Conservative and Christian? US right champions psychedelic drugs | US news

FFor half a century, psychedelics belonged largely to the cultural left: anti-war, anti-capitalist, suspicious of church and state. Today, one of the most politically important psychedelic drugs in the United States – ibogaine – is championed by evangelical Christians, Republican governors, veterans and big tech billionaires.

Many of them see ibogaine, an intense psychedelic derived from a central African root bark, as divine technology. In fact, some don’t call it psychedelic, given the term’s apparent baggage in some circles.

“The psychedelic renaissance is three things: capitalized, conservative, and Christian,” Jamie Wheal, author of Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind, wrote earlier this year in an article titled Make America Hallucinate Again. “The tactical decision to make veterans the face of [the psychedelic reform] the movement has now taken on a life of its own.

After the Food and Drug Administration’s rejection of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD last year, ibogaine is now taking center stage. Texas Governor Greg Abbott in June approved a historic $50 million funding package for ibogaine research, highlighting the drug’s “great promise” in treating conditions affecting veterans – more of whom live in Texas than in any other state.

Reform discussions are also underway in Ohio, while Colorado is already moving to sanction legal ibogaine treatments, in which patients embark on roller coaster journeys lasting around 12 hours.

“It has a revolutionary therapeutic impact on veterans who have suffered all the visible and invisible traumas of war, including traumatic brain injuries, which were completely resolved with a single ibogaine treatment,” says Bryan Hubbard, CEO of the advocacy group Americans for Ibogaine and a Kentucky attorney who often references his personal prayer, Isaiah 61:1. “This very special empowering medicine has the ability to dramatically improve treatment outcomes for conditions that affect the mind, body and soul. »

In a Stanford University study published last year in Nature Medicine, 30 U.S. Special Forces veterans who underwent ibogaine treatment in Mexico saw significant reductions in symptoms of traumatic brain injury (TBI), PTSD, and depression. A month later, most patients had further improved, with no reported side effects.

Hubbard, a devout Christian, says the irony of conservative Republicans like himself being at the forefront of the push to provide legal access to psychedelic therapies is not lost on him. His own legal experiences in Mexican clinics with ibogaine, however, were “the most profound spiritual experiences of my life.”

But the apparent victory of cultural law in defining psychedelic healing and what Wheal darkly described as a “counter-countercultural turn” in the world of psychedelics are coming under increasing scrutiny. “The psychedelic [QAnon] The shaman assault on the White House on January 6 was an early sign that within Maga there may be right-wing psychonauts,” says Jeremy Wheat, director of the nonprofit Global Ibogaine Therapy Alliance, a non-profit organization.

Ibogaine, which Hunter Biden used in 2014 in a failed attempt to combat his drug and alcohol addiction, is “a maverick molecule for a maverick moment,” adds Wheat, after its accidental discovery as a treatment for opioid addiction in the 1960s by heroin addict and filmmaker Howard Lotsof. But as clinics in legal jurisdictions expand to keep up with growing demand, the dream-inducing psychedelic — which can rid addicts of even debilitating withdrawal symptoms, while providing consumers with autobiographical and sometimes distressing films of their lives — “is simply becoming a pill that you take,” Wheat says, under a “ruthless transactional” and lucrative American-style health care system.

The fact that traumatized U.S. veterans and victims of the pharmaceutical industry’s opioid crisis are flocking to Mexico to consume an African psychedelic is just one consequence of how “the ferment of irrationality” has migrated to the right in recent years, where libertarian Republican political figures seem more willing to take previously unimaginable risks.

On September 7, ketamine therapy enthusiast Elon Musk—whose allies are now among the largest individual funders of psychedelic NGOs and drug research and development—posted on X: “White people are a rapidly shrinking minority. [the] world population. » A few hours later, he added: “We can only understand the true nature of the Universe if we question ourselves deeply. I want to know what’s real, even if the answer is the complete erasure of my consciousness.

Towards the end of November, former UFC champion Conor McGregor, who recently lost his appeal in a civil rape case after being accused of holding his female victim in a chokehold, used ibogaine and claimed to have visions of being initiated by Jesus in a viral X-rated 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 apparently has political aspirations. He attended Trump’s inauguration in January and visited the president again in March, before hosting Tucker Carlson in Dublin and leading a short-lived anti-immigration campaign for the presidency of Ireland.

A week after McGregor’s trip, longtime “Don’t Die” entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, a Trump supporter who became a centimillionaire after selling online payment company Braintree in 2013, livestreamed himself tripping on mushrooms — with more than a million people watching on X. Billionaire Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff joined the livestream just weeks after saying Trump should send troops to San Francisco to make the city safer.

Others at the forefront of calls to expand access to ibogaine treatment include former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who 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 by GQ as “the most powerful man in the Republican Party” that no one has ever heard of. Google co-founder Sergey Brin reportedly invested $15 million in an ibogaine research startup 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 2018 in Mexico before his election to the House in 2023. He is the only federal lawmaker known to have stumbled on these drugs, which he says eased his war trauma. “I was always ready to go,” he told the Washington Examiner. “I was a hyper-aggressive spec war guy who just couldn’t turn the page and start a new chapter.” But psychedelics were “life changing” for him. “It was a clean slate; starting completely again,” he said.

It was much the same for Rob O’Neill, the Navy Seal veteran credited with killing Osama bin Laden in 2011, who says ibogaine helped him treat his PTSD amid a series of grueling journeys during which he was forced to witness his own demons. “It gets into your brain. It shows you stuff. And it kind of cleans out the closet,” O’Neill told Tucker Carlson earlier this year. “It’s terrifying.”

But beyond the terrors, the psychedelic experience, says Norman Ohler, author of Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age, is often characterized by a “unified worldview, without boundaries or enemies, because you’re working through your trauma.” Although he doubts that psychedelics can make peace-loving men the most ardent warmongers, Ohler does not see the apparent rise of right-wing figures publicly aligning with the psychedelic reform movement as a negative phenomenon.

“If both sides embrace psychedelics, they can be a unifying force for society,” he says. “Maybe psychedelics will destroy fascism.”

Ohler also recently took ibogaine himself, for psychospiritual purposes, at a clinic in Mexico alongside a group of veterans, one of whom suffered from daily migraines after being shot in the head in Afghanistan years before. “After taking ibogaine, her pain completely disappeared,” says Ohler. “This is a very special medicine.”

A drug that also carries fatal risks. Ibogaine is contraindicated with many other medications and can lead to cardiac arrest. This is why it is best to carry out treatments in an intensive care unit and under supervision. A 2021 study reported that 33 ibogaine-related deaths were publicly reported, but the true figure is likely much higher and questions have been raised about how some clinics handled the deaths in their care — even though the psychedelic is believed to have transformed thousands of lives.

For Hubbard, it is essential that ibogaine be treated as a “very serious medicine”. “I’m not afraid [the term] psychedelics,” he says.

But he seeks to avoid “flamboyant and fanciful” language when presenting his arguments. “Someone who eats a handful of mushrooms and rolls in the mud at Woodstock in 1969 is not a credible advocate for how psychedelics can help bring individual healing and broader spiritual insight,” he says.