For half a century, psychedelics largely belonged to the cultural left: anti-war, anti-capitalist, suspicious of the church and state. Now, one of the most politically consequential psychedelic drugs in the US – ibogaine – is being championed by evangelical Christians, Republican governors, military veterans, and big tech billionaires.
Many of them see ibogaine, an intense psychedelic derived from a central African rootbark, as a divine technology. In fact, some pointedly do not refer to it as a psychedelic, given the apparent baggage of the term 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 military veterans the face of [the psychedelic reform] 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 center stage. Texas governor Greg Abbott signed off on a landmark $50m funding package for ibogaine research in June, noting the “great promise” of the drug in treating conditions suffered by veterans – more of whom live in Texas than any other state.
Reform discussions are also under way in Ohio, while Colorado is already moving towards sanctioning legal ibogaine treatments, in which patients embark on rollercoaster trips of about 12 hours.
“It has a breakthrough therapeutic impact on veterans who have experienced all the visible and invisible traumas of war, including traumatic brain injuries, which have been fully resolved with a single ibogaine treatment,” says Bryan Hubbard, CEO of advocacy group Americans for Ibogaine and a lawyer from Kentucky who often references his personal prayer, Isaiah 61:1. “This very special emancipation medication has the capacity to substantially improve treatment outcomes for afflictions that affect the mind, body and soul.”
In a Stanford University study published last year in Nature Medicine, 30 US special forces veterans who underwent ibogaine treatment in Mexico experienced significant reductions in traumatic brain injury (TBI), PTSD and depression symptoms. A month later, most of the patients had improved even further, without any reported side effects.
Hubbard, a devout Christian, says the irony of conservative Republicans like himself standing at the forefront of the campaign to provide legal access to psychedelic therapies is not lost on him. His own legal experiences in clinics in Mexico with ibogaine, however, were “the most profound spiritual experiences in my life”.
But there is growing scrutiny of the apparent victory of the cultural right in who gets to define psychedelic healing, and what Wheal has described bleakly as a “counter-counter-cultural turn” in the psychedelics world. “The psychedelic [QAnon] shaman storming the White House on January 6 was an early awakening that within Maga there could be rightwing psychonauts,” says Jeremy Wheat, director of the nonprofit Global Ibogaine Therapy Alliance, a nonprofit.
Ibogaine, which Hunter Biden took in 2014 in a failed attempt to address his drug and alcohol addiction, is “a maverick molecule for a maverick moment”, Wheat adds, after its accidental discovery as a treatment for opioid addiction in the 1960s by heroin addict and film-maker Howard Lotsof. But as clinics in legal jurisdictions expand to cope with the rising demand, the dream-inducing psychedelic – which can rid addicts of even debilitating withdrawal symptoms, while also providing consumers with autobiographical and sometimes distressing movies of their lives – is “just becoming a pill you take”, Wheat says, as part of a “ruthlessly transactional” and lucrative American-style healthcare 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 the “effervescence of irrationality” has migrated to the right in recent years, where libertarian Republican political figures appear keener to take previously unfathomable risks.
On 7 September, ketamine therapy enthusiast Elon Musk – whose allies are now some of the biggest individual funders of psychedelic NGOs, research and drug development – posted on X: “White people are a rapidly diminishing minority of [the] global population.” A few hours later, he added: “We cannot understand the true nature of the Universe, unless we question deeply. I want to know what is real, even if the answer is total obliteration 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 alleged to have held his female victim in a chokehold, did ibogaine and claimed to have experienced visions of being initiated by Jesus in a viral X post. “I was shown the light,” he wrote. Jesus descended from the white marble steps of heaven and anointed me with a crown. I was saved! My brain. My heart. My soul. Healed!”
McGregor seemingly has political aspirations. He attended Trump’s inauguration in January and visited the president again in March, before hosting Tucker Carlson in Dublin and then running a short-lived anti-immigration campaign for president of Ireland.
A week after McGregor’s trip, the “Don’t Die” longevity entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, a Trump supporter who became a centimillionaire after selling web payments company Braintree in 2013, live-streamed himself tripping on mushrooms – with more than a million people watching on X. Billionaire Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff joined the live stream just weeks after saying Trump should send troops into San Francisco to make the city safer.
Others at the forefront of calls to expand access to ibogaine treatment include former Texas governor Rick Perry, who was 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 GOP” that nobody has ever heard of. Google co-founder Sergey Brin reportedly made a $15m investment into a startup researching ibogaine last year.
Congressman Morgan Luttrell, a former Navy Seal, did ibogaine and another psychedelic, 5-MeO-DMT, also known as “the God molecule” himself in 2018 in Mexico prior to his election to the House in 2023. He is the only known federal lawmaker to have tripped on the drugs, which he said eased his war traumas. “I was always ready to go,” he told the Washington Examiner. “I was a hyper-aggressive spec war guy that just couldn’t turn the page and start the new chapter.” But psychedelics were “life-changing” for him. “It was a clean slate; start completely over,” 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 that ibogaine has helped him address his PTSD as part of a grueling set of trips in which he was forced to witness his own demons. “It gets in 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 aside from 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 borders or enemies, because you work through your trauma”. Even while he doubts psychedelics can make peace-loving men of the most ardent warmongers, Ohler does not see the apparent upswell in rightwing figures publicly aligning themselves with the psychedelic reform movement as a negative phenomenon.
“If both camps are embracing 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 had been suffering from daily migraines after being shot in the head in Afghanistan years before. “After taking ibogaine, his pain was completely gone,” says Ohler. “This is a very special medicine.”
A medicine that also comes with mortal risks. Ibogaine is contraindicated with a host of other drugs and can lead to cardiac arrest, which is why treatments best take place with intensive care ward care and monitoring. A 2021 study reported that 33 ibogaine-related deaths have been reported publicly, but the true figure is likely much higher and there have been questions over how certain clinics have dealt with deaths under their care – even while the psychedelic has reportedly transformed thousands of lives.
For Hubbard, it is paramount that ibogaine is treated as the “very serious medication” that it is. “I don’t shy away from [the term] psychedelics,” he says.
But he does seek to avoid “flamboyant and quixotic” language when making the case. “Someone who is eating a handful of mushrooms and rolling around the mud at Woodstock in 1969 is not a credible advocate for how psychedelics can help deliver individual healing and broader spiritual enlightenment,” he says.
