For half a century, psychedelics largely belonged to the cultural left: anti-war, anti-capitalist, suspicious of church and state. Today, one of the most politically significant psychedelic drugs in the United States, ibogaine, is promoted by evangelical Christians, Republican governors, military veterans and big tech billionaires.
Many of them view ibogaine, a powerful psychedelic derived from the bark of a Central African root, as divine technology. In fact, some pointedly avoid calling it a psychedelic, given the term's obvious baggage in some circles.
“The psychedelic renaissance is three things: capitalized, conservative, and Christian,” wrote Jamie Wheel, author of Bringing Back the Rapture: Reimagining God, Sex, and Death in a World That Has Lost Its Mind. earlier this year in an article entitled “Make America Hallucinate Again.” “Tactical decision to make military veterans face [the psychedelic reform] the movement has now taken on a life of its own.”
After the Food and Drug Administration ruled out MDMA therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder last year, ibogaine is now in the spotlight. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a landmark $50 million funding package for ibogaine research in June. noting The drug has “great promise” in treating conditions that affect veterans, most of whom live in Texas. any other state.
There are also discussions about reform. in Ohioand Colorado already moving towards authorizing a legal ibogaine treatment that takes patients on a rollercoaster ride lasting about 12 hours.
“It has a revolutionary therapeutic effect on veterans who have experienced all the visible and invisible traumas of war, including traumatic brain injuries, which were completely reversed with one ibogaine treatment,” says Brian HubbardCEO of the advocacy group Americans for Ibogaine and a Kentucky lawyer who often refers to his personal prayer, Isaiah 61:1. “This special emancipatory medicine has the potential to significantly improve treatment outcomes for ailments that affect the mind, body and soul.”
In a Stanford University study published last year in Nature Medicine, 30 US Special Forces veterans treated with ibogaine in Mexico experienced significant reductions in traumatic brain injury (TBI), post-traumatic stress disorder, and depressive symptoms. One month later, most patients showed even greater improvement without any side effects.
Hubbard, a devout Christian, says the irony of conservative Republicans like himself at the forefront of the campaign to provide legal access to psychedelic treatments is not lost on him. However, his own legal experience with ibogaine treatment in clinics in Mexico was “the most profound spiritual experience of my life.”
But there is growing attention to the apparent victory of the cultural right in who will define psychedelic healing, and to what Wil has somberly described as a “counter-countercultural turn” in the psychedelics world. “Psychedelic [QAnon] The shaman storming the White House on January 6 was an early awakening that there may be right-wing psychonauts in Maga,” says Jeremy WheatDirector of the non-profit organization Global Ibogaine Therapy Alliance.
Ibogaine, which Hunter Biden took in 2014 in an unsuccessful attempt to deal with his drug and alcohol addiction, is “an individual molecule for an individual moment,” Wheat adds, after its accidental discovery as a treatment for opioid addiction in the 1960s by heroin addict and film director Howard Lotsof. But as clinics in legal jurisdictions expand to meet growing demand, the dream-inducing psychedelic drug, which can relieve addicts of even debilitating withdrawal symptoms while also providing consumers with autobiographical and sometimes disturbing films of their lives, “simply becomes a pill you take,” says Wheat, as part of a “ruthlessly transactional” and lucrative American-style health care system.
That traumatized US veterans and victims of the pharmaceutical industry's opioid crisis are flocking to Mexico to take an African psychedelic is just one consequence of how “surge of irrationalityIn recent years, he has migrated to the right, where libertarian Republican politicians seem more willing to take previously unfathomable risks.
On September 7, ketamine therapy enthusiast Elon Musk, whose allies are now among largest individual sponsors Psychedelic NGOs, Drug Research and Development – Published by X: “White people are a rapidly shrinking minority [the] population of the planet.” A few hours later he added: “We cannot understand the true nature of the Universe unless we ask ourselves a deep question. I want to know what is real, even if the answer is the complete destruction of my consciousness.”
At the end of November, former UFC champion Conor McGregor, who recently lost his appeal civil rape case after allegedly putting his victim in a chokehold, taking ibogaine and claiming to have seen visions of Jesus' dedication to viral X-post. “I was shown the light,” he wrote. Jesus came down from the white marble steps of heaven and anointed me with a crown. I was saved! My brain. My heart. My soul. Healed!
McGregor appears to have political ambitions. He attended Trump's inauguration in January and visited the president again. in Marchbefore accepting Tucker Carlson in Dublin and then it doesn't work for long anti-immigration campaign for the presidency of Ireland.
A week after McGregor's trip, long-time entrepreneur Brian Johnson, Trump supporter who became a hundred millionaire after selling web payments company Braintree in 2013, broadcast himself live tripping over mushrooms – over a million people watched X. Billionaire Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff joined the livestream just weeks after Trump said: must send troops in San Francisco to make the city safer.
Others at the forefront of calls to expand access to ibogaine treatment include the former governor of Texas. Rick Perrywho served as Trump's Energy Secretary from 2017 to 2019 and co-founded Americans for Ibogaine with Hubbard after receiving funding from Rex Elsass, described from GQ as “the most powerful man in the Republican Party” that no one has ever heard of. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has reportedly invested $15 million in a startup researching ibogaine. last year.
Congressman Morgan Luttrell, a former Navy SEAL, himself used ibogaine and another psychedelic, 5-MeO-DMT, also known as the “God molecule,” in Mexico in 2018 before his election to the House of Representatives in 2023. He is the only known federal lawmaker to have used drugs, which he says alleviated his war trauma. “I was always ready to work” He said Washington Equiz. “I was a hyper-aggressive war specialist who just couldn’t turn the page and start a new chapter.” But psychedelics “changed his life.” “It was a clean slate, starting over,” he said.
Much the same thing happened to Rob O'Neill, the Navy SEAL veteran credited with killing Osama bin Laden in 2011, who says ibogaine helped him cope with post-traumatic stress disorder as part of a grueling series of trips in which he was forced to witness his own demons. “It gets into your brain. It shows you things. And it kind of cleans out the closet,” O'Neal told Tucker Carlson. earlier this year. “It's horrible”.
But beyond the horrors, the psychedelic experience, says Norman Ohler, author of The Trip: Nazi Germany, the CIA and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age, is often characterized by “a single worldview, without boundaries or enemies, because you are working through your trauma.” Even though he doubts that psychedelics can turn the most ardent warmongers into peace-loving people, Ohler doesn't see the apparent rise of right-wing figures publicly joining the psychedelic reform movement as a negative development.
“If both camps embrace psychedelics, they can become a unifying force in society,” he says. “Maybe psychedelics will destroy fascism.”
Ohler also recently took ibogaine himself for psychospiritual purposes at a clinic in Mexico with a group of veterans, one of whom suffered daily migraines after being shot in the head in Afghanistan several years ago. “After taking ibogaine, his pain was completely gone,” Ohler says. “This is a very special medicine.”
A drug that also carries fatal risks. Ibogaine is contraindicated with many other drugs and can cause cardiac arrest, so treatment is best done in an intensive care unit and under observation. 2021 Study reported that 33 ibogaine-related deaths were publicly reported, but the true figure probably much higher and there were questions about how some clinics handled deaths under their care – even though the psychedelic drug has reportedly changed thousands of lives.
For Hubbard, it is critical that ibogaine is seen as a “very serious drug.” “I don't shy away from [the term] psychedelics,” he says.
But when presenting his arguments, he tries to avoid “flamboyant and quixotic” formulations. “Anyone who eats a handful of mushrooms and rolls around in the mud at Woodstock in 1969 is not a credible advocate for how psychedelics can help with individual healing and broader spiritual enlightenment,” he says.
