Veterans push for U.S. legalization of psychedelics
APPLE VALLEY, Calif. — Jose Martinez, a former Army gunner whose right arm and both legs were blown off by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, has a new calling: He has become one of the most effective lobbyists in a campaign to legalize the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs across the country.
On a Zoom call this spring with Connie Leyva, a Democratic legislator in California who has long opposed relaxing drug laws, Martinez told her how psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in “magic” mushrooms, had helped to finally quell the physical pain and suicidal thoughts that had tormented him.
Leyva says she changed her mind even before the call ended, and she later voted yes on the bill, which is expected to become law early next year.
“We ask these men and women to go fight for our freedoms,” she said in an interview. “So if this is something that is helping them live a more normal life, I feel like I shouldn’t stand in the way.”
In the two years since Oregon, Washington, D.C., and a halfdozen municipalities decriminalized psilocybin, vets have become leading advocates in the drive to legalize psychedelic medicine, which they credit with helping ease the post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression that are often tied to their experiences in the military.
The campaign has been propelled by the epidemic of suicides among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan and by the national reckoning over the mass incarceration of people on drug charges that has softened public attitudes on prohibition.
More than 30,000 service members have taken their own lives in the years since Sept. 11 — four times the number of those who died on the battlefield — and the Department of Veterans Affairs has struggled to address the crisis with the traditional repertoire of pharmacological interventions.
“I will not be told no on something that prevents human beings from killing themselves,” Martinez said.
Jesse Gould, a former Army Ranger who started Heroic Hearts Project, an organization that connects veterans to psychedelic therapies available in Latin America, also measures the desperation in the daily barrage of emails he gets from vets seeking help.
The waiting list for a treatment slot, he said, has stretched to 850 people.
“The federal health care system has failed us, which is why veterans have to seek care outside the country,” he said. “They are already turning to psychedelic options in droves, so we can either decide to call these veterans criminals, which is what we do now, or we can make sure they can get effective care here at home.”
Recent studies have buttressed anecdotal accounts of benefit and helped to quantify the therapeutic value of substances like LSD, psilocybin and MDMA, the drug better known as Ecstasy. A study in Nature Medicine found MDMA paired with counseling brought marked relief to patients with severe PTSD. Another in
the New England Journal of Medicine highlighted the potential of psilocybin therapy for treating severe depression.
Although current federal law largely prohibits the medical use of these compounds, researchers expect MDMA-assisted talk therapy to win approval from the Food and Drug Administration in the next year or two, followed soon after by psilocybin, which has already received agency approval as a “breakthrough therapy” for severe depression. In 2019, the FDA gave approval to esketamine, a nasal spray derived from the anesthetic ketamine, for treatment-resistant depression. Off-label use of ketamine for depression has also become increasingly popular.