War and (inner) Peace
How two MAGA alpha figures did something the careful people wouldn’t
There’s a version of this story that’s would be so much easier to tell. That doesn’t make you squirm. A version where those who affect positive change are the researchers in lab coats at Johns Hopkins, where the arc bends reassuringly toward justice, where psychedelic medicine is reclaimed from the fringes through rigorous science and a patient-led care. Some of this is true but it’s not what happened last month.
Donald Trump, flanked by Joe Rogan (host of the most listened-to podcast in the world), and a cluster of military veterans, signed an executive order in the Oval Office to fast-track FDA review of psilocybin and ibogaine on the 18th of April, directing $50 million toward psychedelic research, and begin dismantling the scheduling framework that has kept these compounds locked in a legal cage since 1970.“Can I have some, please?” Trump joked to a laughing room. Cringe. My phone pinged with jubilant announcements from my psychedelic-interested peers but I can’t shake the discomfort of that image.
To understand why this moment is so loaded, we must go back to another war. During Vietnam, drug use among US troops reached a scale that wa staggering, incomparable to any other time in history. A 1971 Department of Defence report found that 51 percent of the armed forces had smoked marijuana, 31 percent had used psychedelics, LSD, mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms, and 28 percent had used hard drugs including heroin and cocaine. When Nixon’s liaison to the Bureau of Narcotics was asked about the drug problem in Vietnam, his response was blunt: “You don’t have a drug problem in Vietnam; you have a condition. Problems are things we can get right on and solve.” A condition. Not a problem. The distinction matters, because it tells you that even then, those in power understood that men in impossible circumstances reach for whatever allows them to survive those circumstances.
What followed that moment, though, was one of the most cynical political manoeuvres in modern American history. Nixon, facing a flagging war, collapsing poll numbers, and a counterculture that terrified him, launched the War on Drugs. His advisor John Ehrlichman was eventually candid about what it actually was: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalising both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”
Psychedelics were classified Schedule I in 1970; Declared to have no medical value and presenting a high potential for abuse. Timothy Leary, former Harvard psychologist, was declared public enemy number one. A generation of genuinely promising psychiatric research was shuttered overnight. The researchers who had been documenting extraordinary results with psilocybin and LSD in treating depression, alcoholism, and end-of-life anxiety were simply stopped. Not because the science was bad but because the science’s users had become politically inconvenient.
That scheduling decision cast a shadow across more than five decades of mental health research. Any compound associated with Schedule I status becomes extraordinarily difficult and expensive to study. Funding dries up, institutional support evaporates, careers become risky and reputations are compromised. The research that did happen was largely done in rodents, or the renegade underground.
Meanwhile, the veterans kept coming home, shattered; from Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. The existing interventions like SSRI’s, talk therapy, a Veteran Affairs System creaking under the weight of demand, kept failing a significant proportion of them. Veteran suicide rates remain nearly double those of the general population. Seventeen veterans die by suicide every single day in the United States.
Joe Rogan has been talking about psychedelics on his podcast for years. He’s interviewed researchers, practitioners, veterans, and anyone else willing to go into it with him. His audience is predominantly male and are also the demographic most likely to distrust pharmaceutical psychiatry. They hungrily absorb thousands of hours of this material. He normalised these conversations for people who would never have encountered them in a clinical journal. Trump, for his part, said the executive order was directly prompted by conversations with Rogan about ibogaine, a compound derived from a West African plant, documented to have profound effects on addiction and trauma and gaining huge traction in veteran communities. The two men went from podcast to Oval Office to signed order in a timeframe that the standard research-to-policy pipeline would find almost incomprehensible. The same qualities that make both of these figures alarming are precisely what made this possible.
Rogan’s willingness to platform ideas that institutional gatekeepers haven’t yet approved is how psychedelic researchers got mainstream airtime long before this moment. His contempt for credentialist dismissal, often applied recklessly, sometimes dangerously, in this instance gave space to scientists whose work was solid and whose access to broader audiences had been systematically constrained. Trump’s contempt for regulatory consensus, his indifference to caution that have made Democratic politicians shy away from anything that still carries the whiff of the counterculture; these same instincts that make him a genuinely dangerous figure politically are what let him sign something that no carefully positioned centrist politician would risk. The recklessness and the breakthrough are the same thing.
Neither man could have done this without the political architecture the veterans provided. Funny how quickly something goes from dangerous to urgent when the people suffering are the one’s we’ve decided are important enough to care about.
You can read that reframing as cynical. It is, in part, cynical. But the veterans who have spent years advocating for access to these treatments, the ones who flew to clinics in Mexico and Jamaica and came back different, the ones who built organisations and lobbied and testified, they aren’t cynical. They’re desperate in the most functional sense: people who found something that worked when nothing else did, and who want other people to have it.
The political choreography of the Oval Office signing doesn’t change what ibogaine does to a traumatised nervous system.
What we’re watching is a genuinely strange historical reversal. Nixon weaponised the drug war against his political enemies; using it to suppress the anti-war left, to criminalise Black communities, to silence the counterculture that threatened his grip on power. The scheduling of psychedelics was never really about public health. It was about political control. Now, 55 years later, another Republican president is partially dismantling that framework, also for political reasons, also surrounded by his coalition, also with one eye on the polls. The motivation is no purer. The latter beneficiaries may be just as real as the former victims.
That’s the uncomfortable truth at the centre of this story. Progress doesn’t always arrive with clean hands. Sometimes it comes through figures with enough cultural dominance and enough contempt for convention to do the thing that more careful people won’t touch. The mushrooms don’t care who signed the order. The veterans don’t care who was in the room.
Whether this moment becomes a genuine turning point or a political gesture that stalls in the regulatory machinery, that part is still being written. But something shifted in the Oval Office last week, this time not in the direction of apocalypse. As counterintuitive as it feels to welcome anything actioned by President Trump and his ilk, this is a move that feels surprisingly hopeful.