“These are people who badly need some kind of therapy, nothing else is working for them,” Kennedy said at a House hearing Tuesday. “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.”
The GOP’s embrace of psychedelics is another, and perhaps one of the more jarring, examples of cultural transformation that Trump’s populist politics have brought.
Veterans seeking cures for mental illnesses associated with combat, combined with the Kennedy-backed Make America Healthy Again movement’s enthusiasm for natural medicine, have strengthened a libertarian strain on the right in favor of drug experimentation. Meanwhile, the left, where hippies are giving way to technocrats, has become more skeptical.
When Joe Biden was president, for example, agencies studied the drugs’ medical potential, but an air of doubt prevailed. The head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Nora Volkow, compared the hype for psychedelics as a cure for mental illness to belief in “fairy tales” in Senate testimony last year.
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.
The VA, under Trump’s secretary, Doug Collins, is working directly with Kennedy on clinical research.
