The Least-Psychedelic President in History Supports Psychedelic Research More Than Any of His Predecessors

This is the way the drug war starts to end, not with a bang or a whimper, but with an executive order signed by a president who must surely be the least-psychedelic occupant ever of the Oval Office, even when you think about characters as glum and dour as Millard Fillmore and Calvin Coolidge. In recent weeks, Donald Trump has picked figurative and literal fights with everyone from the Pope to Iran's ayatollah. Last year, he released an animated video of himself in a fighter plane dropping feces on "No Kings" protestors. If there is an American alive over the age of 30 who has never listened to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band all the way through, it's Trump.

But there he was this past Saturday, flanked by, among others, a pumped-up podcast host known for smoking weed on the air (Joe Rogan), an ibogaine evangelist (Bryan Hubbard), and a Cabinet member who has bragged about snorting cocaine off toilet seats (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.). The president was eagerly putting his John Hancock on "Accelerating Medical Treatments for Serious Mental Illness," an executive order that fast-tracks "innovative research models and…drug approvals to increase access to psychedelic drugs that could save lives and reverse the crisis of serious mental illness in America." The order calls for expedited approval of "psychedelic drugs, including ibogaine compounds," that "show potential in clinical studies to address serious mental illnesses for patients whose conditions persist after completing standard therapy." A president who famously ingests nothing more psychoactive than Diet Coke is now pushing ibogaine—dubbed the "Mount Everest of psychedelics" because of the intensity of the trips it induces and its immense potential to reverse brain damage—into respectability. What's next? Ayahuasca in juice boxes for K-12 cafeterias?

The people present at the signing show how drug policy reform springs from a mix of popular-culture discussion and hardcore, in-the-trenches policy work. Trump himself thanked Rogan for calling his attention to psychedelics and ibogaine, and RFK Jr. wrote on Instagram, "Thank you, [Joe Rogan] for helping bring national attention to these potentially life-saving treatments for veterans and others living with mental illness, and for pushing this conversation into the mainstream." Rogan has used his immensely popular podcast for years to tout psychedelics and a wide array of conventional and unconventional therapies, supplements, and protocols (some more credible than others). Without him and his show, Saturday's signing just doesn't happen. Whatever else one might think of him, Rogan embodies better living through chemistry and self-directed experimentation with all sorts of drugs, exercise programs, and ways of creating a personalized life plan.

When Reason Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller and I interviewed RFK Jr. in 2023 as he was running for president, he told us that he "would definitely decriminalize psychedelics" if he got elected, partly as a wind-down to the drug war in general and because psychedelics are particularly promising as treatments for various sorts of addictions and mental health issues. Kennedy, a former heroin addict who hails from a family as synonymous with substance abuse as politics, has long reflected the majority of Americans who think addicts aren't criminals.

The hulking redhead at the signing ceremony is Hubbard, a lawyer who speaks with a booming, folksy Southern accent and who first became acquainted with ibogaine as a treatment for addiction in 2022. Back then, he told Reason a couple of years ago, he was the head of Kentucky's Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission. His job was to invest hundreds of millions of dollars that the commonwealth got from a national settlement with opioid makers. When he found out about ibogaine, which is derived from an African shrub, from a journalist named Julia Blum, a light switched on. The research was so promising, he knew he had found his life's mission. As he told journalist Rachel Nuwer for Reason during a 2024 trip to New York:

If someone had told me as a 25-year-old man—a staunchly straight-laced, square, institutionalist Republican—that I would have undergone a transformation which would result in me being in New York City for the advancement of God's medicine to heal God's people, I would have told you that I had gone insane and something catastrophic must have happened in my life.

When his Kentucky gig ended due to internal state politics, he was unleashed to pursue activism far beyond the confines of the Bluegrass State.

Others at the signing ceremony included Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, a medical doctor who spent much of his career at Johns Hopkins, who was happy to announce the coming of the "first-ever human trials in the United States" involving ibogaine (patients currently must go out of the country, often to Mexico, for treatment). And then there was Matt Zorn, a Houston-based attorney who only a couple of years ago was busting the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)'s balls over phony arguments regarding marijuana rescheduling and more. Just last year, Zorn joined the Department of Health and Human Services as RFK Jr.'s "psychedelics czar," working within the administration now to help produce orders like Saturday's or last December's calling for the "expeditious" rescheduling of marijuana from Schedule I (the most restrictive category) to something that would allow research and medical designation at the federal level.

It was this mix of activists, politicians, medical researchers, and weirdos that led to a significant act of drug policy reform. But it is also the public, which, ever since Richard Nixon declared war on drugs, has been groping toward a full embrace of legalization of weed at least, if not all currently illegal drugs. Over the decades, more and more of us have tried different sorts of drugs for different sorts of reasons. Apart from illegal/illicit substances, we take pills to give us energy or to calm us down, to grow hair back or perform better sexually, to stimulate appetite or suppress it (one in eight Americans is already taking GLP-1s). Overdoses from opioids are falling sharply, and more of us feel like drugs are not such a problem anymore. We are learning a basic libertarian lesson: that we want to be free and will need to be responsible for what we do with that freedom.

Reason's Jacob Sullum writes, "Trump's initiative…falls far short of acknowledging that adults have a right to use psychedelics for whatever reasons they deem compelling." That is absolutely true, but Saturday's executive order is still no small thing. This is how the drug war ends, a little bit at a time, and then almost all at once (cannabis arrests have declined from more than 870,000 in 2007 to about 211,000 in 2025). And under the orders of a president who just last year was bragging that every suspected Venezuelan drug boat his administration blew up without constitutional authorization "saved 25,000 lives," a plainly fantastical number as imaginary as the idea the targeted boats mostly ferried fentanyl to America (Venezuela is not a fentanyl producer; neither is it a big exporter of drugs to the United States).

As it happens, on Sunday, April 19, an unseasonably cold and rainy day in Manhattan, I found myself at a "March for Cognitive Liberty," sponsored by the Psychedelic Assembly, a nonprofit that cultivates "connection, education, and culture at the edge of expanded consciousness." About 100 people huddled in the rain at Grand Army Plaza, where a statue of William Tecumseh Sherman eerily stood guard as the featured speakers abbreviated their comments due both to the weather and to Trump's executive order.

"I had written this huge, long screed for today, which was all about what our government should be doing," joked Julie Holland, a psychiatrist, author, advocate for drug legalization, and Reason Interview guest. "And I didn't have to say what the government should be doing. Somehow, they are doing some of the things I think they should be doing. I want us to just be happy for a minute and not be cynical."

"Suddenly, we're getting a little excited about the changes that are coming," said William Leonard Pickard, an LSD chemist whom the DEA claimed was responsible for 90 percent of the world's acid supply when he was arrested in 2000. Sentenced to two life sentences, he was released in 2020 under a compassionate release program. "Suddenly, it gets very quiet, like something magical is about to emerge."

When America finally declares victory in the drug war, there will be no big, public signing of surrender papers on the USS Missouri with Gen. Douglas MacArthur or anything so grand and definitive as one might see at the end of a literal war. No, the drug war will fade away, just like MacArthur himself did. And we'll all wonder what took so long.

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