RFK Jr. is bringing psychedelics to the Republican Party

Then in August, the Food and Drug Administration rejected drugmaker Lykos Therapeutics’ application to offer ecstasy, alongside therapy, as a treatment for PTSD. FDA advisers worried the company’s researchers were more evangelists than scientists and determined that they’d failed to prove their regimen was either safe or effective.

Republicans complained the loudest.

“These technocrats think they know better,” Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL who lost an eye in Afghanistan, wrote on X after FDA advisers recommended Lykos’ application be rejected. “Their job is to say NO and support the status quo.”

But Crenshaw, who’s helped secure funding for psychedelic research at the Defense Department, got the response he wanted from Kennedy at Tuesday’s budget hearing. Kennedy said results from early government studies at the Department of Veterans Affairs and FDA were “very, very encouraging.” He added that his FDA commissioner, Marty Makary, sees it the same way. “Marty has told me that we don’t want to wait two years to get this done,” he said.

Crenshaw was pleased. “I’ve spent years supporting clinical trials to study the use of psychedelics to treat PTSD,” he told POLITICO. “It’s been a long fight, and it’s taken a lot of grit. I’m grateful Secretary Kennedy is taking this seriously — helping to mainstream what could be a groundbreaking shift in mental health.”

Kennedy’s comments have revived hope among psychedelics’ advocates that the Lykos decision was more hiccup than death knell. “It’s important for the entire community and the entire value chain around psychedelic therapy to hear that he wants to responsibly explore the benefits and risks of these therapies,” said Dr. Shereef Elnahal, a health official at the VA under Biden who sees promise in the drugs.

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The VA, under Trump’s secretary, Doug Collins, is working directly with Kennedy on clinical research.

Collins has referenced psychedelics on a podcast appearance, on X and at a cabinet meeting this spring when Trump pressed him on what he’s doing to drive down the high suicide rate among veterans.

“I talk with Collins about it all the time,” Kennedy said Tuesday. “It’s something that both of us are deeply interested in.”

Psychedelics spreading in red states

Earlier this month, Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, signed a law to put $50 million into clinical trials of the psychedelic ibogaine, as a mental health treatment.

“That culture shift is underway,” W. Bryan Hubbard, who spearheaded the Texas bill and is executive director of the American Ibogaine Initiative, told POLITICO. As Hubbard sees it, the narrative around psychedelics has evolved from counterculture recreation to a promising medical treatment for the “deaths of despair” from alcohol, drug overdoses and suicides the United States has grappled with in recent decades.

Kennedy was happy to see it.

“It’s super positive. It is really notable that the Republicans have become the party of some of these issues you wouldn’t have expected before,” Calley Means, a top Kennedy adviser, told POLITICO. “States pushing the envelope is certainly aligned with what Secretary Kennedy is trying to do. It gives him leverage to push bolder reforms.”

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The Texas effort involved a six-month sprint by Hubbard and former GOP Gov. Rick Perry to convince state lawmakers to pass the bill. Rep. Morgan Luttrell, another Lone Star Republican who credits ibogaine he took in Mexico with helping him overcome trauma he incurred during military service, also lobbied for it.

Hubbard attributes their success partly to Texas’ independent pioneer culture and a red-state philosophy that was receptive to his pitch for a medicalized psychedelics model. It didn’t hurt that Abbott had signed a bill to study ecstasy, psilocybin and ketamine as treatments for veterans with PTSD with Baylor College of Medicine. And since Texans are no stranger to religion, conversations about the spiritual aspect of ibogaine treatment seemed to resonate with lawmakers.

“We had a message that was tailor-made for the Lone Star State,” he said.

Veterans turned out at public hearings to describe traveling out of the country, often to Mexico, where ibogaine is unregulated, to receive treatment they couldn’t access in the U.S.

“These heroes have gone to war to defend the land of the free, only to come home and be faced with inflexible, bureaucratic systems that offer ineffectual solutions, paired with the Controlled Substances Act that has forced them to flee the country that they have defended in order to access treatment in a foreign country,” Hubbard said.