A renewed national effort to confront the hidden wounds of war is gaining momentum in Washington, as lawmakers and federal officials push to expand research into psychedelic-assisted therapies for America’s veterans.
For decades, policymakers have wrestled with how best to treat the psychological toll carried home by those who served. Now, according to a report from The Guardian a new bipartisan push suggests the country may be ready to explore unconventional tools once dismissed or misunderstood.
At the center of this effort is newly introduced legislation aimed at preparing the Department of Veterans Affairs to evaluate emerging therapies, including psychedelic treatments currently under federal review. Supporters say the goal is simple: give veterans every possible chance to heal.
“Veterans suffering from invisible wounds like PTSD and depression deserve the same level of care from their VA as those with physical wounds,” said Sen. Tim Sheehy. “It’s past time we ensure our system is equipped to meet their needs.”
The urgency behind such proposals is hard to ignore. Leaders in Washington increasingly point to a grim reality—America has lost far more veterans to suicide after war than on the battlefield itself.
Standing at the Resolute Desk, President Donald Trump underscored that reality in stark terms. “Since 9/11, we’ve lost over 21 times more veteran lives to suicide than on the battlefield,” he said. “Today, we’re bringing them new hope.”
In response, the administration has taken steps to accelerate research into ibogaine, a powerful psychedelic compound derived from an African plant. Though currently classified as a Schedule I substance, it has drawn increasing scientific interest for its potential to treat PTSD, addiction, and traumatic brain injuries.
The administration has committed at least $50 million toward research, signaling a major shift in federal priorities. The effort also includes exploring pathways to allow certain patients access to experimental treatments under existing “Right to Try” laws.
Officials emphasize that the move is not about abandoning scientific rigor, but about removing barriers that have long slowed progress. “We owe it to our war fighters and veterans to turn over every stone,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
For many veterans, the conversation is deeply personal. Former Navy SEAL Marcus Capone described years of struggle after multiple deployments, cycling through treatments that offered little lasting relief.
“Every time you come home from a war zone, you feel like you lose a little bit of yourself,” Capone said, recalling emotional swings between anger and despair.
It wasn’t until he pursued ibogaine treatment abroad that he experienced a breakthrough. The process, he said, was intense and demanding, but ultimately transformative.
“The psychedelic shows you not what you want to see, but what you need to see,” he explained. “You deal with it… you get past the grief, the shame.”
Stories like Capone’s are not isolated. Across the country, veterans continue to seek alternative therapies—often traveling overseas due to regulatory restrictions at home.
That reality has raised concerns among policymakers who argue that American veterans should not have to leave their own country to access potentially life-saving care. It has also fueled calls for a more structured, medically supervised approach within the United States.
Advocates say the need is especially urgent for post-9/11 veterans, many of whom continue to carry both visible and invisible wounds from two decades of conflict.
“Our healthcare system has not kept pace and veterans are the ones paying the price,” said Dr. Kyleanne Hunter of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
Beyond ibogaine, other substances—including psilocybin, DMT, and ketamine—are being studied for their therapeutic potential. Early findings suggest these treatments may help address conditions ranging from depression and PTSD to chronic pain and substance abuse.
A recent Stanford study involving special operations veterans found significant improvements in mental health symptoms following a single ibogaine session. Researchers reported reduced PTSD, depression, and anxiety, though they cautioned that larger studies are still needed.
Meanwhile, clinical psychologists studying psilocybin say such substances may work by disrupting harmful mental patterns. By loosening deeply ingrained narratives tied to trauma, patients may be better able to process and move beyond their experiences.
“If there is this repetitive groove in one’s mind that is damaging… we would want to disrupt that,” said researcher Joseph Zamaria.
Veterans like Jesse Gould have taken that message to heart. After multiple combat deployments and years of struggling with PTSD, Gould sought out psychedelic treatment in Peru.
“The PTSD, the depression, the hyper vigilance no longer affected me to the same degree,” he said.
Motivated by that experience—and by the loss of fellow service members to suicide—Gould founded the Heroic Hearts Project, which helps veterans access similar treatments in controlled environments.
“I think something bad is already happening with veterans because they are taking their own lives,” Gould said, pushing back on arguments that reform should wait for federal approval.
Still, not everyone is ready to move forward without caution. Some researchers warn that while psychedelics show promise, there are risks, particularly for individuals with certain psychiatric conditions.
“There are some small subsets of people… who can become psychotic or manic,” said Johns Hopkins researcher Albert Garcia-Romeu, emphasizing the need for proper safeguards.
Advocates agree that safety must come first. Many programs already employ rigorous screening processes to minimize risk and ensure that treatments are administered responsibly.
“These experiences absolutely carry risk,” Gould acknowledged. “That is exactly why screening, preparation and integration matter so much.”
The current movement stands in stark contrast to the military’s past experimentation with psychedelics during the Cold War, when soldiers were sometimes exposed to substances without their knowledge or consent.
Programs like MK-Ultra and the Edgewood Arsenal tests left a troubling legacy, raising ethical questions that still echo today. Supporters of today’s efforts insist that transparency, consent, and medical oversight are non-negotiable.
In Congress, additional proposals aim to establish specialized treatment centers within the VA system, ensuring that veterans can access cutting-edge care closer to home.
At the state level, lawmakers across the country are also beginning to explore regulatory frameworks for psychedelic therapy, reflecting growing bipartisan interest in the issue.
For many Americans, the shift represents something deeper than policy—it reflects a broader recognition of the nation’s obligation to those who served.
“There is hope,” said Amber Capone, whose family has become deeply involved in advocacy. “You can actually live rather than simply survive.”
As the debate continues, one point remains clear: the country is searching for answers to a crisis that has lingered for far too long.
And for the men and women who carried the weight of war, the question is no longer whether change is needed—but how quickly it can come.
When the federal government gave psychedelics to soldiers decades ago, it did so in hopes of giving them advantages to win wars.
It’s now considering doing so again to help save their lives.
Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., is leading a bipartisan Senate effort by introducing what his office describes as a “pro-veteran” piece of legislation called the Veterans Health Administration Novel Therapeutics Preparedness Act.
The bill, introduced March 26, calls for the creation of a program that would test and oversee emerging therapeutic interventions, including “certain psychedelic-assisted therapies” that are currently under review by the Food and Drug Administration.
The bill has since been referred to the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.
President Donald Trump also appears poised to weigh in. CBS News reported Thursday that the White House is preparing an executive order to expand U.S. research into a drug called ibogaine, which is used to treat depression, anxiety, addiction, brain trauma, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The executive order would be designed to test whether ibogaine is “snake oil” or a legitimate treatment, a White House official told CBS News. A “60 Minutes” report last year detailed how nine U.S. veterans traveled to a remote village near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, for ibogaine treatments.
While the proposed Senate legislation doesn’t specify which psychedelics would be administered, it says that “emerging therapeutic interventions, including certain psychedelic-assisted therapies under evaluation by the Food and Drug Administration as of the date of the enactment of this Act, may significantly alter the treatment landscape for post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and other mental health conditions affecting veterans.”
The Federation of State Medical Boards reported that the substances under consideration include psilocybin (magic mushrooms), DMT, ibogaine, and ketamine.
If implemented, the substances would be used to treat substance abuse disorders, traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and chronic pain, Sheehy’s office said.
“Veterans suffering from invisible wounds like PTSD and depression deserve the same level of care from their VA as those with physical wounds, and it’s past time we do more to ensure our VA is equipped and prepared to navigate these veterans’ unique needs,” Sheehy said.
The legislation has already gained the support of several veterans support groups, including Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Dr. Kyleanne Hunter, the organization’s CEO, said a variety of studies have shown promise in using psychedelics to treat PTSD and other ailments soldiers experience when they return from combat.
“Our healthcare system has not kept pace and veterans are the ones paying the price: physically, mentally, and too often, financially,” Hunter said in a statement. “After 20 years of war, the post-9/11 generation is still carrying invisible and visible wounds, and we owe them access to the most effective care available today, not years from now.
“We owe them more than promises — we owe them delivery. This legislation moves innovation into real access for veterans now and we applaud this meaningful action.”
The legislation is a far cry from secretive and sometimes illegal Cold War-era programs that provided soldiers with psychedelic drugs often without their consent or knowledge to explore mind control, create truth serums, or to determine if it was possible to incapacitate large numbers of troops.
One of those programs was the Edgewood Arsenal human experiments, a top-secret program that ran from 1955 to 1975 and involved an estimated 7,000 soldiers.
Along with being subjected to chemical weapons, military doctors tested the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and other drugs. The tests were chronicled more than a decade ago in an article that appeared in The New Yorker titled “Operation Delirium” by author Raffi Khatchadourian.
In the article, Khatchadourian recounted an unnamed soldier telling him about a test where he was told to stick his head “into a culvert-like thing, and they sprayed some kind of mist into my face, and I thought it was water” but was instead LSD.
Once high, he was put in a padded room where doctors tried to get him to take various tests. The man became paranoid and ended up getting violent and punching the doctors.
Another was Project MK-Ultra, a Central Intelligence Agency mind control and behavior modification program involving LSD, ecstasy, psilocybin, and methamphetamine that began in 1953 and lasted nearly 20 years.
That program, which was blamed for the death of an Army biochemist who experienced a severe reaction after being dosed with LSD and fell to his death from a hotel window, was abandoned in the early 1970s after officials determined the effects of LSD were too unpredictable.
Sheehy’s legislation mirrors a bill sponsored by Sen. David McCormick, R-Pa., that would establish psychedelic-focused “centers for excellence” in VA facilities where veterans could be treated with magic mushrooms, ibogaine, and ecstasy.
That legislation would require the establishment of at least one center in each VA regional district and would be overseen by a veteran advisory committee that would include veterans and health professionals.
It has a companion bill in the House being sponsored by the Congressional Psychedelics Advancing Therapies (PATH) Caucus that was introduced last year but has not advanced to the House floor.
The movement has the support of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who said during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing last summer that the novel therapies need to be made available to people with serious mental health conditions.
Kennedy said the VA at the time had 11 clinical trials underway “particularly for our service members and retired service members.”
“It’s critically important that we make sure that the science on this is solid, and the preliminary results are very, very encouraging and it’s something that we want to pursue,” he said. “These are people who badly need some kind of therapy.
“Nothing else is working for them. This line of therapeutics has tremendous advantage, if given in a clinical setting, and we are working very hard to make sure that that happens within 12 months.”
Kennedy criticized previous administrations in October for what he said was the “aggressive suppression of psychedelics” and that the “war on public health” would end under President Donald Trump.
Trump clears path for expanded psychedelic research to treat veterans’ PTSD
Sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office on Saturday, President Donald Trump described the quieter tolls of wars — one that follows veterans home and lingers long after the fighting ends.
“Since 9/11, we’ve lost over 21 times more veteran lives to suicide than on the battlefield,” he said. “Today, we’re bringing them new hope.”
Trump, in a declaration suffused with urgency, signed an executive order directing the Food and Drug Administration to accelerate the review of certain psychedelic therapies to treat mental illnesses.
Specifically, the order commits at least $50 million in federal funds to boost research on ibogaine, a powerful hallucinogen derived from the African shrub iboga.
Ibogaine is classified as a Schedule 1 substance in the United States — the same category as heroin — which means the Drug Enforcement Administration considers it to have a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. Yet it has drawn mounting scientific attention in recent years for its potential to ameliorate conditions ranging from post-traumatic stress disorder to depression.
Much about the treatment remains opaque, but researchers argue the magnitude of the benefits observed in small, controlled trials merits further investigation. A 2024 Stanford University study of 30 special operations veterans with traumatic brain injury and repeated blast exposure found significant improvement in functioning, as well as an easing of PTSD, depression and anxiety symptoms after a single ibogaine session. No serious adverse side effects were reported, and no cardiac complications of the kind occasionally associated with the drug were observed. The authors cautioned, however, that larger studies were needed to better understand its safety and efficiency.
“If these turn out to be as good as people are saying, it’s going to have a tremendous impact on this country, and other countries, too,” Trump emphasized. “It’s for a lot of people, but it’s for our military in particular. The suicide epidemic among veterans is a national tragedy.”
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appearing alongside Trump on Saturday, said, “We owe it to our war fighters and veterans to turn over every stone” to alleviate the mental health challenges stemming from their deployments. He acknowledged that the Schedule 1 restriction has caused veterans to seek treatment abroad, where ibogaine is legal.
“It’s disturbing to me and to the president that hundreds, in fact thousands, of veterans are having to travel to Mexico, or other countries, to experiment with interventions that hold great promise,” Kennedy added.
Trump’s directive would not immediately change the categorization of any substance. Instead, it aims to ease the regulatory constraints that have long stymied research, including for therapies already well advanced along the FDA’s approval process.
The Trump administration will also create a pathway for ibogaine to be “administered to desperately ill patients under the ‘Right to Try’ law.” This would permit patients with life-threatening conditions — who have exhausted all approved care — to access experimental medicine not yet fully supported by the FDA.
“I’ve always believed in ensuring that the American patients have access to breakthrough treatments and therapies with love for our veterans, and I have a real love for our veterans,” the president concluded.
Marcus Capone, a Navy SEAL veteran with multiple combat deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, told Military Times that he found relief in the unconventional treatment. He credits the intervention, without hesitation, for saving his life.
“Every time you come home from a war zone, you feel like you lose a little bit of yourself,” he said, recalling cycles of emotional volatility which encompassed anger and sadness. Over the years, he tried both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical treatments, none of which proved to have long-lasting benefits.
As a last resort, his wife Amber Capone arranged for him to attend a medically supervised retreat in Mexico involving ibogaine. The treatment itself extends between six to 24 hours. Such sessions, he said, are psychologically demanding and physically taxing. At times, they can involve dark imagery and periods of intense emotional processing. But he insists that, for him at least, the gains were worth it.
“The psychedelic shows you not what you want to see, but what you need to see,” he explained. “So when you’re dealing with a traumatic experience, and you go revisit that, you deal with it. You get past the grief, the shame, and move on with your life. They actually get to the root cause of issues.”
The Capones have since established a foundation, Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions, or VETS, focused on expanding safe access to psychedelic-assisted therapy for those who have exited the military.
“There is hope,” Amber Capone told Military Times. “It’s not a one-size fits all, it’s not for everyone even. But there is hope, and you can actually live rather than simply survive.”
fter three combat deployments in Afghanistan, during which he suffered traumatic brain injuries from concussive blasts, army ranger Jesse Gould developed post-traumatic stress disorder and said he “drank almost every night to cope”.
In times of hardship, veterans sometimes turn to “medication and talk therapy, but it tends to be more of a maintenance program than actually overcoming it”, Gould said, but added that at age 28, “I was still very young. I didn’t want to be on medication the rest of my life.”
So, in February 2017, after hearing a podcast about ayahuasca, Gould traveled to Peru, where he tried the drug.
“The PTSD, the depression, the hyper vigilance no longer affected me to the same degree,” said Gould, who says he lost more than a dozen people he served alongside to suicide.
He thought psychedelics could help prevent more deaths, and just months later, he launched Heroic Hearts Project, a non-profit that hosts retreats where veterans can take ayahuasca or psilocybin and perhaps find relief from their trauma.
State lawmakers have begun paying attention to the potential health benefits of psilocybin, or “magic mushrooms”. Colorado, New Mexico and Oregon have legalized it for therapeutic use and at least eight states are now considering similar legislation. (Notably, in Colorado, it’s also legal for personal use.)
While people have taken mushrooms for centuries, and many researchers have concluded they are safe under certain conditions, even some who think the fungus has medicinal benefits argue that states should wait for Food and Drug Administration approval before legalizing it.
“I have always heard the argument of, ‘Well, just wait because otherwise, if something bad happens, then it’s going to mess up the whole system,’” Gould said. “I haven’t seen that. I think something bad is already happening with veterans because they are taking their own lives.”
Ingesting magic mushrooms can cause a “heightened state of learning” and disrupt the brain’s default mode network, allowing people to “become detached from their sense of self and their sense of identity”, said Joseph Zamaria, a clinical psychologist at the school of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who researches psychedelic-assisted therapy.
“If there is this repetitive groove in one’s mind that is self-referential and damaging and harmful – it’s abusive – we would want to disrupt that,” Zamaria said. “People who have experienced trauma [often] internalize the trauma. So they will say, ‘I am this person. I’m ashamed of this thing.’”
He continued: “If we can loosen the hold of those narratives on somebody’s mind, they may be able to work through the trauma more easily.”
A study published in 2025 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology following 22 adults with PTSD found that psilocybin “administered with psychological support may be safe, well-tolerated and associated with symptomatic improvement in adults with PTSD”.
Andy Smith, a Democrat and a Minnesota state representative, recently co-sponsored legislation with a Republican to allow residents 21 and over with conditions, such as PTSD and depression, to use psilocybin with a licensed facilitator. Lawmakers in both parties have introduced similar bills in Iowa, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey and New York.
“I grew up in the era of the Iraq war, where a lot of my friends went off to war and came back very much changed,” Smith said. “We don’t have a lot of tools to help in those areas” but psychedelic medicine shows “great potential to help those struggling with PTSD, depression and substance use disorder”.
Still, Albert Garcia-Romeu, associate director of Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University, said there was “limited data to support using psilocybin to treat PTSD, and there could be unknown risks”.
“It’s a pretty safe substance,” Garcia-Romeu said. “People have taken [psilocybin] for thousands of years, but there are some small subsets of people that if they take it – or if they take it at the wrong time – they can become psychotic or manic or even violent.”
He is skeptical of the state bills because “each one is going to be slightly different”.
Garcia-Romeu said: “I think it would make sense to do the FDA-approved medication route because that is going to come with a set of authoritative guidelines from major medical and regulatory bodies.”
Gould noted that his Heroic Hearts Project avoided bad outcomes with a “robust” intake process, which meant, for example, that people with schizophrenia and certain bipolar or personality disorders would not be allowed to attend a retreat. The organization has hosted more than 1,500 veterans and their spouses, none of whom had a psychotic episode, he said.
“These experiences absolutely carry risk, and I don’t take that lightly. That is exactly why screening, preparation and integration matter so much and why we have built our programs around that,” said Gould, whose organization has a wait list of more than 2,000 veterans.
When asked whether people who offer psilocybin to those struggling with PTSD should wait for federal approval, as some governors have argued, Gould pointed to the number of deaths by suicide among veterans. In 2023, the suicide rate among veterans in the US was 35 per 100,000 people, more than double the general population’s rate, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“I don’t want to repeat that cycle,” Gould said. “So even if it’s states figuring it out and it’s a little bit clunky, I prefer that than just saying, ‘Hey, there is no other option.’”
