How the conservative activist Bryan Hubbard, with help from Rick Perry and Joe Rogan, persuaded Trump and the G.O.P. to embrace ibogaine, a psychedelic drug derived from an African shrub.
One evening in May, about thirty guests—oil executives, Navy SEALs, and D.C. political operatives among them—arrived at the Coronado Club, in downtown Houston, where Texas’s ultra-wealthy have converged since the nineteen-fifties. Walking past portraits of nineteenth-century Galveston gentry, they filed into the dining room, where QR codes and envelopes had been placed on tabletops to collect donations for Americans for Ibogaine, a pro-psychedelics nonprofit. As waiters in black suits served steak and peach cobbler, Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and the former Republican Presidential candidate, and the chairman of Americans for Ibogaine, leaped to his feet. In recent years, Perry has refashioned himself into a folksy elder statesman of the psychedelic movement, often describing himself as the “Johnny Appleseed” of plant medicines. Standing in front of a painting of the Rio Grande, Perry spoke about the chain of extraordinary events that had led President Donald Trump to sign an executive order, in April, expediting F.D.A. approval of psychedelic therapies. “I’m a very, very strong man of faith,” Perry said. “It couldn’t have happened without some divine intervention.” Then he bowed his head and blessed the meal.
A scene like this, unimaginable a decade ago, marks a paradigm shift: increasingly, it is conservative leaders who are embracing research into psychedelics. Ibogaine, in particular—a psychedelic drug derived from an African shrub—has become a cause célèbre for the American right. The drug’s relative obscurity has allowed its champions to shake off the baggage of the nineteen-sixties, and to position its use, not as hippie hedonism but as a medical intervention compatible with patriotic duty and Christian faith. This framing has been remarkably effective at winning the support of red-state governments and securing substantial funding for psychedelic research. Buoyed by a countercultural drift, psychedelics now have more political clout than in any previous chapter of American history.
The major force behind the ibogaine movement in recent years has been Bryan Hubbard, a Kentucky lawyer and lifelong Republican who co-founded Americans for Ibogaine alongside Perry, and stood behind Trump in the Oval Office during the executive-order signing. Born in Russell County, Virginia, Hubbard was largely raised by his grandfathers, both union coal miners with missing fingers, and still speaks with an Appalachian twang. He spent sixteen years practicing workers’-compensation law in Kentucky—a field that revealed the extent to which the opioid crisis had turned the region into an “apoca-billy hillscape,” as he put it. After taking depositions from hundreds of people who had been debilitated by painkillers prescribed for their work injuries, Hubbard came to see addiction not as a moral failure but as the most visible symptom of a profound spiritual affliction at America’s core.
Hubbard went on to run Kentucky’s Social Security disability system and its child-support-enforcement program, before leading its Office of Medicaid Fraud and Abuse Control. In 2022, the attorney general Daniel Cameron appointed him to lead Kentucky’s newly formed opioid-abatement program, which was charged with distributing roughly half of the eight hundred and forty-two million dollars that the state had received from a settlement with opioid companies. After steering some of the funds toward naloxone and addiction-treatment programs, Hubbard began researching alternative rehabilitation therapies. He first learned about ibogaine from Julia Reibelt, the author of a popular Substack about her experiences with psychedelic therapy. Ibogaine has been used for decades in international clinics and underground circles to treat severe drug addiction; unlike psychedelics such as psilocybin, it has a reputation for mitigating acute opioid-withdrawal symptoms. Intrigued, Hubbard later flew to New York, where he grew convinced of the drug’s potential after meeting with leading ibogaine researchers, veteran advocates, and philanthropists. He spent the following months organizing a series of public hearings in Kentucky where F.D.A. officials, Stanford researchers, and U.S. military veterans testified about ibogaine’s benefits. But, just as Hubbard was on the cusp of allocating forty-two million dollars from the opioid settlement to ibogaine clinical trials, Cameron, his political benefactor, was replaced in the A.G.’s office by Russell Coleman, a former F.B.I. agent. Displeased with Hubbard’s ibogaine advocacy, Coleman called him into a meeting where, according to Hubbard, he was “ambushed” and asked to resign. [Coleman cited “limited resources” as part of the reasoning behind his opposition, and said that the state should be more focussed on the prevention side of the opioid crisis.]
Eventually, in the wake of that disappointment, Hubbard found Logan Davidson, the senior adviser of Texans for Greater Mental Health and the director of policy and advocacy of Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions. In 2021, Davidson had successfully shepherded the bill that made Texas the first state to fund psychedelic research, for psilocybin-assisted therapy for veterans—a precedent that Hubbard thought could open a path forward for ibogaine. And, while other states had balked at the fifty-million-dollar price tag that Hubbard deemed necessary for the clinical trials, Texas had ended the year with a twenty-four-billion-dollar budget surplus from oil and gas revenues. “Texas needs to finish the job I began in Kentucky,” Hubbard told Davidson. But first he had to make one call.
In September, 2023, after decades of suppressing anxiety and insomnia that he partially attributed to severe concussions he suffered as a high-school quarterback, Rick Perry went to a clinic outside Tijuana, where he lay down on a mattress, pulled on an eye mask, and started tripping on ibogaine. “I was on a spaceship, and there were all these Mesoamerican symbols and hieroglyphics flying past me,” he told me, by phone, from his ranch in Round Top, Texas. “Out in the distance, one that caught my attention was Satan.” The demon had “little horns” and “baying teeth,” but Perry felt no fear. “He came up right in front of me, and I said, ‘Satan, get behind me,’ ” Perry said. “He did disappear.”
At the same clinic, he smoked 5-MeO-DMT—a highly potent psychedelic that can be found in the venom of the Colorado River toad—which provoked a sort of spiritual ecstasy. “It was clearly the brightest, whitest, purest light that I’ve ever been around in my life,” he told me. “I knew that I was in the presence of God, and that he loved me immeasurably.”
Perry said that an MRI taken before the trip showed mild brain atrophy, typical of a man in his seventies; another scan, taken six months later, showed none at all, and he recalled his neurosurgeon, Charles Gordon, telling him that he now had the brain of a forty-year-old. Countless veterans whom Perry had gotten to know had experienced similarly stark recoveries after exhausting conventional treatments for brain injuries and trauma, and turning to ibogaine. Between these firsthand testimonies from veterans, his own medical miracle, and the spiritual experience, Perry became convinced that helping legitimize ibogaine should be his life’s mission. He understood psychedelics to be a reification of the Christian belief in life after death. That belief seemed especially potent the day we spoke—thirty minutes before our interview, he’d discovered that one of his five dogs had died. “I got most of my crying out,” Perry said, emotion still heavy in his voice. “This medicine is, for me, a confirming message that, after death, your spiritual home is waiting on you. There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said, slowly. Then a long pause. “I get to see my dog.”
Hubbard and Perry first met in June, 2023, after the ex-governor keynoted a psychedelics conference organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS); Hubbard later reached out to him to see if he could assist with the effort to bring ibogaine to Texas. In October, 2024, the two invited thirty handpicked Texans—veterans, researchers, donors—to a war-council-style meeting in downtown Austin. “I’m the football coach, Bryan is the quarterback, and y’all are the team,” Perry told them.
The veterans were a key part of the team. Unlike in Kentucky, where Hubbard pushed ibogaine as a broader treatment for former opioid addicts, the clinical trials that Hubbard, Perry, and Davidson were proposing, in Texas, would be centered on veterans, in keeping with the psilocybin precedent. Rick Doblin, the founder and president of MAPS, had identified, decades earlier, that veterans, as a sympathetic constituency, were the surest route to bipartisan support. He pointed out that ibogaine’s therapeutic potential had been evident since the nineteen-sixties. “But we need to show that the psychedelics are coming to heal people who society values, and we tend to demonize addicts.” He added, “The fact that you can take psychedelics and stay Christian, stay Republican—that’s the key learning that society needed in order to integrate these drugs.”
In the spring of 2025, the team built momentum through activities such as hosting private screenings of “In Waves and War,” a documentary on Navy SEALs and psychedelic therapy, which they used to recruit dozens of legislators to their cause. At one point, they were holding seventy meetings a day; Davidson described the campaign as the most intense experience of his political career. It was also one of the weirdest. “Most legislative and political efforts are pretty homogenous, but this was the strangest cast of characters you can imagine,” he said. “You’re standing up there next to Navy SEALs, career scientists, MAHA hippies, traditional hippies, first responders—everybody is getting in.”
That May, Hubbard was invited to a closed-door meeting with Texas’s Speaker of the House, Dustin Burrows, and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, to make his case for fifty million dollars in state appropriations to bring ibogaine to Phase III clinical trials—a sum that even his own team doubted he’d land. Hubbard burned a wish ticket, believed to manifest desires, on the balcony of his hotel room before walking to the state capitol. The meeting had been scheduled to run for thirty minutes. After an hour and a half, Hubbard emerged, with his head down, then looked up at his team, who were standing outside waiting for him. He stomped his foot. “Fifty million fucking dollars,” he said. The confirmation came by text two days later. It was like scoring the winning touchdown in the final minutes of a game.
In June, 2025, Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 2308, creating a framework for ibogaine clinical trials funded by partnerships between the state and private drug developers. The bill passed the Texas House 138–2, and the state Senate 27–4. By December, a consortium led by UTHealth Houston and U.T.M.B. Health had been awarded the fifty-million-dollar sum to lead the trials. “Democrats early on were, like, Yes, we support this, but we’re not going to get tagged as the druggies,” Davidson said. “That’s where the conservative influence provides cover. Each side gets permission from the other side to do this.” Hubbard told me that he hopes the win becomes a “big-bang singularity” which other red states will follow. Today, nineteen states have pro-psychedelic legislation passed or pending, including Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.
The city of Austin, meanwhile, “is the psychedelic center of the world at this point,” Paul Austin, the host of the “Third Wave” podcast and a microdosing coach for the entrepreneurial class, told me. A new archetype has emerged from this scene: the rugged libertarian cowboy. In March, at an Americans for Ibogaine event held during SXSW week at a MAHA-adjacent wellness club in Austin, Hubbard, who sports a thick beard and shoulder-length hair, showed up in bluejeans and cowboy boots. Standing onstage near a refrigerator of raw milk, as the scent of barbecue wafted in the air, he delivered a fiery speech outlining ibogaine’s emancipatory potential for the American people, channelling a Western sheriff’s incorruptible sense of justice and a preacher’s thundering conviction. Describing veterans as “ground zero” for addiction and suicide, Hubbard noted that “deaths of despair” have taken a million and a half American lives in the past ten years, a figure he said exceeds the number of U.S. soldiers killed in action since 1776. “I don’t care what culture you come from, what color you are, or what your political-party label is,” he said. “We can look at the foundations of this country as they are now, and we see the crumbling and the cracking and the strain,” he continued, his voice rising. “Yes, this is about ibogaine. But this is about the human condition, and what this country is supposed to be.”
About two weeks later, Hubbard and Perry sat down with Joe Rogan, in his podcast studio, in Austin, for the second time. Their first conversation with Rogan introduced ibogaine to more than a million and a half viewers on YouTube, but their second appearance would prove even more consequential. As Perry told this story to the Coronado Club audience, back in May, he paused for dramatic effect. “Here’s what’s happened,” he said. “We’re standing in the studio, microphones off. Joe Rogan says, ‘What can I do to help you?’ And Bryan said, ‘Talk to the President.’ It was really that simple. Rogan—I hug his neck, man—this guy literally texted the President.”
According to Hubbard, Rogan sent Trump information about ibogaine’s treatment outcomes for addicts and veterans suffering from P.T.S.D. When Rogan saw Trump at a U.F.C. fight in Miami, on April 11th, the President told Rogan that he thought ibogaine was a good idea. After that, things moved quickly. On April 18th, Hubbard was at the White House for the executive-order signing, which he described as an “out-of-body psychedelic experience.” Rogan opened with remarks about how the War on Drugs campaign was racist as Trump stared ahead impassively. Then Rogan told reporters Trump’s reply when he first texted him about ibogaine: “Sounds great. Do you want F.D.A. approval? Let’s do it.” As the camera panned between Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump solicited testimonials about how great ibogaine is—then briefly pivoted to Iran, before coming back to sign the order. “Can I have some, please?” Trump joked, while struggling to pronounce the word “ibogaine.” He went on, “I’ll take whatever it takes. I don’t have time to be depressed.” It was the first time that a sitting U.S. President had spoken favorably about psychedelics.
The executive order, titled “Accelerating Medical Treatments for Serious Mental Illness,” directs federal agencies to improve coördination and reduce delays around psychedelic clinical trials and drug development; it also states that patients with life-threatening conditions can access these investigational drugs under the Right to Try Act. The order’s singling out of ibogaine, the only psychedelic mentioned by name, surprised analysts, given how much less research exists on it than on psilocybin or MDMA. “It really couldn’t have been based solely or even primarily on science, because the science is just so lacking,” Mason Marks, a law professor at Michigan State University who specializes in F.D.A.and controlled-substances regulation, told me.
Hubbard and Perry call ibogaine “the most sophisticated molecule on the planet,” and often cite a 2024 Stanford study that found sharp reductions in P.T.S.D., depression, and anxiety symptoms among thirty Special Operations veterans with a history of traumatic brain injury. However, given the legal limitations, studies like the Stanford one are observational and limited to small groups, and the science behind ibogaine’s supposedly miraculous workings remains thin. Also, ibogaine’s prolongation of the heart’s QT intervals carries a real risk of fatal arrhythmia. “This cardiotoxicity continues to be a concern, but researchers have developed protocols to try to address it,” Nora Volkow, the longtime director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told me.
Marks and other legal experts noted that the executive order’s actual provisions are fairly modest, and in some cases even unnecessary, like speeding up F.D.A. approval for reclassifying Schedule 1 drugs—this already happens by law within three months of F.D.A. approval. “It’s like condensing the last mile by a fraction,” Marks said, explaining that it’s the requirement for extensive clinical trials that makes the process so lengthy. And, although stock prices for drug companies researching psychedelics soared in reaction to the news, it remains unclear whether the order will actually expedite F.D.A. approval for such drugs. Matt Zorn, an H.H.S. lawyer with a background in psychedelics policy who drafted much of the order, pushed back at criticisms. “Just because it’s symbolic doesn’t mean it’s not functional,” he told me. “An executive order forces something to the top of the agenda that may have languished at the bottom.”
The most tangible provision was the directing of tens of millions of dollars in federal funding to support state governments with psychedelic-research programs—a move that implicitly favored Texas, the only state at that point with a framework and state-sanctioned funds to conduct ibogaine research. Four weeks later, Colorado launched its own ibogaine initiative, which Perry attributes to his conversations with Governor Jared Polis. The movement, as Hubbard hoped, had begun to spread.
Back at the Coronado Club, over dessert, a guest raised what he saw as the central contradiction of the evening: preaching “just say no” to kids while the attendees sat at a fund-raiser for ibogaine. “Most of the people in this room are probably conservative, and we’ve had to take a position that is almost the opposite of where we were, say, five years ago,” he said.
Perry clarified his position. “I am still anti-drugs, recreationally,” he said. “I am very much against the legalization of drugs.” Rather, he was advocating for these psychedelics to be rescheduled so that they could be researched, with the ultimate goal of dispensing psychedelic treatments under the health-care system with the same oversight as prescription medications. But other members of Texas’s conservative establishment were still dubious. “They don’t do that, and go to a concert?” a woman asked, of the drugs in question. Another guest unintentionally hit on one of the movement’s main unresolved tensions when he asked where ibogaine came from, and how its supply would be controlled long term.
After the executive order, a coalition of ibogaine practitioners had published an open letter warning of the risks of overharvesting the iboga plant and cutting out the Bwiti people of Gabon, who have used it ceremonially for generations. Hubbard told guests at the Coronado Club that his movement leans on both science and reverence. He noted that there is the capacity to create a self-contained, U.S.-based supply chain through yeast and algae that replicate ibogaine’s alkaloid. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies are trying to develop an oral version of noribogaine, ibogaine’s primary metabolite, and other companies are working on non-psychoactive derivatives. But he also insisted that there was still much to learn from the Bwiti. “They are the possessors of what I would call the master key of knowledge,” Hubbard said. He said that one of his main priorities is “making sure that they are involved, and can deliver what they have known now for centuries.” In return, he said, U.S. researchers would offer “scientific knowledge on things that can help improve life there,” and the Bwiti would “be our full partner for the medicalization of Ibogaine in the U.S. and globally.” Whether that priority can survive the process of medicalizing ibogaine remains an open question. “Here’s the other reality,” he said, his voice lowering. “The systems that have fought the emergence of ibogaine specifically, and psychedelic medicine generally, over the past sixty years are now the same systems that are going to shepherd their emergence.” ♦
