ibogaine: Conservative and Christian? US right champions psychedelic drugs

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Conservative and Christian? US right champions psychedelic drugs

Texas governor among those to call for expanded access to ibogaine, said to help with treating veterans with PTSD

Mattha Busby
Fri 26 Dec 2025 13.00 GMT
Last modified on Fri 26 Dec 2025 13.06 GMT

For half a century, psychedelics largely belonged to the cultural left: anti-war, anti-capitalist, suspicious of the church and state. Now, one of the most politically consequential psychedelic drugs in the US – ibogaine – is being championed by evangelical Christians, Republican governors, military veterans, and big tech billionaires.

Many of them see ibogaine, an intense psychedelic derived from a central African rootbark, as a divine technology. In fact, some pointedly do not refer to it as a psychedelic, given the apparent baggage of the term in some circles.

“The psychedelic renaissance is three things: capitalized, conservative and Christian,” Jamie Wheal, author of Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind, wrote earlier this year in an article titled Make America Hallucinate Again. “The tactical decision to make military veterans the face of [the psychedelic reform] movement has now taken on a life of its own.”

After the Food and Drug Administration’s rejection of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD last year, ibogaine is now center stage. Texas governor Greg Abbott signed off on a landmark $50m funding package for ibogaine research in June, noting the “great promise” of the drug in treating conditions suffered by veterans – more of whom live in Texas than any other state.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/26/us-right-champions-psychedelic-drugs

[SheltieLover]

1. They must have found a way to profit from it