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The Trump administration is “very anxious” to create a pathway for access to psychedelics therapy, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says, and top officials across federal agencies want to “get it out to the public as quickly as possible.”
In an interview on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast that was released on Friday, Kennedy said he’s confident “we’re going to get it done,” with plans to develop and finalize rules that would enable patients with conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression to access psychedelic substances like psilocybin and MDMA in a “very controlled setting.”
The secretary has stood out for his advocacy for psychedelics reform, pitching the idea as a 2024 Democratic presidential candidate before ultimately becoming the nation’s top health official under the Trump administration.
The president himself has been largely silent on the issue, but as Kennedy noted, support for expanding research and access to the novel therapeutics extends beyond HHS, with the heads of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) also looking to tap into the potential benefits of psychedelic medicines.
“Everybody in my agency—and over at VA at [Secretary Doug Collins’s] agency—is very anxious to get a rule out there that will allow these kind of studies and will allow access under therapeutic settings, particularly [for] the military soldiers who have suffered these injuries to get access to these products,” Kennedy said. “We’re working through that process now. We’re all working on it and trying to make it happen.”
“I think that we’re going to get it done.”
While some of the reform proposals under consideration would simply be designed to “encourage more clinical trials” with “very strong guidelines,” the health secretary said, agencies are interested in the full range of possibilities that psychedelics therapy and other “rapid interventions” may present. One of Kennedy’s personal goals for substances like psilocybin would be to validate its utility over SSRIs for depression.
“We’re looking at that as an entire category of interventions that people ought to be able to study and ought to have good access to, and we should get it out to the public as quickly as possible,” he said.
“This is what we’re envisioning, so I can’t tell you exactly what we’re going to do—but very, very strong therapeutic guidelines, so how they’re applied, what kind of follow up. Because a lot of these things rewire your brain. If you don’t do follow up, it doesn’t work, or you have a failure rate. So those kind of protocols are all stuff that we’ve been developing and studying, and I think most of the people in the administration are anxious to make this happen as quickly as possible. I know Doug Collins over at the VA has, I think, 21 studies going over there. They’re very, very promising.”
“You need those guidelines because you don’t want to make the Wild West. You can have horror stories overnight because some people can have a very, very bad experiences on that,” Kennedy said. “We’re looking at ways to get it done so that it’s in a very controlled setting.”
When asked by Rogan to expand on how he envisions the future of psychedelics therapy and whether it’d include people other than those in the military or other front line roles, the secretary said “personally” he would like to see broad access, but “we need to move in baby steps because you don’t want to create a situation where people are getting hurt.”
Still, you “shouldn’t have a soldier who has given everything for the country, who has suffered terribly, who has got to Tijuana to get these treatments—to leave our country in order to get the treatments,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I have seen so much overwhelming anecdotal evidence,” Kennedy said, noting that a relative of his has benefitted from psychedelic therapy, “but also clinical studies that attest to the effect.” And officials at agencies like NIH and FDA are “doing whatever they can to make this happen.”
The interview on Rogan’s podcast comes months after the release of a book from a journalist who allegedly had a romantic relationship with Kennedy, where she claims that, as a presidential candidate, Kennedy still used psychedelics like DMT “for fun” and hid his drug use from his wife.
Meanwhile, in November, Kennedy, Vice President JD Vance, the FDA commissioner and other Trump administration officials attended a “Make America Healthy Again” summit that featured a session dedicated to exploring psychedelic medicine.
In June, Kennedy said his agency is “absolutely committed” to expanding research on the benefits of psychedelic therapy and, alongside of the head of FDA, is aiming to provide legal access to such substances for military veterans “within 12 months.”
The secretary also said in April that he had a “wonderful experience” with LSD at 15 years old, which he took because he thought he’d be able to see dinosaurs, as portrayed in a comic book he was a fan of.
Last October, Kennedy specifically criticized FDA under the prior administration over the agency’s “suppression of psychedelics” and a laundry list of other issues that he said amounted to a “war on public health” that would end under the Trump administration.
Kyle Jaeger is Marijuana Moment’s Sacramento-based managing editor. He’s covered drug policy for more than a decade—specializing in state and federal marijuana and psychedelics issues at publications that also include High Times, VICE and attn. In 2022, Jaeger was named Benzinga’s Cannabis Policy Reporter of the Year.
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