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Strange trip: why Trump is backing psychedelics
00:17:45
Madeleine Finlay talks to journalist Mattha Busby about the US president’s recent executive order fast tracking research and funding for psychedelic research
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- [00:00]
Madeline Findlay
This is the Guardian.
- [00:10]
Charles Schwab Podcast Host
Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Washington Wise is an original podcast from Charles Schwab that unpacks the stories making news in Washington right now and how they may affect your finances and portfolio. Like listen@schwab.com Washingtonwise Running a business means juggling a lot of moving parts. And when your communication tools can't keep up, things start to slip. Missed calls, slow replies, scattered conversations. They're not just frustrating, they're lost opportunities and revenue left on the table. That's where Quo comes in. Spelled Q, U O. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2, trusted by over 90,000 businesses. One shared business number for calls and texts. So every conversation stays visible, organized and accountable. It works from an app or computer. You can keep your existing number, add teammates and sync your CRM, letting you scale without adding complexity. And with built in AI, Quo logs, calls, summarizes conversations and flags next steps even after hours Stop missing customers. Stop leaving revenue on the table. Try quo free and get 20% off your first six months at quo.comtech that's quo.comtech quo no missed calls, no missed customers.
- [01:48]
Madeline Findlay
A strange scene, or perhaps better described as another strange scene, unfolded at the White House recently with President Donald Trump centre stage.
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Maytha Busby
He's sat there at his desk in the Oval Office and he's got a cast of characters behind him. Joe Rogan, who's a lot shorter actually, than many people may have thought was. Sort of his head is like bobbing behind Trump.
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Madeline Findlay
Joining Joe Rogan, the influential podcaster with an interest in alternative therapies was a lawyer, Brian Hubbard, who runs Americans for Ibergaine, a kind of psychedelic that's had a lot of interest from the veteran community.
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Maytha Busby
And then there's a congressman next to him who took these psychedelics himself for his own war trauma.
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Madeline Findlay
Just a few weeks before, Brian Hubbard and former Texas governor Rick Perry had done a podcast with Joe Rogan, they
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Maytha Busby
were just like, can you ask him, Joe? So Joe Rogan supposedly texts Trump and Trump responds almost immediately regarding the medicalization of this particular psychedelic, ibogaine. Great. Sounds good. Do you want FDA approval?
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Madeline Findlay
And seemingly, just like that, they're on a fast track to review an approval.
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Donald Trump
Today I'm pleased to announce historical reforms to dramatically accelerate access to new medical research and treatments based on psychedelic drugs.
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Madeline Findlay
Psychedelics do remain illegal in the US. Classed as Schedule 1, they're defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for Abuse. But this new executive order is a green light for researchers and pharmaceutical companies to explore the potential and risk of psychedelics as therapeutics. So today has President Trump just opened the door to a psychedelic future? From the Guardian, I'm Madeline Findlay and this is Science Weekly. Maytha Busby, you're a journalist covering health, human rights and the environment. And you've written about Trump's recent executive order on psychedelics. Before we get into what it said, obviously these are still tightly regulated drugs. But as studies on their potential therapeutic effects have begun to emerge, we've heard more voices calling for them to be made more accessible in research. Who's been campaigning on these drugs, aside from the researchers themselves?
- [04:42]
Maytha Busby
At the forefront of it all, really in the US Are the veterans who are suffering from ptsd, traumatic brain injury and really debilitating symptoms. And so they've emerged really as the key advocates for these reforms. And they've got the ear of lawmakers in the Republican Party and clearly now Trump. But, you know, obviously psychedelics have long belonged to the cultural left for decades, and it's just been interesting to see it kind of migrate rightwards here.
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Madeline Findlay
And just to give a sense of the drugs we're talking about here, there are different psychedelics being studied, like dmt, mdma. And in fact, there was an interesting study out last week looking at how a single dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, can cause anatomical changes in the brain. And some of the participants even reported having a deeper sense of psychological insight and better well being. But the only one specifically called out in the executive order was something known as ibogaine, which is probably the least studied of them all. It's been claimed to help those who suffered traumatic brain injury or tbi. Tell me a bit more about this one.
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Maytha Busby
Ibogaine is basically derived from iboga, which is like this root bark from a shrub that grows in Gabon principally. And it's the one that has really given relief to these veterans. They've been going down to Mexico in their thousands. So there was a study a couple of years ago out of Stanford that was published in Nature, and they studied 30 combat veterans who were all suffering from debilitating TBI. And all of them experienced like, a significant improvement in their symptoms.
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Madeline Findlay
So this leads us on to the executive order. Give me the headlines of what it said.
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Maytha Busby
So there's sort of five or six elements to it, and they're going to basically put $50 million into research. And it seems that a lot of it will be kind of corralled into studying this psychedelic ibgain. And then one of the key ones is that end of life patients will be given the right to try. And this is a sort of system that Trump actually introduced in his first term. And he gave a long sort of monologue, actually, in the Oval Office about how proud he is of this. So it seems that, yeah, ibogaine won't be the kind of thing those patients will be doing, but psilocybin maybe to make peace with their death, which there has been research on. And then more widely, they said that they're going to fast track the reviews of other psychedelics. So that's going to be two kinds of psilocybin drugs for two kinds of depression, and a lesser known drug, methylene, that's like a milder version of mdma. And Trump said that any drugs that will be approved will then be rescheduled. So moved out of Schedule 1, which he then followed up this meeting by down scheduling cannabis a couple of weeks later. So, yeah, you're really seeing a flurry of things happening here. I mean, for a Republican president to be doing it as well is, you know, and for it to be Trump, a man who says he's never even, you know, had a drink, had a trip, had a cigarette, is really far fetched. I think I said in my piece, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were hallucinating when you saw the scene.
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Madeline Findlay
It is really extraordinary. And there's obviously been this enormous amount of advocacy from veterans. And then there's Joe Rogan in all of this.
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Donald Trump
I got a call from a number of people, including the great Joe Rogan, and he said, we have to do something about this. And I looked into it. I called Bobby, I called Oz, I called Marty and Jay, and it was really, it was uniform support.
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Madeline Findlay
How big would you say these influences are on Trump? I mean, is this coming from the veterans or is it really sort of the power of podcasting?
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Maytha Busby
Yeah, obviously he wants to curry favor with this sort of like, manosphere kind of Joe Rogan listener constituency. But yeah, at the same time, it was reported in the Washington Post that the executive order had already been being drafted up, rather, at the time that Joe Rogan made this ask.
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Madeline Findlay
Okay, so it's maybe more that this famously abstinent president has been pushed down this route through the advocacy of the veterans. But why now?
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Maytha Busby
I mean, it's certainly a welcome distraction for him. Right? Like at a time when they're clearly losing, not winning in Iran. But as I said earlier, I think the veteran stories are really difficult to refute. 22 veterans are dying on average every day from suicide. He said in the Oval Office. It's like 21 times the amount of service people that have died on the battlefield since 9 11. So this is a really, really horrendous issue. And the drugs that these veterans are given to address their symptoms just often kind of get them addicted. And I think that there's, you know, shifting sands here and especially with the Make America Healthy movement, you know, there with Kennedy and all these Maha mums, the mushroom mums behind them, there is, there is a real fervor for change.
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Madeline Findlay
And Maytha, you make the point that this is also quite surprising coming during a Republican administration. I mean, how big of a U turn does it represent for the Republican Party? And where do things stand now amongst the administration? I'm sure there are many, many people in there who don't agree with what Trump is pushing forward.
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Maytha Busby
Yeah, I mean, advocates fought, you know, especially with RFK as health secretary, who's obviously super pro psychedelic therapy, that, you know, stuff would have happened earlier. I mean, there was a piece in Politico that said a few weeks before the executive order, the psychedelic revolution that never was, which obviously hasn't aged very well, but there's definitely been like a lot of discord between sort of Maha and MAGA people, you know, a lot of MAGA people, you know, really not interested in, in furthering the cause of psychedelic therapy. So yeah, we kind of in, in this really, really curious moment, Richard Nixon was the president that, you know, announced the war on drugs and, and put these psychedelics into, into schedule one. And then it was Reagan's administration, I believe, that prohibited MDMA in the 80s. Yeah, you just wonder what sort of ripples this will have for the rest of the world really, because it's, it's been an American launched and led war on drugs. But it broadly does look like the war on drugs is winding down significantly and this is, you know, another threshold moment to that.
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Madeline Findlay
Yes. And of course psychedelics do remain illegal for the average person in the US but what does it all mean in practice for researchers, for pharmaceutical companies and for those veteran advocates?
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Maytha Busby
I mean, it's a huge green light. Right. It's still very difficult to actually do psychedelic research quite often because of these legal constraints. So once there is potentially an approval or two and a rescheduling, but that will also require the dea, the Drug Enforcement Administration to come on board. And only just before the executive order came out, there was a letter released that showed they were kind of, you know, against it. So there are moving parts here and it's kind of Trump almost sounding the starting gun or, you know, is certainly the biggest green light yet for a potential multibillion dollar industry. You know, the door has been pushed open far further than it ever has before, really.
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Madeline Findlay
Coming up, the door may be opening, but who stands to gain?
- [13:17]
Kai Wright
I'm Kai Wright.
- [13:18]
Carter Sherman
I'm Kari Sherman.
- [13:19]
Kai Wright
And we are here to tell you about our new show, which is rooted in this feeling that at least I have. I know you have, where, you know, it's kind of like when you wake up in the morning and you pick up your phone and you're just hit in the face with a fire hose of news. Right?
- [13:36]
Carter Sherman
Like there's war, there's authoritarianism. Our planet is burning. I could go on and on and
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Donald Trump
on and on and on and on.
- [13:43]
Kai Wright
But like, we're trying to figure out how to manage it, right? Like, how do you manage it?
- [13:46]
Carter Sherman
I manage it by leaning in and trying to learn more and trying to figure out, okay, how can I be smarter about this particular topic and who can I talk to that's going to make me feel better about it and
- [13:57]
Kai Wright
who can tell me who's responsible for the mess that I'm reading about? So that's our mission. That's the show.
- [14:03]
Carter Sherman
Welcome to Statesite with Kai and Carter. We're a new show from the Guardian.
- [14:07]
Kai Wright
We're talking to big thinkers and the best journalists just trying to understand the world through smart conversation and honest reporting.
- [14:14]
Carter Sherman
We don't have billionaires telling us what to say.
- [14:16]
Kai Wright
Stateside with Kai and Carter will come out three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday starting May 13th.
- [14:22]
Carter Sherman
Follow on Apple Podcasts or catch us wherever you watch or listen.
- [14:29]
Charles Schwab Podcast Host
Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Washington Wise is an original podcast from Charles Schwab that unpacks the stories making news in Washington right now and how they may affect your finances and portfolio. Listen@schwab.com WashingtonWise.
- [14:55]
Madeline Findlay
Maitha One of the aspects of this that you wrote about in your article was this element of indigenous communities having stewarded the use of these drugs, Ibergaine in particular, and looking at Gabon as well, where it's designated a cultural heritage plant. What do we know about its origin as a drug?
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Maytha Busby
Yeah, so it's unclear exactly when it was discovered. There's a myth that it was a man and a woman hunted a porcupine and they cooked it into a stew and the man had gone to sleep and his wife tried it and she started hallucinating. So it's unclear. I mean, certainly it's. It must have been after the point that humans learned how to make soup. And so it was in the early 20th century then that French chemists were researching, I think it was an antidepressant drug of sorts. And so they extracted ibogaine. And in the 60s, a man, Howard Lotsoff, who's addicted to heroin and was just experimenting with all sorts of other drugs on top of that, a chemist friend gave him some ibigatin and he took it. And then, you know, almost miraculously, you know, woke up and realized he was. Wasn't in withdrawal for heroin. So you who owns Ibegain? There are concerns in Gabon that folks aren't going to be kind of adequately compensated. The sovereign wealth fund of the country. They want a slice of the market. But equally, ibogaine can be produced in labs. But yeah, certainly there are real concerns that the advocates behind Trump that day haven't kind of satisfactorily made a deal, what made any sort of deal with the Gabonese people, even though Hubbard did sort of pay lip service and thanked our brothers in Gabon for stewarding this medicine.
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Madeline Findlay
And I suppose we'll see how that plays out and who ends up benefiting from it.
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Maytha Busby
Yeah, I mean, immediately after the executive order, it's the pharmaceutical companies whose stocks surged, who were developing psychedelic treatments until there is really like broad decriminalization, which there still hasn't been for cannabis even, you know, despite this latest rescheduling until that really happens, I think that, you know, advocates, at least left wing advocates, will be left sort of disappointed. And, you know, even as it stands, they don't think Trump, you know, unsurprisingly, is going to be the one that sort of delivers full liberation for, you know, these people, these psychonauts and these plants.
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Madeline Findlay
And I guess one of the lessons here as well is that if you've got a substance that you want to be made available, get it in the inbox of Joe Rogan.
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Maytha Busby
I mean, really, the conversation around psychedelics owes a lot to him having kind of folks like Aubrey Marcus on his podcast, you know, more than a decade ago and, you know, the early kind of manosphere folks that were, you know, kind of giving a hall pass to the listeners to be able to sort of go to the jungle and do ayahuasca and it not be considered a sort of lame thing to be doing.
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Madeline Findlay
Well, as you say, I think it's very easy to kind of feel like you're looking at a different world entirely when observing the Trump universe. So, Maitha Busby, thank you so much.
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Maytha Busby
Thanks very much.
- [18:32]
Madeline Findlay
Thanks again to Maitha Busby. You can find his reporting@theguardian.com and before you go, I just wanted to tell you about a video podcast that our New York office is launching. It's called Stateside with Kai and Carter, and it's hosted by our colleagues Kai Wright and Carter Sherman. Each week they're going to be trying to make sense of some of the biggest stories happening right now. The show will feature conversations with some of the smartest thinkers and reporters, not just from the Guardian, but from across the world. It's launching tomorrow with episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You can find it in full video on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. And that's all from us. This episode was was produced by me, Madeline Finley, the sound design was by Joel Cox, and the executive producer was Ellie Burie. We'll be back on Thursday. See you then.
- [19:38]
Maytha Busby
This is the Guardian. Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.
- [19:58]
Knox
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Knox
To find out more, just search up the podcast with Knox and Jamie wherever you listen to podcasts and prepare to make Wednesday your new favorite day of the week.
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Maytha Busby
ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere.
- [20:43]
Charles Schwab Podcast Host
Acas.com Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day, but what policy changes should investors be watching? Washington Wise is an original podcast from Charles Schwab that unpacks the stories making news in Washington right now and how they may affect your finances and Portfolio. Listen@schwab.com WashingtonWise Many business leaders see AI's
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Andrew
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