The scene seemed so far-fetched you could be forgiven for thinking you might be hallucinating.
On the weekend in which psychonauts celebrate “Bicycle Day” – the anniversary of the first LSD trip – Donald Trump was in the Oval Office double-checking that he was correctly pronouncing the name of a lesser-known psychedelic, ibogaine, as he signed a landmark executive order to accelerate research into hallucinogens, and to increase access.
“Can I have some, please?” Trump joked of ibogaine, which in gruelling 12-hour trips often provides visions of traumatic personal memories. “I’ll take whatever it takes,” he added, with the podcaster Joe Rogan standing behind him.
Thanks to the order, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will as early as this week fast-track the reviews of three incoming psychedelic drug candidate applications that have already received breakthrough therapy designations.
These are likely to be psilocybin for two types of depression, and MDMA for PTSD, a prior application for which was rejected by the FDA in 2024, said industry analyst Josh Hardman, the founder of the psychedelic drug development news site Psychedelic Alpha. The move, the biggest greenlight the potential multibillion-dollar market has yet received, sent psychedelic company stocks soaring.
“The expected issuance of these three vouchers shows just how much the White House has changed its mind on psychedelics in the last six months,” Hardman added, referring to reported discord within the Trump administration over psychedelic reform.
The order states that investigational psychedelic drugs more broadly – including ibogaine, which early studies suggest significantly improves symptoms of traumatic brain injury while providing relief from opioid withdrawal symptoms – will become available under “right to try” legislation, which is reserved for terminally ill patients and those who have tried all approved treatment options.
That sets up a potential clash between the White House and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), said Logan Davidson, the legislative director of Vets (Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions), a non-profit which has provided ibogaine treatment abroad to several thousand US veterans.
“At least to date, the DEA has said that schedule I compounds are ineligible for right to try,” he said.
On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a new $139m initiative “to help spur new, effective therapies for behavioral health … including the safe use of psychedelics”. At least $50m of that amount will be earmarked to match state psychedelic research initiatives, paving the way for a US-first human trial on ibogaine, and the order called for a push to increase psychedelic clinical study participation, especially among veterans.
“Most people didn’t have Trump accelerating psychedelic research on their bingo cards,” said Ismail Ali, the co-director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (Maps), a leading psychedelic reform group. “It’s so easy to be reductive about this. We really have to see both sides.”
People will continue to be criminalized for psychedelic-related offences at the state and federal level, Ali warned, with pharmaceutical and commercial interests the immediate beneficiary of the order. “If you’re looking at the US federal government for the full liberation of these plants,” he said, “you’re probably looking in the wrong place.” But, he added: “It is a substantial threshold moment.”
Psychedelics have been federally illegal since Richard Nixon passed the 1970 Controlled Substances Act to, as Rogan said in the Oval Office, “target the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement”. The prohibited mind-altering drugs, which also include LSD, DMT and mescaline, remain schedule I substances, which complicates research endeavours, but the order said rescheduling would accompany any FDA approvals.
On Saturday, Trump indicated his administration was already working on rescheduling efforts, which would also require approval from the DEA. “Would you get the rescheduling done, please?” he said. “You know they’re slow-walking me on rescheduling.” Pointing at an official, he added: “You’re going to get it done, right?”
The decades-long prohibition of psychedelics pushed therapeutic use outside of the formal medical system, said Jeffrey Singer, a surgeon and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian thinktank. “Under the current pathway, the FDA will likely restrict prescribing and administration to licensed clinicians who often lack meaningful training in psychedelic-assisted therapy,” he wrote on Monday.
Throughout the so-called war on drugs, traditional and underground practitioners were systematically persecuted, and there are concerns that the Indigenous communities that stewarded psychedelics like ibogaine and psilocybin will not be fairly compensated for the knowledge.
The former chair of the Native American Church of North America, Sandor Iron Rope, described the executive order as “biopiracy dressed in clinical language”. He added in a social media post: “The opening for healing is real, but without explicit protections for Indigenous sovereignty, religious freedom, traditional knowledge, and equitable benefit-sharing, this order risks repeating one of the oldest patterns in colonial history – taking the medicine and leaving behind the people who made it sacred.”
Earlier this year, a delegation from Americans for Ibogaine, a non-profit campaign group that was represented in the Oval Office by its chief executive Bryan Hubbard, attended the first International Conference on Iboga and Ibogaine in Gabon, the country where the plant’s therapeutic qualities were discovered and where it is designated a national cultural heritage plant.
“Despite a recent visit by Americans for Ibogaine to Libreville, no free, prior, and informed consent was obtained from the traditional communities,” said a report in Africa Coeur News. “No royalties were discussed, no profit-sharing mechanism was proposed, no terms were negotiated.”
Ibogaine, which carries significant cardiac risks, can be produced synthetically in laboratories and extracted from other plants, while it is also grown in Ghana and Mexico, but Gabon’s sovereign wealth fund wants a share of the market. Hubbard, a lawyer who began advocating for ibogaine after working on an aborted Kentucky state project to fund a trial, said in the Oval Office: “For our brothers and sisters in Gabon, you have our deepest gratitude for your stewardship of the sacred tree grown for the healing of nations.”
Whether this marks the latest chapter in a long history of extraction will depend on what happens next – not just for ibogaine, but for a psychedelic renaissance increasingly defined by who controls the direction of travel, who profits, and who gets left behind.
“Psychedelics can be applied in irresponsible ways that reinforce problematic social dynamics,” says the psychedelic reform advocate Ali. “Even if we’re healing our individual trauma, if we’re not applying what we’re learning to our human relationships and our geopolitical reality, then all we’re going to do is use psychedelics to enhance the ego of one dominant nation and continue perpetuating violence and oppression.”
Only a minute after signing the order, Trump pivoted to Iran.
“They have no navy, they have no air force, they have no leaders, they have no nothing,” he said. “You call that enforced regime change.” And with that, the same president who had potentially just opened the floodgates to an American psychedelic future reverted back to matters of war.
