Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Guardian.
Chapter 2: What executive order did President Trump sign regarding psychedelics?
A strange scene, or perhaps better described as another strange scene, unfolded at the White House recently with President Donald Trump centre stage.
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.
Joining Joe Rogan, the influential podcaster with an interest in alternative therapies, was a lawyer, Brian Hubbard, who runs Americans for Ibogaine, a kind of psychedelic that's had a lot of interest from the veteran community.
And then there's a congressman next to him who took the psychedelics himself for his own war trauma.
Chapter 3: How did Joe Rogan influence Trump's decision on psychedelic research?
Just a few weeks before, Brian Hubbard and former Texas Governor Rick Perry had done a podcast with Joe Rogan.
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?
Chapter 4: What is ibogaine and why is it significant for veterans?
And seemingly, just like that, they're on a fast track to review and approval.
Today I'm pleased to announce historic reforms to dramatically accelerate access to new medical research and treatments based on psychedelic drugs.
Psychedelics do remain illegal in the US. Classed as Schedule 1, they're defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. But this new executive order is a green light for researchers and pharmaceutical companies to explore the potential and risks of psychedelics as therapeutics. So today, has President Trump just opened the door to a psychedelic future?
From The Guardian, I'm Madeleine Finlay, and this is Science Weekly. Maitha Busby, you're a journalist covering health, human rights and the environment.
Chapter 5: What are the implications of the new executive order for researchers?
And you've written about Trump's recent executive order on psychedelics. Before we get into what it said, obviously, these are still tightly regulated drugs. But as studies on their potential therapeutic effects have begun to emerge, we've heard more voices calling for them to be made more accessible in research. Who's been campaigning on these drugs, aside from the researchers themselves?
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.
And just to give a sense of the drugs we're talking about here, there are different psychedelics being studied like DMT, MDMA. And in fact, there was an interesting study out last week looking at how a single dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, can cause anatomical changes in the brain.
And some of the participants even reported having a deeper sense of psychological insight and better well-being.
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Chapter 6: Who are the key advocates pushing for psychedelic therapies?
But the only one specifically called out in the executive order was something known as Ibogaine, which is probably the least studied of them all. It's been claimed to help those who've suffered traumatic brain injury or TBI. Tell me a bit more about this one.
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 this leads us on to the executive order.
Chapter 7: What are the potential benefits of psychedelics for mental health?
Give me the headlines of what it said.
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. And then one of the key ones is that end of life patients will be given the right to try. And this is a sort of system that Trump actually introduced in his first term.
And he gave a long sort of monologue actually in the Oval Office about how proud he is of this. So it seems that Ibogaine won't be the kind of thing those patients will be doing, but psilocybin, maybe to make peace with their death, which there has been research on. And then more widely, they said that they're going to fast track the reviews of other psychedelics.
So that's going to be two kinds of psilocybin drugs for two kinds of depression.
Chapter 8: How does the executive order impact the legal status of psychedelics?
And a lesser known drug, methylene, that's like a milder version of MDMA. And Trump said that any drugs that will be approved will then be rescheduled, so moved out of Schedule 1, which he then followed up this meeting by downscheduling cannabis a couple of weeks later. So, yeah, you're really seeing a flurry of things happening here.
I mean, for a Republican president to be doing it as well is, you know, and for it to be Trump, the man who says he's never even had a drink, had a trip, had a cigarette, is really far-fetched. I think I said in my piece, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were hallucinating when you saw the scene.
It is really extraordinary. And there's obviously been this enormous amount of advocacy from veterans. And then there's Joe Rogan in all of this.
I got a call from a number of people, including the great Joe Rogan. And he said, we have to do something about this. And I looked into it. I called Bobby. I called Oz. I called Marty and Jay. And it was really, it was uniform support.
How big would you say these influences are on Trump? I mean, is this coming from the veterans or is it really sort of the power of podcasting?
Yeah, obviously he wants to curry favour with this sort of like manosphere kind of Joe Rogan listener constituency. But yeah, at the same time, it was reported in the Washington Post that the executive order had already been being drafted up rather at the time that Joe Rogan made this ask.
OK, so it's maybe more that this famously abstinent president has been pushed down this route through the advocacy of the veterans. But why now?
I mean, it's certainly a welcome distraction for him, right? Like a time when they're clearly losing, not winning in Iran. But as I said earlier, I think the veteran stories are really difficult to refute. 22 veterans are dying on average every day from suicide. He said in the Oval Office, it's like 21 times the amount of service people that have died on the battlefield since 9-11.
So this is a really, really horrendous issue. And The drugs that these, you know, veterans are given to address their symptoms just often kind of get them addicted. And I think that there's, you know, shifting sands here, and especially with the Make America Healthy movement, you know, there with Kennedy and all these maha mums, the mushroom mums behind them, there is a real fervour for change.
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