Driven by a desire to help ex-servicemembers with mental illness, GOP lawmakers led a failed campaign last year to persuade the Biden administration to approve psychedelic drugs.
Now they may have found the ally they need in President Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The Alliance for Mental Health
A longtime believer in psychedelics’ potential to help people with illnesses like post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, despite the lack of supportive evidence Biden officials found, Kennedy is ramping up government-run clinical studies and telling the disappointed lawmakers doctors will be prescribing the drugs soon.
“These are people who badly need some kind of therapy, nothing else is working for them,” Kennedy said at a House hearing Tuesday. “This line of therapeutics has tremendous advantage if given in a clinical setting. And we are working very hard to make sure that that happens within 12 months.”
The GOP’s Cultural Shift
The GOP’s embrace of psychedelics is another, and perhaps one of the more jarring, examples of cultural transformation that Trump’s populist politics have brought.
Veterans seeking cures for mental illnesses associated with combat, combined with the Kennedy-backed Make America Healthy Again movement’s enthusiasm for natural medicine, have strengthened a libertarian strain on the right in favor of drug experimentation. Meanwhile, the left, where hippies are giving way to technocrats, has become more skeptical.
Bipartisan Views on Psychedelics
When Joe Biden was president, for example, agencies studied the drugs’ medical potential, but an air of doubt prevailed. The head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Nora Volkow, compared the hype for psychedelics as a cure for mental illness to belief in “fairy tales” in Senate testimony last year.
Then in August, the Food and Drug Administration rejected drugmaker Lykos Therapeutics’ application to offer ecstasy, alongside therapy, as a treatment for PTSD. FDA advisers worried the company’s researchers were more evangelists than scientists and determined that they’d failed to prove their regimen was either safe or effective.
Republicans complained the loudest.
“These technocrats think they know better,” Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL who lost an eye in Afghanistan, wrote on X after FDA advisers recommended Lykos’ application be rejected. “Their job is to say NO and support the status quo.”
Government Studies and Progress
But Crenshaw, who’s helped secure funding for psychedelic research at the Defense Department, got the response he wanted from Kennedy at Tuesday’s budget hearing. Kennedy said results from early government studies at the Department of Veterans Affairs and FDA were “very, very encouraging.” He added that his FDA commissioner, Marty Makary, sees it the same way. “Marty has told me that we don’t want to wait two years to get this done,” he said.
Crenshaw was pleased. “I’ve spent years supporting clinical trials to study the use of psychedelics to treat PTSD,” he told POLITICO. “It’s been a long fight, and it’s taken a lot of grit. I’m grateful Secretary Kennedy is taking this seriously — helping to mainstream what could be a groundbreaking shift in mental health.”
Optimism for Psychedelic Therapies
Kennedy’s comments have revived hope among psychedelics’ advocates that the Lykos decision was more hiccup than death knell. “It’s important for the entire community and the entire value chain around psychedelic therapy to hear that he wants to responsibly explore the benefits and risks of these therapies,” said Dr. Shereef Elnahal, a health official at the VA under Biden who sees promise in the drugs.
The VA, under Trump’s secretary, Doug Collins, is working directly with Kennedy on clinical research.
Collins has referenced psychedelics on a podcast appearance, on X and at a cabinet meeting this spring when Trump pressed him on what he’s doing to drive down the high suicide rate among veterans.
State Initiatives and Progress
Earlier this month, Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, signed a law to put $50 million into clinical trials of the psychedelic ibogaine, as a mental health treatment.
“That culture shift is underway,” W. Bryan Hubbard, who spearheaded the Texas bill and is executive director of the American Ibogaine Initiative, told POLITICO. As Hubbard sees it, the narrative around psychedelics has evolved from counterculture recreation to a promising medical treatment for the “deaths of despair” from alcohol, drug overdoses and suicides the United States has grappled with in recent decades.
Republican Support and Progress
Kennedy was happy to see it.
“It’s super positive. It is really notable that the Republicans have become the party of some of these issues you wouldn’t have expected before,” Calley Means, a top Kennedy adviser, told POLITICO. “States pushing the envelope is certainly aligned with what Secretary Kennedy is trying to do. It gives him leverage to push bolder reforms.”
Conservative Advocacy for Change
The Texas effort involved a six-month sprint by Hubbard and former GOP Gov. Rick Perry to convince state lawmakers to pass the bill. Rep. Morgan Luttrell, another Lone Star Republican who credits ibogaine he took in Mexico with helping him overcome trauma he incurred during military service, also lobbied for it.
Hubbard attributes their success partly to Texas’ independent pioneer culture and a red-state philosophy that was receptive to his pitch for a medicalized psychedelics model. It didn’t hurt that Abbott had signed a bill to study ecstasy, psilocybin and ketamine as treatments for veterans with PTSD with Baylor College of Medicine. And since Texans are no stranger to religion, conversations about the spiritual aspect of ibogaine treatment seemed to resonate with lawmakers.
Public Support and Influence
Veterans turned out at public hearings to describe traveling out of the country, often to Mexico, where ibogaine is unregulated, to receive treatment they couldn’t access in the U.S.
“These heroes have gone to war to defend the land of the free, only to come home and be faced with inflexible, bureaucratic systems that offer ineffectual solutions, paired with the Controlled Substances Act that has forced them to flee the country that they have defended in order to access treatment in a foreign country,” Hubbard said.
Conservative Endorsement and Media Influence
But the biggest momentum push was likely the boost Hubbard and Perry got from conservative kingmaker Joe Rogan when the two went on Rogan’s podcast in January.
“That really put a tremendous amount of wind in our sails,” Hubbard said.
Still, last year’s FDA decision to reject Lykos Therapeutics’ application underscores the concerns raised by many scientists that the utility of the drugs is oversold.
Shift in Conservative Approach
FDA advisers raised ecstasy’s potential to damage the heart and liver; a suspicion that trial researchers were more advocates than scientists; and a worry that results had been skewed by the psychedelics’ pronounced effects, since participants could figure out if they got the drug.
Ibogaine also poses heart risks. The Drug Enforcement Administration lists both it and ecstasy on its schedule of drugs with no currently acceptable medical use and high risk of abuse.
That would have once been enough to make law-and-order Republicans say no.
Changing Perspectives on Psychedelics
Kennedy’s adviser Means says things are changing for the better.
“Ten years ago, nobody expected the Republican Party as the party of healthy food, as the party of exercise, as the party of questioning pharmaceutical companies, as the party of psychedelic research — but that’s where we are,” Means said.
“The Democratic Party has become the party of blindly trusting experts,” he concluded. “The Republican Party has become the countercultural party that’s asking common-sense questions.”
