Can This Psychedelic Help Cure Opioid Addiction?

The Psychedelic Assembly attracts a certain type of clientele. The walls of the group's Manhattan meeting space are lined with LSD blotter art and Alice in Wonderland paraphernalia. Rows of bookshelves are filled with esoteric titles on tryptamines, DMT entities, and magic-mushroom alchemy. The people who gather there converse easily on topics ranging from visits with Mother Ayahuasca in the jungles of Peru to tips for throwing a successful group MDMA experience.

Suffice to say, those who find their way there tend to check certain boxes: liberal, Northeastern, experienced with mind-altering substances. They do not tend to be politically and religiously conservative lawmen from one of the reddest states in the U.S.

But on a sunny morning in May, that's exactly who walked in: Bryan Hubbard, an attorney fresh from Lexington, Kentucky. Hubbard was on a drug-themed visit to New York City—part of a very unexpected turn of events that began in 2022 when he embarked on a yearslong journey into the heart of psychedelic-assisted healing. His stop at the Psychedelic Assembly "was just kind of the icing on the surreality cake," he says.

"If someone had told me as a 25-year-old man—a staunchly straight-laced, square, institutionalist Republican—that I would have undergone a transformation which would result in me being in New York City for the advancement of God's medicine to heal God's people, I would have told you that I had gone insane and something catastrophic must have happened in my life," he says.

By "God's medicine," Hubbard means the psychedelic drug ibogaine. Specifically, he was interested in its potential ability to rid people of addiction to opioids and other habit-forming substances.

Hubbard was in a unique position to be looking into ibogaine in 2022: He had recently been named head of Kentucky's Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, a task force charged with divvying up half of the state's $842 million settlement from national litigation that accused opioid manufacturers and distributors of exacerbating the opioid epidemic. Hubbard and his colleagues were supposed to disperse the funds across whichever state programs would deliver the biggest bang for the buck in helping Kentuckians recover and rebuild.

Most of the grants would go to established methods of prevention and treatment. But Hubbard believed more was needed than the status quo. Methadone and buprenorphine (under the brand name Suboxone) are the gold-standard treatments for opioid dependence, but anywhere from 40 percent to 80 percent of people who take these synthetic opioids relapse. So while existing treatments do save lives, they are not a panacea. If they were, Hubbard points out, Kentucky's overdose deaths would not have risen by more than 50 percent since 2019.

On July 29, 2022, Hubbard felt he got the lead he was looking for. He was on the phone with Julia Blum, a journalist he admired, picking her brain about under-the-radar treatments for substance use disorders when she asked if he'd ever heard of ibogaine.

"I've never heard of it in my life," he replied. "Tell me more."

Blum gave him a quick crash course on the drug. Ibogaine is an alkaloid primarily produced by a Central African shrub called iboga. It's one of the most potent mind-altering substances in existence, triggering experiences that last 30 hours or more. Often it leaves the user forever changed.

In Gabon, where iboga has been used for centuries, people turn to the shrub to obtain messages from ancestors and spirits and to get clarity on their life's direction. In the West, ibogaine more recently has become known for a different application: helping to rid people of substance use disorders.

Anecdotal data and some scientific studies suggest that several psychedelic drugs, including ibogaine, may be able to help root out the sources of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental maladies. Ibogaine stands out, however, for what may be a unique ability to abruptly end addiction-related cravings while also allowing the person to bypass the agonies of withdrawal.

"It's a long, intense journey during which the medicine illuminates the roots of the addiction through dreamlike visions that often involve memories," Blum explained to Hubbard. Many people also emerge with a newfound sense of meaning and purpose.

"Where can I learn more?" asked Hubbard.

Relatively few scientific studies have been conducted on ibogaine. But the research that does exist is encouraging. At a clinic in St. Kitts, for example, the majority of 191 patients who received a single dose of ibogaine successfully detoxed from opioids or cocaine. The fact that this study was conducted in St. Kitts highlights a major problem, however: Ibogaine is a Schedule I substance in the United States, so it is illegal in this country. Americans who wish to try it have to travel to Mexico, Brazil, Costa Rica, Colombia, South Africa, or another place where it is available. This keeps ibogaine treatment "only in the realm of people who have money," says Nolan Williams, a Stanford psychiatrist and neurologist who has conducted research on the drug.

Hubbard came to regard ibogaine as a potential solution for addictions. More than that, he saw a powerful substance capable of healing the "profound spiritual affliction" that he believes is at the core of what drives most people to reach for the pill bottle or needle. "As technologically advanced and as wealthy as we are, we are living in a brutally dehumanizing era," he says. We have erected false walls around ourselves that have given rise to an epidemic of loneliness, divisiveness, and despair, he continues, and we have become complacent in the face of forces that manipulate and exploit us. We have forgotten "how fabulously special and beautiful" each of us is, he says, "simply by virtue of being a human being."

Hubbard hoped ibogaine could be the wrecking ball that smashed through all of that. And in his role directing Kentucky's commission, he saw a chance to transform the state—an epicenter of the opioid crisis—into a national leader in ibogaine research. He hatched a plan for Kentucky to host clinical trials to establish the drug's safety and efficacy so the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would approve it as an addiction treatment.

"What gets me fired up and ready to go every morning," Hubbard says, "is perhaps thinking that there might be something within me that God finds suitable to utilize to pursue the emancipation of my fellow human beings from any subjugation that they might be suffering."

And the way Hubbard sees it, opioid abuse is about the biggest tyrant of the soul and subjugator of human beings that there is.

Destitution Everywhere

Although the lilt of Hubbard's Appalachian accent is so pronounced that it seems almost put on, he possesses the diction of a 19th century literato. He is physically formidable, capable of bench-pressing over 400 pounds, and his beard and shoulder-length hair are reminiscent of a Viking. But his blue eyes become glassy and his voice trembles with emotion when he discusses the tragedies of opioid addiction.

Hubbard grew up in Russell County, Virginia, a lush region of mountain ridges and valleys that sits atop some of the country's richest mineral wealth. Despite its vast coal reserves, nearly a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. In Hubbard's small community, a handful of powerful families owned and controlled everything, he says, while the rest of the citizenry were "the nobodies."

Hubbard's family fell into that latter category. His home life was "chaos," he says. His earliest memories are his parents' screaming matches. Fortunately, his grandparents took an active role in his upbringing, preventing him from winding up "in a ditch someplace." His grade school–educated grandfathers both were missing fingers and suffered from silicosis from years of working the mines, but they always exuded happiness, optimism, and "immense wisdom," Hubbard recalls. The only person he idolized as much as his grandfathers was President Ronald Reagan, whom he imprinted on "just like a gosling to its mother goose." Before Hubbard had even finished elementary school, he decided that, like Reagan, he would dedicate his life to serving his fellow Americans. And what better way to do that, he thought, than to pursue the noble practice of law?

Hubbard's starry-eyed notions about his chosen career path were quickly dispelled by his legal education at the University of Kentucky. He learned that law often had "nothing to do" with objective truth or justice, that power frequently trumps truth, and that the legal system is regularly used by those with power to crush people who don't have any. "Our judicial system is a disgrace, period," he says.

But Hubbard compartmentalized his disappointment and got his degree. After graduating in 2000, he took a job at a Lexington insurance defense firm that handled all of Walmart's worker compensation claims for the state. The gig was supposed to be temporary, but a year in, his boss fell off a ladder and died. He inherited her pile of 300 cases and wound up staying for the next 17 years.

As time passed, Hubbard noticed a conspicuous pattern in the cases he was seeing: A woman between the ages of 45 and 70 from the Appalachian region of Kentucky, who had spent her entire life in a low-wage job, would come in complaining of excruciating pain from a work-related injury. The injury was minor enough that it should have taken six months or so to heal following treatment, and diagnostic tests could not pinpoint the anatomical source of her pain. Yet here she was, in agony. Inevitably, Hubbard says, she would be "loaded up" on a particular cocktail of drugs: OxyContin, Xanax, and Prozac.

One day, Hubbard was driving through town, pondering how it could be that women who were taking enough opioids to knock out a horse could still be in pain, when a thought struck him: Their physical pain was a symptom of a profound emotional and spiritual pain that no amount of pharmaceuticals could alleviate. "They had reached a point in life where they recognized that they were going to be living at the dead end of welfare subsistence to their grave, without any prospect of having a life that we would perceive as being one that is lived with freedom and dignity and control over destiny," Hubbard says. "That work accident…was the straw that broke their backs."

Hubbard did not have any peer-reviewed scientific journal articles to back up his hunch. But he felt sure he was right.

Transparent, Accountable, Accessible

In 2017, Hubbard moved on to a job as Kentucky's deputy commissioner of the Department for Income Support. There, he says, he solidified his reputation as "a take-no-prisoners…get-it-done-without-compromise dude."

Hubbard rooted out substantial internal rot, for example, in Kentucky's Child Support Enforcement program, which is administered by 120 elected county attorneys. Financial controls and oversight were nonexistent. Money was disappearing, and around 40 of the administrators were housing the program on property they personally owned, allowing them to collect rent from the state. Hubbard's team uncovered dirt that led to a federal prosecution of one corrupt administrator and ongoing FBI investigations of three others.

When Democrat Andy Beshear became governor in 2019, Hubbard was promptly removed from his job on "hour one of day one," he says. "I have no question that that was a favor done to the [state-wide Kentucky] County Attorneys Association," which "had had quite enough of me." (Beshear's office declined an interview request for this story.)

Daniel Cameron, the state's new Republican attorney general, then appointed Hubbard to oversee the Office of Medicaid Fraud and Abuse Control. Hubbard's office doubled criminal indictments and convictions during the next year. Many of those convictions were for fraudulent prescriptions of Suboxone, one of the synthetic opioids used to treat opioid addiction. Rather than curtailing the crisis, the drug was being diverted and sold on the street.

By April 2022, Hubbard had developed enough expertise in opioid addiction and the many federal, state, and nonprofit entities tied to it that Cameron tapped him to lead the Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission. As he accepted the position, Hubbard pondered how to deliver the most value possible to Kentucky. The vast majority of the funds would be invested in strengthening existing infrastructure for recovery and prevention. But Hubbard was also interested in finding new approaches.

A few months later, he got in touch with Blum, and his journey into the world of ibogaine had begun.

The 'Ibogaine A-Team'

Virtually everyone who knows anything about ibogaine has heard of Juliana Mulligan. Mulligan spent most of her 20s struggling with opioid dependence. All conventional treatments failed her, and she had endured overdoses, hospitalizations, homelessness, physical assault, and incarceration. In 2008, she heard about ibogaine from a friend and sought it out as a last-ditch effort to save her life.

Mulligan very nearly died in the process. The provider she found in Guatemala gave her double the safe dose, causing Mulligan to go into cardiac arrest. Despite the intensity of the experience, her first sensation upon waking up in the hospital was a feeling of liberation.

"It felt like a thousand pounds of guilt, shame, and regret had been lifted off of me," Mulligan recalls. She had no cravings for opioids and only mild symptoms of withdrawal, and she felt a new clarity about her life's purpose. "I suddenly saw that my years of suffering were actually my training to do the work I was meant to do," she says: to advance ibogaine as an accessible treatment and to change the largely ineffective mainstream substance use disorder treatment system.

That was 13 years ago, and Mulligan has not touched an opioid or experienced a craving for one since. She lives in New York City, where she is a licensed psychotherapist who works with clients before and after ibogaine treatment. "I get emails all the time from people asking me questions," she says. So when a message landed in her inbox from "some guy from Kentucky," she didn't think much of it but agreed to take his call.

As Hubbard explained his position, she said to herself: "Holy shit, this is a huge deal." She and her colleagues had been struggling for years to come up with a realistic plan for making ibogaine an FDA-approved pharmaceutical—a process that, on average, requires half a billion dollars. Hubbard was the first person in a position of any political power who had expressed interest in ibogaine, something Mulligan "never expected from a Republican Kentucky guy with an accent like that."

So Mulligan launched into action, connecting Hubbard with "all my ibogaine A-team." He responded with enthusiasm, dedicating nights and weekends to reading all he could about the drug and connecting with dozens of researchers, philanthropists, and activists. He and his wife spent $5,000 of their own money to travel to New York City to meet Mulligan and her colleagues—a "personal investment," Hubbard says, in finding a solution for Kentuckians.

No one knows how exactly ibogaine works. In pharmacological parlance, it's a "dirty drug"—one that hits receptors across the brain's various systems. Researchers have little idea of why it would be effective for treating substance use disorders. "We understand only 1 percent of what it does," Mulligan says, "which is also why it's a little bit dangerous."

Researchers have traditionally shied away from studying ibogaine because of its cardiac risk. "The biggest concern [about ibogaine], in my opinion, is the lack of regulation in foreign countries and the risk involved in seeking this treatment in potentially unregulated environments," says Alan Davis, an associate professor of social work and director of the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education at Ohio State University. "We desperately need to answer questions about safety and what is happening out there right now in these clinics."

From 1990 to 2008, at least 19 people died after taking ibogaine, and a trial participant in New Zealand also died in a study published in 2017. There is compelling evidence, however, that the drug's cardiac risk can be mitigated through intravenous magnesium. An ibogaine facility in Mexico called Ambio Life Sciences has given magnesium to around 1,000 clients since 2014, and none has experienced a serious arrhythmia.

While current evidence suggests that ibogaine is "at least as good as and potentially more effective than other treatments for opioid use disorder," Davis says, it's "very difficult to know for sure" because clinical trials have yet to be completed on the drug. He and his colleagues are trying to at least partly fill that knowledge gap by conducting an FDA-informed real-world survey of people who have used ibogaine to address addiction or other disorders. For now, a "degree of skepticism is warranted," he adds—but that will hopefully change as more data are collected about ibogaine's effectiveness.

Anecdotally, the results for many people who have taken ibogaine have been "remarkable," says Amber Capone, co-founder and CEO of Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions (VETS), a nonprofit that helps American veterans access psychedelic therapy abroad, including at Ambio. "I've seen people with active suicidal ideation or attempts, people who are barely surviving life, completely regain their lives and futures and restore their families' hope," she says.

Capone and her husband—Marcus, a medically retired Navy SEAL—created VETS after Marcus took ibogaine and experienced profound relief from symptoms of PTSD and traumatic brain injury (TBI). VETS has footed the bill for nearly 1,000 veterans since 2019, but the need far outstrips its capacity: The organization has to turn away "the vast majority" of those seeking help, Capone says.

The only way to ensure that ibogaine is accessible to everyone in the U.S., adds Williams, the Stanford researcher, is to get FDA approval and Medicare coverage of the treatment. If that did happen, any fears about possible diversion of the mind-altering, currently prohibited drug would probably be unfounded, says Tom Feegel, CEO of Beond Ibogaine, a treatment center in Cancún, Mexico. "It's exceptionally unlikely that people would choose to use this particular psychedelic for a recreational purpose," Feegel says.

Of Beond's approximately 500 annual clients—most of whom are Americans—60 percent come to address opioid use, 13 percent alcohol use, 9 percent depression, and 7 percent cocaine use. A few also come for treatment of PTSD and TBI. Just 4 percent are there for "health and optimization," a broad category that includes people interested in self-exploration, personal growth, enhanced mental acuity, and help navigating life transitions.

Seasoned psychonauts (a term for people who have extensive experience with mind-altering drugs) also sometimes find their way to Beond, curious to try "the Mount Everest of psychedelics," Feegel says. This category of client usually comes in thinking they want "a so-called psychospiritual" journey, he notes, but most wind up getting "what they need, not what they want."

"What they need" tends to look like a 10-to-12-hour, deeply introspective dive into their entire life and lineage, conveyed to them in more detail than they ever could have imagined. They usually also emerge with new clarity on how best to spend their remaining time on Earth.

"There are many other psychedelics that are a lot more fun and a lot less demanding," Feegel says. "Ibogaine is not a party favor."

'Akin to a Miracle'

By January 2023, Hubbard felt confident enough to introduce the ibogaine idea to Cameron. It was, he told the attorney general, a "Manhattan Project opportunity."

Hubbard showed Cameron a PowerPoint presentation explaining the drug and proposing a public-private partnership to launch an FDA-approved clinical trial within Kentucky to investigate ibogaine's ability to treat opioid use disorder. He suggested paying for this with $42 million from the opioid settlement—5 percent of the total—spread over six years, with that money matched by a drug developer. Ibogaine, Hubbard told Cameron, gave Kentucky the opportunity to pivot from a "state that has been at the back end of America for almost its entire modern history" to the leader of "a revolution" in addiction treatment.

Cameron's office declined an interview request for this story. But Hubbard says the attorney general was supportive, and Cameron made remarks at a May 2023 press conference indicating as much. Most of Hubbard's colleagues at the commission got on board too. Commission member Karen Butcher—whose son, Matthew, died from an opioid overdose in 2020—remembers seeing Hubbard's PowerPoint slides and feeling "like I was watching something that was akin to a miracle. All I could think was, if my son were alive today, we'd be headed to Mexico."

One of the strongest dissenters from ibogaine enthusiasm was Sharon Walsh, a professor of behavioral science, pharmacology, pharmaceutical sciences, and psychiatry at the University of Kentucky, where the ibogaine clinical trial would likely take place. "If the focus is on opioid withdrawal, we have medications that are already approved for opioid withdrawal," she stated at a June 2023 commission meeting. "Those are very effective drugs. I'm not sure why we need other drugs to target opiate withdrawal."

Days later, Walsh resigned from the commission. In emailed responses to questions, she said her resignation was due to increased work responsibilities. She reiterated that opioid withdrawal is "easily treatable" and that what's really needed is "medications that can prevent someone from returning to opioid use."

"I would be absolutely ecstatic to see a true 'cure' for opioid use disorder make it to market or any other treatment that fills the unmet need as this deadly disorder has devastated the United States," Walsh added. "In fact, I would encourage any company that has promising data to share their early safety and efficacy data with the Food and Drug Administration and request a fast-track approval."

Walsh was not the only skeptical voice after Hubbard raised the ibogaine idea. At a press conference in May 2023, Beshear chided the commission for proposing such a large sum for ibogaine compared to law enforcement. "If you only provide $1 million to law enforcement and $42 [million] to pharma, it doesn't seem like you're backing the blue," he told reporters. "It seems like you're backing Big Pharma."

Ordinary Kentuckians, by contrast, seemed supportive of the ibogaine proposal. "In the middle of this 60-plus percent Trump-voting, Bible Belt believing-in-hellfire-and-brimstone red state, there is a tremendous amount of organic grassroots support for [ibogaine's] advancement," Hubbard says. An independent analysis of hundreds of social media responses to the ibogaine proposal suggested that most Kentuckians viewed it favorably.

Three public hearings about the drug—all of which ran over four hours—also drew crowds. Nolan, Mulligan, and the Capones testified, as did an FDA representative who confirmed that it was possible to get approval for an ibogaine clinical trial. Dozens of others spoke as well, including veterans, parents, and former opioid users. Many of the testimonies were highly emotional, and some speakers availed themselves of a box of tissues next to the microphone.

As the weather turned cool, ibogaine seemed poised for success. Hubbard had received commitments from Stanford University and several foundations to support Kentucky as it pursued clinical trials, and he was confident of majority support from the commission. But he decided to hold off on voting until Williams' latest ibogaine findings were published.

Williams' study appeared in Nature Medicine in January. A single dose of ibogaine, he and his colleagues concluded, provided significant reductions in measures of PTSD, depression, anxiety, and TBI-associated disability in 30 VETS-supported patients who undertook the therapy at Ambio. Thirteen participants also had alcohol use disorder, and all significantly reduced their number of drinking days after treatment with ibogaine. All of the participants received intravenous magnesium, and none experienced serious side effects.

Ibogaine, in other words, seemed ready for a U.S. clinical trial.

But by the time Williams' research came out, the hope of making Kentucky the site of that trial had faded. In November 2023, Cameron lost the governor's race to Beshear—and Republican Russell Coleman, a former FBI agent and Mitch McConnell lawyer, was elected attorney general. The tides of power had shifted, and ibogaine's most influential political supporter was out of the game.

Thwarted Breakthrough

Hubbard had suspected that something was off when he heard Coleman say that longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had been one of his boyhood heroes. But prior to the election, the two men had developed what Hubbard thought was a "working friendship."

Hubbard had given Coleman the same ibogaine briefing he had presented to Cameron. But unlike Cameron, Coleman had been careful to remain neutral. As the election approached, Hubbard started to wonder whether Coleman was truly the "independent, reform-minded Republican" he had seemed in private conversation, or if he was "part of the same ol' machine establishment that's run Kentucky generationally now for decades."

In December—after Coleman was elected but before he took office—he called a meeting with Hubbard. As Hubbard recounts the meeting, Coleman started by acknowledging that ibogaine "very well may have therapeutic value." But he quickly pivoted to expressing his disagreement with the project and his "great displeasure" with Hubbard's public advocacy for ibogaine.

"You have not in any way acted with any degree of objectivity," Hubbard recalls Coleman telling him. "You've not treated this with anything other than full-throated, complete 100 percent supportive advocacy."

"I've been an advocate for this because I believe in it," Hubbard says he replied.

"The decision has been made," Coleman said, according to Hubbard. "I'm going to need your resignation by December 31." (Coleman's office declined an interview request for this story.)

The day after Christmas, Hubbard issued a 10-page resignation letter addressed to "The People of Kentucky." The ibogaine plan had failed, he wrote, because it presented a "mortal threat" to the established order of power and money. "The opportunity for Kentucky to pioneer a breakthrough has been thwarted."

Butcher, the ibogaine-supporting commission member, held out hope that the proposal could still move forward in Hubbard's absence. But that was quickly dashed. Coleman appointed a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent to take Hubbard's place as head of the commission. In an address that Coleman delivered in March, he asked members of the commission to "step back" from "the unproven and incredibly expensive clinical trial for a psychedelic that is currently illegal as a Schedule I drug."

Hearing this, Butcher says, she felt "discouraged, disgusted, heartbroken, and disillusioned."

Hubbard now thinks his ibogaine plan was always doomed to fail. He points to an open source analysis of publicly available records compiled by Reveille Advisors, a private intelligence firm based in Denver. "We were really curious why there was so much instant animosity towards the ibogaine proposal from the University of Kentucky and the existing administration," says Wes Anderson, Reveille's director of operations.

Anderson and his partner, Rob, who prefers to withhold his last name because of his investigative work, also had personal interests in ibogaine. Anderson has a brother who is living homeless in Dallas, in part because of an opioid habit, and Rob is a retired Special Operations veteran with combat-related TBI. Their investigation, which they undertook pro bono, revealed financial links between those who opposed the ibogaine proposal and the opioid disorder treatment industry.

Walsh, the University of Kentucky professor, for example, earned nearly $50,000 in consulting fees from companies that make buprenorphine and Naloxone in 2016 and 2018, the years for which Reveille could find data. She has served as a scientific adviser for at least eight such companies in the last three years, and she was an investigator on a successful recent clinical trial of long-acting buprenorphine. "If opioid use disorder medicines are challenged," Anderson argues, "her life's work will no longer be relevant."

Walsh responded by email that this assessment "could not be more wrong." She confirmed that she has worked as a scientific adviser on substance use disorders to pharmaceutical companies, U.S. government agencies, and international organizations. But she added, "I am unclear why you are interested in including me in your article as I was not a part of the hearings or voting related to the issue of ibogaine. I had already left the Commission before those events occurred."

Jay Blanton, a spokesperson for the University of Kentucky, stated by email that it is normal and encouraged for university faculty to work with both the public and private sectors. "Pharmaceutical development would be a common field for industry consultation as so much drug development—including for those who advocate for ibogaine—occurs within the private sector," he said.

Hubbard rejects these arguments. During the last 25 years, he claims, his alma mater has betrayed its land grant institution mission of democratizing higher education and has become the equivalent of "a Fortune 100 corporation" with a multibillion-dollar economic footprint.

"Every move the University of Kentucky makes is animated by a money lust," Hubbard says. "Any suggestion that their academic positions are in no way influenced by their embedded financial relationships is a slap in the face to the recent history of academia's prostitution to Big Pharma, and to common sense."

Reveille's findings also extended to the politicians involved in ibogaine decisions. Beshear, it found, received about $225,000 in campaign donations from pharma companies and their lobbyists and from opioid use disorder benefactors such as recovery centers, while Coleman received nearly $200,000 from such donors. Beshear's law firm represented Purdue Pharma against the state of Kentucky in the OxyContin case, and Coleman's law firm is the lobbyist for DisposeRx, a medical disposal kit that is distributed with opioid prescriptions. Coleman's firm—like Beshear's—has also represented Purdue Pharma, Abbott Laboratories, and Merck in lawsuits in Kentucky. And although the two politicians are from opposite political parties, Coleman's firm donated over $35,000 to Beshear's 2023 reelection campaign—almost matching the $37,000 donation from Beshear's firm to Beshear's campaign.

Thickening the plot, in August, Coleman also recused himself from an FBI investigation into potential health care fraud by Addiction Recovery Care (ARC), a high-profile addiction treatment provider in Kentucky. According to Reveille's findings, affiliates of ARC and its chief executive officer gave $21,000 in cash donations to Coleman's election campaign.*

Anderson emphasizes that all of these findings are "just observations" and "we're not saying there was active wrongdoing." Hubbard, however, is convinced that his ibogaine proposal had been cut down by a "nexus of intertwined political and financial interests."

A Divine Conviction

On a Saturday morning last May, Hubbard walked across a stage in New York City in cowboy boots to address hundreds of attendees at Horizons, the world's longest-running psychedelics conference. "I'd also ask your conversational forbearance as I get ready to move forward, because English is my second language," he deadpanned, eliciting laughter from the audience.

The jokes ended there. His eyes wide and burning, Hubbard spent the next 10 minutes delivering a CliffsNotes version of the previous year's travails in the impassioned cadence of a Southern preacher. Several times, the auditorium broke into cheers, forcing Hubbard to pause. In the back row, Rick Doblin, the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, took a rare break from responding to emails on his phone and placed a hand on his face as he thoughtfully listened. As Hubbard continued, Kevin Balktick, the conference's founder, whispered to me: "Bryan is hands-down my favorite speaker—he's just incredible."

Hubbard concluded with a rallying cry that channeled his favorite verse from the Book of Isaiah: "I am convinced that if we of common mind, heart, and soul, regardless of political persuasion…make a commitment that we are going to deliver good tidings unto the meek, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to them that are bound—We! Shall! Win!"

The crowd burst into a standing ovation.

Hubbard has become a hero in the psychedelics community. He has attended dinners held in his honor where he was likely the only Republican in the room, and he has been a key guest at exclusive meetings with wealthy figures funding the movement to legitimize mind-altering drugs.

Hubbard's efforts to find another taker for the thwarted Kentucky trial have also picked up speed. He is talking to officials in Ohio, Washington state, Nevada, Missouri, New Mexico, and Arizona—plus a "dark horse" state that he has sworn not to reveal—about leveraging their resources to foster ibogaine research. In July, an individual connected to Georgia's opioid settlement fund contacted him to inquire about ibogaine. "There's a lot of interest that ranges from introductory exploration all the way to deliberative consideration of 'if' and 'how,'" Hubbard says.

Of the potentially interested states, he says, Ohio, New Mexico, and the dark horse are the furthest along, and he is hopeful that one or more of these states will soon "break the dam open." He has met with Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and "top officials" in the mystery state. In New Mexico, he has had meetings with state Rep. Andrea Romero (D–Santa Fe), who has facilitated gatherings with officials from Picuris Pueblo, a Native American community in Taos County.

"They want ibogaine access as quickly as it can be negotiated," Hubbard says of the Picuris Pueblo officials. If that happens, data collected in Picuris Pueblo could be compiled into a safety and efficacy study that paves the way for a formal FDA trial conducted by researchers at the University of New Mexico.

Mulligan is working on a plan for these states to form a coalition to develop a generic ibogaine using their pooled opioid settlement funds. Although the Kentucky effort failed, Mulligan says, "it wasn't for nothing" given all these developments.

Hubbard is more cynical today than he was before he heard the word ibogaine, but he is also more committed than ever to shepherding the drug across the FDA finish line. "My first and only objective that I have in life right now," he says, "is to try to do everything that I can in whatever way I can to advance [ibogaine's] availability as quickly as we can."

*UPDATE: This article has been updated to reflect news that happened after the October 2024 issue went to print.