Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.
For years when most people thought about psychedelic drugs, they pictured long-haired tripping hippies either having a ball or risking and wasting their lives, depending on the tenor of the anti-drug messaging one happened to be subject to. That association was cemented in the late 1960s, when modern scientific study of psychedelics—which had been picking up speed since the ’50s—ground to a halt, thanks to government regulation and negative public opinion. But when science ceded psychedelics to the counterculture movement, it abandoned promising results on the power of these drugs to change human minds for the better.
Then, at the turn of the 21st century, Johns Hopkins University received the first regulatory approval to resume the study of psychedelics in the U.S. The university’s research kicked off a full-blown psychedelics renaissance, putting a spotlight on MDMA, psilocybin and other drugs previously known for their recreational effects as potential treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, substance-use disorder and more.
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Last month President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at accelerating access to psychedelic drugs. But what will this actually mean for researchers in the booming field?
Here to walk us through the story is science journalist Jane C. Hu. She writes The Microdose, a newsletter supported by the University of California, Berkeley, Center for the Science of Psychedelics.
Feltman: Thanks so much for coming on to chat with us today.
Jane C. Hu: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Feltman: So why don’t we start by giving our listeners a little context for why psychedelics have been in the news the last few days?
Hu: So April 18 President Trump signed an executive order basically ordering the government to accelerate accessibility for psychedelics. It’s a big move symbolically, just because the Trump administration is really stacked with psychedelics advocates, and so when Trump took office and appointed his secretaries, I think there were a lot of high hopes among psychedelics advocates that there was gonna be some real movement, hadn’t really seen a lot lately, but this is kind of the big news.
Feltman: Yeah, well, and I definitely wanna dig into who those advocates are and, and where that movement is coming from. But first, for our listeners who don’t know, could you give us kind of a primer on, you know, why we’re talking about psychedelics in a therapeutic way in the first place?
Hu: Yeah, so there’s been a huge amount of resurgence in interest in using psychedelics therapeutically, a lot of research into specifically psilocybin, MDMA. Folks might have heard that in 2024 a company called Lykos, which is now called Resilient, submitted a new drug application to the FDA to basically try and get MDMA approved as a drug. That did not go through.
But I feel like over the last few years there’s been a lot of discussion about how to make these drugs accessible for people, not just for therapeutic use but just general use. Oregon and Colorado right now have programs up and running where people can just take psilocybin under the supervision of someone who’s trained as a facilitator.
Feltman: And what does the research say about, you know, what these drugs can accomplish therapeutically?
Hu: There’s been a lot of evidence suggesting that people who are given psilocybin, MDMA and in some cases other psychedelics as well, that it can help with depression, anxiety, PTSD.
We can dive into, you know, some of the nitty-gritty of the research, but overall things are looking at least promising enough that the FDA has granted investigational new drug designation to a lot of companies to basically look into whether these drugs should be approved as medicines later on.
Feltman: Yeah. So I’ve covered this a bit in the past and actually done some psychedelic therapy myself ...
Hu: Mm.
Feltman: And one thing I’ve always thought was interesting is that when I talk to some experts there’s a lot of research suggesting that the therapy component is really important and that, you know, what they call “set and setting” is, is huge in getting these positive outcomes. But then there’s also, it, it seems, like, maybe sort of a, a rising argument that the drugs themselves are so incredible. You know, I, I had one person tell me when I was reporting a story once, “It’s not really psychedelic-assisted therapy; it’s therapy-assisted psychedelics.”
Hu: [Laughs.] Yes.
Feltman: I’m really curious what your take is on sort of that tension, especially as we start to see more and more kind of start-ups offering things that are legal [for medical use], like ketamine, really, like, at home, without much therapeutic oversight.
Hu: Yeah, there are also companies that are really betting on the fact that it is these substances specifically—not just without therapy, but they’re developing versions of these psychedelic molecules that take away some of the most potent aspects of the trip. So they’re really trying to develop basically a nontripping version of a psychedelic.
So, yeah, I mean, I think that’s the million-dollar question, right, maybe a billion-dollar question. [Laughs.] I think it’s an empirical question of whether—how much the therapy really plays into things. And it seems like right now it’s very difficult to disentangle the two because there is really no standard therapy that people use to accompany these sessions and also not a lot of empirical work really trying to disambiguate the contributions of the medicine versus the therapy. I think even just philosophically [Laughs] it might be difficult to disentangle those two things.
I’d be curious to hear what you think about this, Rachel. I mean, do you think that you could have just been given the drug without the therapy and it would’ve helped you?
Feltman: It is really hard to disentangle, and as someone who’s done a lot more therapy than psychedelic-assisted therapy, like, there was something particularly effective about the psychedelic-assisted therapy, at least in terms of sort of efficacy within a short time frame. But it’s hard for me to imagine having had the same benefits without all of the therapy around it—though, again, I have a bias because I’ve done a lot of therapy and think therapy really works. [Laughs.] So yeah, it seems very clear we need a lot more research on that.
Hu: Totally, yeah, and I guess kind of coming back to what you had said earlier about ketamine, so it’s funny because ketamine is often thought about in the same category as psychedelics, and I think a lot of people kind of consider it a psychedelic. The mechanism of action for it is different enough that some people don’t think it’s a true psychedelic, but it is, as you mentioned, like, the most available drug right now in that category because it’s approved for use as an anesthetic, and so there’s a lot of off-label use as a therapeutic device.
But yeah, I mean, as a result people are getting, you know, mail-order ketamine, just being able to go home with it and do it not under supervision. And I think there are a lot of open questions about the safety of that. Now, I’ve heard that there are some cases in which people actually do start under supervision and then after they’ve gotten used to the experience and have a little bit more familiarity with what the drug does to them, they’re able to take it home and try and use it responsibly. But yeah, a lot of open questions about the safety of that and what that’s going to look like in the future.
Feltman: Yeah, and I, I think this sort of support bubbling up that’s really enthusiastic about the potential of the drug specifically is a good segue into the sort of advocates in our current administration. Could you tell us a little bit about, you know, who these, you know, pro-psychedelic figures are and what their stance is on the future of this, you know, industry?
Hu: Okay, so within the Trump administration one of the big movers in all of this has been [Robert F. Kennedy], Jr. He has spoken publicly that he’s done psychedelics, that they’ve helped him, that members of his family have done psychedelics and it’s helped them. And so a lot of people in the psychedelics world were kind of looking to RFK’s leadership to maybe push something forward.
So what’s interesting about this executive order, if you actually watch the signing ceremony around it, it’s revealed that this arose from Joe Rogan texting the president. Joe Rogan essentially said, like, “Hey, I’ve been talking to a lot of psychedelics advocates. Can we get something done?”
[CLIP: Joe Rogan speaks during President Trump’s signing of an executive order on psychedelics on April 18: “I sent him that information. The text message came back, ‘Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let’s do it.’ It was literally that quick.”]
Hu: Which is wild.
So it seems like really what drove Rogan to do this was an advocate named Bryan Hubbard, who has been really lobbying hard for more states to use ibogaine, which is kind of an obscure psychedelic, to basically try and get ibogaine research off the ground. And after Hubbard was on Rogan’s podcast recently, Rogan went ahead and sent that text, and now we’ve got this executive order.
Feltman: Well, and I’m glad you brought up ibogaine because I, I know that that came up in RFK’s Senate hearings, and, you know, unlike maybe psilocybin I think that might have been the first time a lot of people heard about ibogaine. I know that there’s some promising research on it in terms of treatment for substance-abuse disorder.
But I think it’s a really interesting addition to the conversation because of all the things people are saying it might be good for. And it seems like that’s kind of the direction a lot of this hype is going in, that instead of focusing on the actual results that are maybe for, like, discrete conditions and specific populations, this idea that we’re gonna blow this wide open and, and that these psychedelic compounds are gonna be helpful for everything.
Hu: Yeah, the resurgence of ibogaine has been really interesting to watch. So if you look at, you know, when psychedelic research became kind of more popular again, especially in the 2010s and 2020s, a lot of it has been focused primarily on psilocybin and MDMA. But over the last couple of years, advocates, particularly more conservative advocates, folks who are specifically really interested in veterans’ mental health, have really all gotten behind ibogaine specifically.
And there have been a handful of studies done on ibogaine, but it is still incredibly early days. And in fact, a couple of years ago, when I first started reporting on this, a lot of the people I talked to, including, you know, like, researchers within the government, researchers who study addiction, were all like, “You know, we don’t think that it’s likely ibogaine is ever going to even make it to clinical trial investigations because it’s got some heart complications as a risk factor.” And researchers say, you know, it’s possible to mitigate those, but compared to something like psilocybin or MDMA, that don’t have that same risk profile, it definitely is a little bit more extreme.
And also the experience of ibogaine is, is really intense, like, effects last a really long time. People often say it’s just not a pleasant experience. But yeah, I do think that’s maybe part of the reason, too, it’s become kind of embraced, especially by this more right-wing psychedelics advocacy, is I think, like, the messaging is very much like these aren’t your hippie psychedelics, where you’re, you’re doing this for fun. It’s like you are having an intense, serious trip, and that’s really what shows that you’re doing it for healing.
Feltman: That’s so interesting. It’s funny—after I, I wrote a feature about doing ketamine therapy several years ago, I got a pitch from, like, a luxury psychedelics resort being like, “Do you wanna come do our new ibogaine therapy?” And I was like, “The one where you have to strap me to the bed and monitor my heart and make sure I don’t, like, tear my skin off? No, thank you.” [Laughs.]
Hu: [Laughs.] Yeah, yeah, it sounds like a really intense experience.
Feltman: Which is not to say it can’t potentially be very helpful for, for some people, but I was like, “It’s not, not a casual thing for me to go do on vacation. Thank you.” [Laughs.]
Hu: No! And I mean, okay, actually, I think this, this brings up another reason why I think ibogaine has made this resurgence, especially in the U.S., is because a lot of U.S. service members have gone to these retreats. You know, you have to go out of the country to be able to do this.
The rallying line a lot of the time is, like, you know, “Our veterans served us, and we’re falling down on the job, trying to help them. Like, they shouldn’t have to leave the country to be able to get this therapy.” And so that’s been part of, I think, the push to bring it to the U.S., or at least have more research available for it in the U.S.
Feltman: Yeah, and why do you think these drugs are, are so exciting to RFK when he is, you know, so opposed to many pharmaceuticals and sort of medical interventions?
Hu: I think a lot of folks think about psychedelics as being in opposition to a lot of that traditional pharma model. So one line that I hear all the time is that, you know, instead of taking an antidepressant every day, you could possibly take one dose of ibogaine or one dose of psilocybin and essentially be healed for some amount of time.
Now, we don’t necessarily have the data to show that. We have a lot of anecdata. There, like, there are a lot of people who have said that this has been useful to them. And while that is interesting information it’s not the same as actual scientific research. But it seems like now, potentially, with this executive order, with also some other developments around the country, we might be seeing more research on this.
Feltman: Yeah, so what do you think is gonna happen with this executive order? You know, people who are, like, ready to get out the gate and do research, what is this gonna change for them?
Hu: So for psychedelic researchers this doesn’t really substantively change much for them.
I think the biggest two things that we’re gonna potentially see from this are getting ibogaine research off of the ground because this executive order sets aside [at least] $50 million to cooperate with state governments that have some kind of psychedelic trials. And Texas, last legislative session, actually passed a bill committing $50 million to ibogaine research specifically. Based on the architects of this executive order, it seems like this order was written pretty much to make sure that Texas gets a matching $50 million to their commitment.
The other thing we’re likely to see is that we might see an accelerated timeline for the approval of some psychedelic drugs by the FDA. So there is this new voucher program that the Trump administration enacted last year, where essentially it accelerates the timeline for new drug approval from about a year to as little as a month. And part of this executive order was that the FDA is supposed to give three of those vouchers to psychedelic companies.
And I mean, it’s funny you bring up psychedelic researchers and if this is going to help them. I’ve actually heard from a number of psychedelic researchers that they’re a little concerned about there being a top-down order from the White House to try and effect what should be an FDA decision.
Feltman: Well, I guess it will be interesting to see how that plays out.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back on Monday with our weekly science news roundup.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend!
