The Trump administration moves to treat millions of mentally ill veterans with psychedelics

October 26, 2026 3oliver

The Trump administration moves to treat millions of mentally ill veterans with psychedelics

Amanda Friedman

Updated Sun, October 25, 2026 at 2:00 PM UTC

7 min read

TRUMP SIGNS EXECUTIVE ORDER — (Photo by Allison Robbert/For The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Nearly one in three veterans who relies on the government for health care could benefit from taking psychedelic drugs like magic mushrooms or MDMA.

That’s not the assessment of some hippie or fading 1960s rock star. It came from Andrew Gradison, a senior adviser at President Donald Trump’s Veterans Health Administration. Gradison told a conference for psychedelics enthusiasts this month that he is eager to ramp up the VA’s capacity to give the drugs to as many as 2.1 million veterans with mental illnesses like post-traumatic stress disorder or depression. Gradison said 6.4 million veterans regularly rely on the VA for care.

No government regulator has deemed psychedelics safe or effective for mental illness. Under former President Joe Biden, the Food and Drug Administration in 2024 resoundingly rejected a proposal to authorize MDMA — also known as ecstasy — combined with talk therapy, to treat people with PTSD.

But psychedelics are getting a second chance in the Trump administration. Trump in April issued an executive order to accelerate research, clinical trials and patient access to the drugs. Republicans in Congress are among psychedelics’ biggest backers. And the constituency they are seeking to please, veterans, are disproportionately Republicans.

Veterans, frustrated with high suicide rates among their fellow ex-service members, are lobbying aggressively to see Trump follow through.

“We were able to roll out a vaccine for Covid because of President Trump’s Warp Speed initiative,” said Juliana Mercer, a Marine Corps vet who also spoke at the Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics conference in New York City. “Why aren’t we warp-speeding this treatment to save our veteran lives? What’s keeping us from doing that?”

Gradison said practical challenges, and the need to ensure safety, stand in the way. He said that “it’ll be a challenge” for the VA “in the first year to treat four digits worth of patients” with an FDA-approved psychedelic drug.

“Our demand will exceed our ability to supply these therapies, no doubt,” Gradison said.

Still, psychedelic enthusiasts can also point to some momentum coming out of the Trump administration. A week after Trump’s April executive order, the FDA allowed fast-track application reviews for three drugmakers developing psychedelic treatments. One, Compass Pathways,is set to finish submitting an application to the agency this quarter for its synthetic formulation of psilocybin for treatment resistant depression. Psilocybin is better known as magic mushrooms by those who use it for fun, rather than for healing. Compass anticipates an approval during the first half of 2027.

The psychedelic movement’s excitement over the federal action dominated discussions at the three-day New York conference, which drew attendance from federal officials, top executives at psychedelic-focused drug companies, biotech investors, clinicians and mental health advocates.

“We stand here on a new day and a 180 degrees different trajectory than what 2024 brought to us,” W. Bryan Hubbard, CEO of the psychedelic medicine advocacy group Americans for Ibogaine, said while speaking on Oct. 17, earning applause from the audience. Ibogaine, a psychedelic drug derived from an African shrub widely available in Mexico, has drawn interest from veterans for treating conditions like PTSD.

Trump’s psychedelics push has even been embraced by former skeptics of the drugs. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told senators in 2024 she thought psychedelic medicine backers were getting ahead of the evidence. “When people get excited, they want to start believing a little bit in fairy tales,” she said. However, she stood in the Oval Office with Trump in April as he signed his order, applauding the effort. She’s also spoken positively about the drugs in recent interviews.

Though psychedelics have yet to meet government regulatory standards, advocates of their approval often point to anecdotes about veterans’ experiences receiving psychedelic therapy in Mexico and promising clinical trial data as reasons to move forward.

Glenn H. Curtis, a retired Army major general, described the impact of taking ibogaine last year in Mexico as having a “miraculous” effect on his PTSD and traumatic brain injuries.

“Those same people that had issues coming home from deployments, even like myself, 20 years later, still have issues today that they have not received any kind of treatment [for],” said Curtis, who is a volunteer for Americans for Ibogaine.

Veterans have multiple champions in Washington for their cause. Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.), a former Navy SEAL who served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, has offered his support,sponsoring legislation to establish an office within the VA dedicated to helping the agency prepare for psychedelic drug approvals and integrate the therapies into patient care. Reps. Lou Correa (D-Calif.) and Jack Bergman (R-Mich.), a former Marine Corps general, co-chair the Psychedelics Advancing Therapies Caucus, which recently released a suggested framework for implementing FDA-approved psychedelic therapies into the U.S. health care system.

At the same time, psychedelic enthusiasts are set to lose two prominent advocates on Capitol Hill. Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a former SEAL ousted by a primary challenger in March, led a successful push in 2023 to pass legislation that funded federal clinical trials on psychedelic therapies for active-duty military members. Another Texas Republican, Rep. Morgan Luttrell, a former SEAL who sought ibogaine treatment in Mexico for a traumatic brain injury he incurred during training, is retiring from Congress in January after deciding not to seek reelection.

“Executive orders have a tendency to go away as the tides ebb and flow, and I would just hate for something like this to be removed,” Luttrell told POLITICO, emphasizing his desire for Congress to codify Trump’s executive order.

Veterans are a reliable Republican voting bloc, with 61 percent voting for Trump over Kamala Harris in 2024.

The VA has led the push in Washington to advance access to psychedelic therapy. It’s involved in 20 psychedelic clinical trials and was one of the first major health care systems to roll out Spravato, an FDA-approved treatment for depression using esketamine, a chemical component found in ketamine. Ketamine — an anesthetic frequently referred to as a psychedelic due to its psychoactive effects — is currently the only psychedelic-like drug approved for medical use.

Trump administration officials say they hope more will be approved soon.

“We want to see the drug approved if it’s safe and effective, and the reason why is because there’s a mental health crisis,” Matt Zorn, deputy general counsel at the Health and Human Services Department, told POLITICO.

Despite the federal government and advocacy groups’ ongoing efforts to support the veteran community, mental health issues among the population have long persisted. The VA has cited research finding that 23% of veterans that receive care through the VA had PTSD at some point in their lives, compared to 7% of veterans who don’t seek care through the VA. The agency has pointed to war zone deployment, training accidents and military sexual trauma as some of the main situations that could lead to a military service member developing PTSD.

U.S. veterans take their own lives at a rate roughly 57% higher than the general adult population, with an average of nearly 18 veterans dying by suicide every day.

While psychedelic enthusiasts feel closer than ever to scoring an FDA approval, cracks within the coalition have widened over what treatment should look like. Drugmakers and biotech investors have financially supported a drug-first model but some clinicians, mainly psychotherapists, and lawmakers argue that psychedelics are safer and more effective for treating mental health conditions when paired with psychotherapy.

“This is not dropping a pill and saying ‘I’m going to be cured tomorrow,'” Correa said during a press briefing in September. “There’s pre-preparation, psychiatric, psychological counseling, the actual treatment and then post-treatment psychological, psychiatric treatment in order to be very effective, most effective.”

This tension came to a head with the FDA’s 2024 rejection of a MDMA-assisted therapy application from Resilient Pharmaceuticals, then known as Lykos Therapeutics. Among the agency’s chief concerns was that regulators struggled to determine how much of the clinical improvement came from the effects of MDMA versus the intensive talk therapy component of the treatment. The agency also cited concerns about missing safety data, trial manipulation accusations and the potential risk for misconduct among therapy practitioners.

But Compass’ psychedelic therapy doesn’t include a talk therapy component, allowing the FDA to more easily evaluate the efficacy of the drug.

“Patients are in need, and this is a class that’s been well studied. We’re making sure that all standards are met so that patients can receive treatment safely,” Lori Englebert, Compass’ chief commercial officer, told POLITICO in a recent interview.