W. Bryan Hubbard

Three hours later, I got a telephone call asking if I could go and meet with the Texas House Speaker and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.

I went at 4.30 in the afternoon on May the 14th and spent an hour with these two gentlemen going back and forth about what this project was, why it was so existentially necessary for Texas and the country.

And on Friday morning, May the 16th at 10 a.m., we got a text message from Lieutenant Governor Patrick confirming that he would approve and fully fund the Texas Ibogaine Initiative.

As we walk in here today, literally just 10 minutes before we walked into your studio, I can confirm.

that the great state of Texas is going to fully fund the Texas Ibogaine Initiative, originally intended to be a public-private partnership, but now has decided on its own to commit a full $100 million to launch the development of Ibogaine all the way through the FDA's drug development process for the benefit of the American people.

to do so on its own, without any drug development partner, and to do it

for the good of humanity.

Well, I had some very wonderful advocates who preceded my meeting.

Was he skeptical?

Oh, he was completely disengaged from the process, highly skeptical as we learned through intermediaries.

But we had two wonderful brothers on mission who happened to be twins, Marcus and Morgan Luttrell.

I know Marcus very well.

Marcus and Morgan Luttrell reached out to the Lieutenant Governor.

They spoke to him very movingly and personally about their own experiences with Ibogaine, what it had done not just to save their lives, but what it was doing to save the lives of warfighters who had come to the end of being able to live.

And as they explained to him what it did for them and what it has done for their brothers and sisters-at-arms who've returned to war, to broken government systems that can do nothing,

to cure what ails them at their core.

He was persuaded to have an open-minded conversation.

And through that conversation on May the 14th, we essentially went through what science suggests are the powers of the most sophisticated molecule on the planet to resolve physiological substance dependence and thereby create psychology within the human being whereby they believe they have ownership of their selves and their future and that that future will be one defined by choice rather than compulsion.

And the most powerful aspect of the Ibogaine argument, not just for the Lieutenant Governor and House Speaker, but for most of these legislators who voted yes,

is the experience endorsed by many that Ibogaine confirms without question the reality of our individual human divinity.