the value of psychedelic treatment is “a top priority” for his agency.
Mr. Perry has set his sights even higher. “My goal is to sit down with the president and his senior staff and say, ‘Here’s what we’ve got,’” he said.
A slight complication mars this scenario. Mr. Trump remains upset with his former energy secretary for persuading the president to have a phone conversation with the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, on July 25, 2019. In the call, which led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, the president pressed Mr. Zelensky, who was in need of American aid, to “do us a favor” and investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other Democrats.
“I get indicted for making a phone call,” Mr. Trump said last month to faith leaders. He then added, “Rick Perry, you don’t want him on your debate team, let me put it that way.”
At the cafe in Round Top, Mr. Perry chewed thoughtfully on his cheeseburger while recalling the president’s insult. “In the end, Trump is very transactional,” he said, grinning. “And anyway, I wouldn’t want to be on my debate team, either.”
Robert Draper is based in Washington and writes about domestic politics. He is the author of several books and has been a journalist for three decades.
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