What Is Ibogaine and Why Is Trump Talking About It?

0:05Hi, Michelle. Thanks so much for being here. Hi, Tyler. Thanks for having me. In 2023, Rick Perry, the Republican former governor of Texas and former U.S. energy secretary, went to a clinic outside Tijuana, laid down on a mattress, and started tripping on a psychedelic drug called Ibogaine. Michelle, can you tell us what Rick Perry saw during his trip? Rick Perry's trip report has to be one of my favorites that I've ever heard of in my reporting career. He told me that as he was starting the trip, he saw himself flying on a spaceship of sorts through all of these Mesoamerican symbols. And out in the distance, he sees this demon in the horizon.

0:51And it starts coming towards him with these baying teeth and flashing wings. And Rick told me that he was not afraid. And then he told this demon, Satan, get behind me. And the demon disappeared. That's Michelle Luke, a journalist who covers drug culture and advocacy, who just wrote a piece for The New Yorker on the rights embrace of a psychedelic drug called Ibogaine, which led to President Trump signing an executive order back in April, greenlighting research into psychedelics as a treatment for mental illness. This executive order would have seemed almost unthinkable just a few years ago, especially coming from a president whose party has long championed the war on drugs and opposed the push for the legalization of marijuana.

1:37But even though Trump was reportedly quick to come aboard the Ibogaine initiative, the movement itself was the result of some unlikely alliances between drug advocates, former Republican politicians, and yes, Joe Rogan. I wanted to talk with Michelle about how the Ibogaine movement gained traction on its way to acceptance within the White House, how the politics of psychedelics have shifted in recent years, and what it all tells us about the state of the drug advocacy movement. This is The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. So I guess we should start by talking about what Ibogaine is.

2:13Like, where does it come from, and what exactly is it meant to do? Does everyone who uses Ibogaine, like, do they have a Rick Perry-like experience, or do you think the demon was very specific to Perry? I think that Ibogaine experiences can be very variable. It is a psychoactive drug that derives from this shrub called Iboga. And it's actually found in Central Africa and has been used in ceremonies in Gabon by a spiritual tradition called buiti. What's really notable about Iboga or Ibogaine trips is that they can last between 16 to 48 hours. So in some cases, you're underwater for almost two days.

2:54It's a really gruelingly long trip, and at extremely high doses, you can feel intense nausea and even paralysis. So I think that this sort of experience can be classified as a pretty rugged spiritual ordeal. And I think that this very intensity is what has made Ibogaine advocates like Navy SEALs really latch onto it as something that is not necessarily a fun recreational party drug, but a rite of passage towards healing. That's interesting because obviously there are drugs like MDMA or, you know, psilocybin where people do use them as fun party drugs. But then there's also a lot of, you know, potential therapeutic benefits.

3:43And so it's like depending on the dose or what exactly you're trying to do with the drug, it can have different effects. But it sounds like, I mean, is the idea that like you're kind of only using Ibogaine if you're trying to recover from something or experience something? Like it's not, I guess you wouldn't like take it and then go to the club. Well, that's a line that I kept hearing over and over again from people like Rick Perry. Oh, no. They kept saying you will never go to an Ibogaine rave. Ibogaine is pretty obscure, even within insider psychedelic circles. A lot of people don't really know what it's like or its history, or it really doesn't have much of a cultural imprint in American pop culture.

4:25And so I think this blank slate is actually what has really aided its advocates in pushing it through, because the right, I think, is really focused on medicalization rather than recreational use. And they're really able to say, look, ibogaine is a drug that is extremely tough. It lasts a really long time and it has significant medical risks. In some cases, patients have actually died using ibogaine. So its advocates say Ibogaine is something that you really need to take in a hospital bed under regulated doctors and nurses. It's not something that you're going to see on a dance floor. Yeah, so we're going to, I mean, this whole conversation is going to be about sort of like the right wing embrace of Ibogaine.

5:09But before we talk a little bit about that process, I'm wondering if you can explain the executive order that President Trump signed in April called Accelerating Medical Treatment for Serious Mental Illness. Like if you could just tell us about that order and what it actually does, since that's such a big part of why people are talking about Ibogaine right now. Absolutely. So that executive order is really what sparked my entire story and my decision to kind of look into this movement. A few weeks before Trump signed the executive order, I already heard rumblings from my sources that something big was about to happen.

5:40But when the news broke and everyone saw these videos and later memes. A man who's really respected by everybody and he's a fantastic person, Joe Rogan, to say a few words. Joe Rogan standing behind the president next to Dr. Oz and RFK Jr. and all these psychedelic advocates. It was genuinely mind-blowing. And I think in many ways this was like a historic victory for the psychedelic movement. It was the first time that psychedelics have been mentioned by a U.S. president in a favorable way ever in history. The fact that the executive order also only mentions Ibogaine as the only psychedelic within its actual text was also really notable because at that point, most Americans had no idea what it was.

6:25Trump himself actually struggled to pronounce Ibogaine as he was joking about how he wanted to try it. It's called Ibogaine treatment. Ibogaine. Remember the name? Is that pronounced relatively properly, would you say? I don't want to get it wrong. I, Bogdan, because it's so important, and experienced an 80 % to 90 % reduction in symptoms of depression and anxiety within one month. Can I have some, please? I'll take it. So the executive order does several things. I think one of the most notable things is that it actually coordinates all of these different agencies that tend to regulate drugs, including the HHS, the DEA, the FDA, and the VA, sort of instructing them to share data and streamline the whole process.

7:17It also directs millions of dollars in federal funding to support state governments with psychedelic research programs. So this move was actually directed implicitly towards Texas, which at the time was the only state that had established a framework and had state-sanctioned funds to conduct Ibogaine research. So what's kind of interesting about the executive order is that there was a lot of discourse when it first came out that it was kind of more of a PR stat. It was a symbolic move that brought a lot of attention to psychedelic legalization, but a lot of insiders in the industry were saying that it didn't really move the needle that much.

7:57However, I spoke to this guy named Matt Zorn, who the media likes to call the psychedelic czar. He's a lawyer for the HHS. And he told me that just because something is symbolic doesn't mean that it's not functional. It's really about hijacking attention, which is the currency that really matters, and forcing psychedelics to the top of an agenda because in the past, it might have just languished at the bottom. Yeah. I mean, even if this executive order doesn't actually do that much, it's still striking that it even happened. And as you say, you have an American president saying, you know, positive things about psychedelics in the Oval Office for the first time ever.

8:37So it seems like a lot of this can be traced back to this guy named Brian Hubbard, who you describe in your piece as the major force behind the Ibogaine movement in recent years. Can you tell us a little bit about Hubbard and how he found his way to this particular cause? Yeah, so Brian Hubbard is a really fascinating character. In many ways, I think he's a psychedelic folk hero of this current era. He is a lawyer from deep in Appalachia, coal mining country. He was born in Virginia and then spent a lot of his career as a lawyer and then later running public welfare programs in Kentucky. In 2022, he was appointed by the then-A.G.

9:17Diano Cameron to distribute millions of dollars of funding that the state had received from a settlement with opioid companies. And so as he was researching alternative treatments for opioid addiction, he came across Ibogaine, which had been used for decades in underground circles and by people like veterans who go to offshore clinics to access this treatment to treat some of the most deeply entrenched forms of drug addiction. And so Hubbard then flies around the country and meets all of these researchers and advocates and funders. And then he spends months organizing public hearings in Kentucky about Ibogaine.

9:55But then just as he was on the cusp of getting an Ibogaine program through using some of this opioid money, he actually was fired by a new boss who had taken the AG's role, a former FBI agent named Russell Coleman. So Hubbard then has to take the show on the road and he links up with this a very well-connected GOP strategist named Rex Alsace, whose son died of an opioid overdose. And they had actually been introduced by the folk singer Melissa Eldridge, who also lost the child to opioids. So you have this whole coalition of, I guess, grieving parents, really, who are working to bring Ibogaine treatment to the mainstream.

10:37It's interesting because it's like you kind of describe Hubbard linking up with all of these people who seem very interested in using Ibogaine to treat opioid addicts. But then eventually it seems like the movement kind of arrives in Texas and all of a sudden the initiative is centered around treating veterans. And so I guess I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how over time the goals seem to shift a little bit. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting part of the story because for a long time, drug addicts in particular have not been seen as very sympathetic to the general public.

11:12They're, you know, oftentimes people with very complex histories. And back in the 80s, when another psychedelic advocate named Rick Doblin, who's the founder of MAPS, a really influential psychedelic organization, Rick Doblin was trying to legalize MDMA, and he made a very calculated decision to focus on veterans because he knew that this was a particularly sympathetic group that could win bipartisan support. And as you know, the GOP doesn't really have a great track history of dealing with drug addicts in very sympathetic ways. And so I thought it was very interesting that Hubbard was able to kind of fuse these two different groups of Ibogaine recipients and kind of also bring in a very strong veteran coalition of Navy SEALs who are really able to win, I think, the support of red state legislators.

12:09So a big part of this coalition was also Rick Perry. Part of the reason I think why it seemed like why Hubbard was successful in getting funding for these Ibogaine trials in Texas is that he had such a strong ally in Perry, who I think went on that first Ibogaine trip about a year before he would formally team up with Hubbard in this effort. You write in the piece that the two of them met at a psychedelics conference where Perry was one of the keynote speakers. We obviously started this conversation by talking about Perry's experience on Ibogaine, but I feel like most listeners still remember him as like this staunch social conservative who was pretty far right on just about every issue imaginable, including on drug legalization.

12:49So I guess like what happened to him? Like how did he get to a point where he was even like in Tijuana doing Ibogaine? Like what's been going on with Rick Perry since we heard about him last? Well, Rick Perry kind of became converted to the Ibogaine cause through his old and personal experience and encounters with veterans. Perry himself is a veteran, and he was on vacation in San Diego when he met a former Navy SEAL named Marcus Luttrell, who told his story of how he had used Ibogaine to treat traumatic brain injury and sort of informed the then governor of the entire pipeline of veterans who were seeking out this medicine overseas.

13:32And I think that really stoked Perry's sense of patriotism because he wanted to help these veterans and he didn't understand why they have to go overseas to access this medicine. So that kind of led him to become interested in trying Ibogaine himself. And when he went down to the same clinic that a lot of these veterans have been going to, he also participated in a study where he got an MRI done where they actually measured his brain capacity. And they found that at the time he had, you know, normal atrophy at the time for a 72 year old man. But almost miraculously after the treatment, his neurosurgeon told him that his brain had reverted to the state of a 40 something year old.

14:16And I think that really shocked Perry to have this sort of personal quasi-miracle happen to him after a treatment. That, combined with all of the personal, very moving testimonies that he was hearing from veterans, I think allowed him to change his mind. And, you know, Perry is someone who I think is very proud of his ability to change his mind. He made a note to tell me that in the past, he was also open to changing his mind on other issues like criminal justice and prison reform. You know, he used to be known as someone who was very tough on crime. But someone once told him, you know, if you think of yourself as a true fiscal conservative, you would realize that prison reform actually saves a lot more money than jailing all these people forever.

15:04and he ended up shutting down some prisons during his time as governor. So I think he sees these two causes as somewhat similar as things that might seem antithetical at first to the conservative mindset, but actually really fit with a lot of their values. Fascinating. Let's take a quick break. And then when we come back, I want to zoom out from Ibogaine specifically to like the politics around it. So like the conservative movement's broader turn on psychedelics and what it means for drug research and drug reform more generally. This is The Political Scene from The New Yorker. We'll be right back.

15:51So, Michelle, most of the figures who have come up in this story so far have been Republicans or they're right-leaning. And it seems like a lot of the states that are embracing Ibogaine are thinking about embracing Ibogaine? Is it like, are there 19 that are considering similar programs to what's happening in Texas? For the most part, they seem to be GOP-controlled states. But like, what, if anything, have Democrats had to say or do with the Ibogaine movement? To what extent is this bipartisan? Well, what I was told by political lobbyists who were a huge part of passing it in Texas is that Democrats were always down, but they didn't want to be seen as the druggies.

16:28They didn't want to be seen as softies. And so courting the GOP senators is what allowed these lobbyists to have the sort of political cover that they needed to pass Ibogaine. And that's what I thought was really interesting is that in order for it to become a bipartisan issue, they really had to get some of the most Christians, some of the most nationalist legislators on board. And I mean, you kind of talked about this a little bit earlier with Perry, but I guess I'm still trying to wrap my head around like there's a sentence in the piece about how, you know, conservatives have been able to position Ibogaine not as hippie hedonism, but as a medical intervention compatible with patriotic duty and Christian faith.

17:16And I guess I'm still wondering, like, how exactly that works. Like, is it because you feel closer to God when you do Ibogaine? Like, how is it not contradictory? Or what is the pitch? Yeah, exactly. I think that there's a really long hangover from the psychedelic 60s and the countercultural legacy of the hippies. And I think that the Ibogaine movement activists have been very, very careful to thread this very thin line between Ibogaine as being part of, you know, psychedelic culture, but at the same time different from all the other psychedelics. precisely because it's so intense, it's almost anti-recreational, and its supporters are a lot of the veteran communities.

18:01They are really positioning it as very different from Timothy Leary frying your brain on LSD. So I was really interested in how psychedelics can fit into a Christian framework. I think that was another reason why I really wanted to dive into this story is understanding what the Republican mindset of psychedelics are. And someone like Rick Perry was very clear in telling me that he sees psychedelics as a very spiritual experience and it's about having a direct relationship, a direct encounter with God. And so these drugs that were once seen as taboo or even demonic are now being embraced as a mystical but very Christian experience.

18:44Is there anything that's happened in the mainstream conservative movement over the last few decades that made a shift like this seem possible or in hindsight even likely? Or is this just like a real unprecedented break for a party that's historically been extremely anti-drug and has been like on the front lines of the war on drugs? Well, it was interesting, you know, as part of my reporting, I went to a private fundraiser at a club, at a members club in Houston that was attended by a lot of Texas oil executives. And they were very confused about this pivot themselves. And they were asking Perry, like, are you telling us to go back on decades of just say no?

19:27Like, what are we supposed to tell our kids. And I think Perry, again, was like, this is about medicalization. It is not about taking Ibogaine and going to a concert or going to a party. And I think that what's also really, another factor that's been really influential here is obviously the Maha movement, which has really set the cultural tone that has allowed the Ibogaine movement to surge ahead. Another fundraiser that I attended was actually at a Maha adjacent wellness center in Austin where, you know, the refrigerators were full of raw milk and there were all of these cryptocurrency merchandise on the table.

20:05It was very libertarian and Maha coded. And I think this idea of being distrustful of pharmaceutical drugs like SSRIs and wanting alternatives, wanting to treat mental health issues at their root causes rather than just masking the symptoms has really, really been very helpful in propagating psychedelics to the right wing. I guess like in my lifetime, the main drug that I've seen like a bunch of like policy changes around has been marijuana. So, you know, that is something that has moved through ballot initiatives, dispensaries, a legalization frame. Whereas Ibogaine, you know, you were talking about how they're not using the language of legalization.

20:48It's like clinical trials and FDA pathways and state appropriations and doctors. And I guess, like, is one of these methods better or more durable than the other in your view? Or does it you just have to use a different method for different drugs that have like different effects? I think that what's kind of complex and maybe confusing to the average person right now is that there are currently so many different models at play for drug legalization in America. On one hand, you have the FDA pathway, which Ibogaine is pursuing through, like you said, expensive clinical trials and years and years of research.

21:23But then you also have the decriminalization model in states like Colorado and Oregon that have decriminalized a lot of psychedelics. So it's actually legal just to own a lot of these substances and grow your own mushrooms and things like that. And then meanwhile, in New Mexico, legislators actually passed a bill that legalized psilocybin, which is the active compound in magic mushrooms. And it was a very strong sort of bipartisan movement there as well. So, you know, I think that right now there are all of these different models competing for supremacy. What Ibogaine is perhaps most unique in is that it got through via basically fiat, right?

22:06Like Rogan just texting Trump and telling him about the benefits of Ibogaine to treat veterans and PTSD and then meeting Trump two weeks later at a UFC match in Miami and Trump telling him it was a great idea. and then a week later, they're in the White House. It happened so quickly and in some ways was able to bypass a lot of the obstacles that other psychedelics have faced. Yeah, that's actually exactly what I want to go to next, which is just like the Ibogaine initiative and how it became executive order, like what that kind of tells us about access politics in the age of Trump and whether any of this is like replicable for other drugs.

22:49So we'll talk more about that when we get back from the break. This is the political scene from The New Yorker.

23:08So, Michelle, we were just talking about how Perry and Hubbard secured funding for Ibogaine trials in Texas. But I want to reconstruct the exact chain that led to Trump signing an executive order that mentioned Ibogaine, because that is just the part that I think was really, really wild for people who were kind of watching this go down. So maybe the most important thing that happened or that kind of led to this was that Perry and Hubbard went on Joe Rogan's podcast. And then what happened? So the story of Perry and Hubbard going on Joe Rogan's podcast is kind of incredible. Perry calls it an act of divine intervention.

23:43And when you hear the story, it kind of reads that way. So Perry actually became friends with the Paul Mitchell Hair Company co-founder, John Paul DeGioria. And they would take motorcycle rides that Perry called peace, love, and happiness rides together. And one day, John Paul told Rick that his next door neighbor is Joe Rogan. And so Perry asked him to pass along a note asking Joe Rogan if he would have him and Hubbard on to record an episode about Ibogaine. And so that's how they ended up on Joe Rogan's podcast for the first time. I am 100 % persuaded that these substances are divine medications that are engineered from on high so that we can heal what we do to ourselves, what we do to each other, and be affirmed by the love of our Creator, which is eternal and almighty.

24:41Amen. If you believe in God, you have to believe that if God created these things and people are aware of these things, they're there for a purpose. There is no greater gift. It was hugely influential. That podcast reached millions of viewers and really helped to expedite the process through which Abigail was being pushed through the Texas legislator at the time. And then they went on about a year later and were able to talk to Joe Rogan again. And that pivotal podcast is what eventually led to the executive order. Because right after taping, actually, Joe Rogan asked them what he could do to help.

25:19And they told him to talk to the president. And literally, Joe Rogan just took out his phone and text the president. Or at least that's how the lore goes. I guess like one would like to think that, yes, Joe Rogan might have texted Trump and initially brought his attention to Ibogaine. But at the end of the day, the executive order still got signed because of the science. Like, that's what one would hope, right? But you spoke to Mason Marks, a law professor at Michigan State who specializes in FDA and controlled substances regulation, who's told you that it really couldn't have been based solely or even primarily on science because the science is just so lacking.

25:55So what is the science of Ibogaine? And what do we know about it? And I guess, like, how dangerous do we think it is, given that earlier you were talking about its potential cardiotoxicity? So one of the most interesting things about R. The Game compared to other psychedelics is that anecdotally, there are a lot and a lot of people who are saying that it has this almost miraculous ability to curb withdrawal symptoms. And so that is what makes it particularly good for treating, for example, opioid addiction. And is that part of what distinguishes it from something like psilocybin or MDMA? Like aside from the fact that like it's just drastically different experiences, like an ibogaine seems like a lot more intense.

26:34Like is there any other psychedelic where like someone takes it and then they're like, you know what, the drug that I was addicted to, I just don't feel it anymore. Like is that kind of the point of ibogaine? And that's one of the main things about it, I think, that makes it so interesting to scientists is trying to understand how and why it's able to curb these withdrawal symptoms. One theory is that it kind of works on a lot of different receptors. It's kind of a dirty drug to use the scientific lingo. But like I said, I think that the science on it is pretty murky. There haven't been that many, you know, placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical trials on this drug.

27:13For many years, the science has been kind of impeded because of a lack of funding. And there hasn't been that much political will to study this obscure drug that, you know, in some cases has killed people. Ibogaine has this kind of maybe scary tendency to elongate the intervals between your heartbeats. And so it can cause fatal heart arrhythmias. But, you know, one thing that's also very interesting that a scientist told me is the reason why Ibogaine is so effective has to do a lot with how long the trip is. So Ibogaine lasts 16, 36, 48 hours. An LSD trip is usually 12 hours. And that's usually considered, you know, more on the long end of the spectrum.