Republicans and RFK Jr. have embraced psychedelics. What could go wrong?

When conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took to the social media site X (formerly Twitter) last month to threaten the Food and Drug Administration, he included a laundry list of items that he wants to deregulate if elected to a health leadership position under the incoming Trump Administration. For the most part, all of the items Kennedy listed — including clean foods, raw milk, and stem cells — seemed to fall in line with his campaign to prioritize personal choice and new age or experimental medicines while upending regulatory bodies like the FDA. 

But Kennedy also listed psychedelic drugs, which are banned in most parts of the world, as something under the FDA’s “aggressive suppression,” which may come as a surprise to those who associate psychedelics with “flower children” of the 1960s and not the far-right libertarian crowd that Kennedy has historically drawn. As one supporter commented on his post, “I disagree on the psychedelics which are horrible, but on everything else, yes.” 

Yet Kennedy is just one of several prominent Republican politicians to recently endorse psychedelics. In 2023, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who served as the U.S. Secretary of Energy under the last Trump Administration, spoke at the annual Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) conference after previously backing a Texas bill that would increase research investigating psilocybin for veterans. Psilocybin is the drug in "magic" mushrooms and has been shown to significantly improve depression symptoms for patients in clinical trials, and other studies are investigating its use in other conditions like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and substance use.

“Some of you are out there thinking what in the hell is that dude doing on this stage,” Perry said at the conference. Yet that same summer, Perry said federal psychedelics legalization was actually “more supported by Republicans” than Democrats.

Now that Republicans control the Senate and Congress — and President elect Donald Trump nominated Kennedy to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — some are hopeful that the GOP can exercise its governing power to revive a psychedelic movement that has shown signs of losing steam. Yet others warn that right-wing leadership could fast-track psychedelics and prioritize the business side of the industry without ensuring equal priority to the “integration” part of the psychedelic experience that comes with additional mental health and societal supports.

“The Trump Administration has signaled that it is going to be as radical as possible," said Brian Pace, a psychedelics researcher at Ohio State University. "They see themselves as coming in and cleaning house and implementing change through executive directives, and I don’t think that makes for careful medicine.”

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Although it remains illegal on the federal level, psilocybin was legalized in Oregon and Colorado through ballot measures in recent years, and treatment centers are now being rolled out in these states. Many other cities have decriminalized psychedelics, citing their low risk for harm, especially compared to drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine.

With this momentum, many were hopeful that Lykos Therapeutics (formerly known as MAPS), would get FDA approval this summer when they submitted a new drug application for MDMA to treat PTSD. MDMA, sometimes called "ecstasy," had been shown to significantly improve PTSD symptoms in clinical trials.

However, the industry experienced serious setbacks after the FDA rejected MDMA therapy in August, citing concerns over the quality of the data submitted with the new drug application. Earlier this year, study participants came out to say that they had felt pressured to report positive results, and at least one patient came forward with sexual misconduct allegations. Ultimately, some of the studies submitted in the new drug application were retracted by the journal that published them. 

Juliana Mercer, the director of veteran advocacy and public policy at Healing Breakthrough, which advocates for MDMA-assisted therapy for veterans, said the FDA's MDMA decision came as a "gut punch" to those working to increase the availability of psychedelics and that long-standing stigma against controlled substances like MDMA are a barrier to getting them approved. In Massachusetts, a ballot measure to legalize psilocybin was also rejected this past election.

"I think there is absolutely still stigma attached to it," Mercer told Salon in a phone interview. "There is still more work to be done in terms of correcting the information that was given to us through programs like the 'Just Say No,' campaign and the War on Drugs."

Although Kennedy will need to be confirmed by the Senate to secure a leadership role at the HHS, some believe his influence could lead to deregulation that could make psychedelics more widely available.

“With plans to bust the corrupt alliance between major pharmaceutical companies and the agencies that regulate them, while supporting transformative treatments such as psychedelic-assisted therapies, we expect RFK to usher in a new era of U.S. health care,” Joe Caltabiano, the CEO of Healing Realty Trust, which invests in the psychedelic and cannabis industry, wrote in a statement.

Yet others emphasize that those regulatory frameworks are in place for safety reasons and that psychedelics need to be subject to this kind of scientific scrutiny. Some, including Dr. Nora Volkow, who helms the National Institute of Drug Abuse, have warned that the hype around psychedelics has outpaced the science.

“You have people saying psychedelics are going to cure the mental health crisis, and those are big statements,” Pace told Salon in a phone interview. “Those are the kinds of statements that certainly attract investors, and they certainly get donations to get a research study done.”

In addition to support from Republican representatives in California, Texas and Michigan, psychedelics have also garnered advocacy among Silicon Valley Republicans. Elon Musk, who Trump appointed to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency agency, has said that he has a prescription for ketamine, a psychedelic-like anesthetic, and has discussed using other psychedelics. Earlier this month, psychedelic investor Christian Angermayer said on X that many attendees at a psychedelics event in San Francisco were “pro-Trump, some of them very openly” which “would have been impossible a year ago.” And Rebekah Mercer, who has been called “one of the chief financiers of the fascist movement,” donated $1 million to MAPS through the Mercer Family Foundation to fund psychedelic research for veterans.

Although some have argued that psychedelics can “turn” people into progressives, change ideology, or fight facism, these substances have a long history of use by people across party lines and tend to amplify existing ideologies rather than change them, Pace said. As psychedelics have hit the mainstream, it follows that they are being embraced by mainstream political parties in the U.S., he added.

"For those who think that psychedelics are going to revolutionize mental health, 'solve the mental health crisis,' or introduce kinder, gentler capitalism, it's much more likely that the reverse is going to happen," Pace said. "Psychedelics will be assimilated by the mental health system, [or, for example,] they will be applied through a conservative, Christian lens, rather than distort[ing] it."

Psychedelics have been described as having the power to deconstruct the mind, from which changes can be made in the process of integration that can significantly improve mental health. In Western culture, the reconstruction part of the process could be deprioritized in an attempt to find a “quick fix” to the mental health crisis.

“When the stakes are high, go slow, but in Silicon Valley, it’s ‘move fast and break things,’” Pace said. “But in this case, we are talking about people — not things.”

Psychedelics may be another tool for tackling the mental health crisis, but they will be most effective for communities that have social support in place to help them integrate the experience, Pace said. It also seems counterintuitive for Republican leaders to try and solve the mental health crisis — which is known to be amplified by health disparities, discrimination and social determinants of health like economic inequality — when many of those same leaders back legislation that puts more people at risk for these situations on the front end, he added.

“There is this idea that if you have a mental health problem, you take a pill and you have this individual solution for a problem that affects a lot of people,” Pace said. “There is this systemic side of how to address things like reducing the rates of PTSD by making sure that we have robust conversations about sexual assault prevention with men and boys and all kinds of things that are beyond the individual. But this can be a selling point for people: ‘Now we have this treatment, you just pull yourself up by the bootstraps and get back in the saddle.’”