Mattha Busby
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
He sat there at his desk in the Oval Office, and he's got a cast of characters behind him.
Joe Rogan, who's a lot shorter, actually, than many people may have thought.
Sort of his head is like bobbing behind Trump.
And then there's a congressman next to him who took the psychedelics himself for his own war trauma.
They were just like, can you ask him, Joe?
So Joe Rogan supposedly texts Trump and Trump responds almost immediately regarding the medicalisation of this particular psychedelic ibogaine.
Great, sounds good.
Do you want FDA approval?
At the forefront of it all, really, in the US are the veterans who are suffering from PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and really debilitating symptoms.
And so they've emerged, really, as the key advocates for these reforms.
And they've got the ear of lawmakers in the Republican Party and clearly now Trump.
But, you know, obviously, psychedelics have long belonged to the cultural left for decades.
and it's just been interesting to see it migrate rightwards here.
Ibogaine is basically derived from iboga, which is like this root bark from a shrub that grows in Gabon principally.
And it's the one that has really given relief to these veterans.
They've been going down to Mexico in their thousands.
So there was a study a couple of years ago out of Stanford that was published in Nature, and they studied 30 combat veterans who were all suffering from debilitating TBI, and all of them experienced a significant improvement in their symptoms.
So there's sort of five or six elements to it.
And they're going to basically put $50 million into research.
And it seems that a lot of it will be kind of corralled into studying this psychedelic ibogaine.