How the US right turned psychedelics into a new market

The American right once treated psychedelics as a symbol of national decay; now key figures around Donald Trump want to fast-track them into mainstream medicine and, potentially, a booming new market.

The reversal lands with striking historical symmetry. In 1966, Senator Ted Kennedy pressed Timothy Leary in a Senate hearing shaped by fear, moral panic, and the belief that LSD fueled social breakdown. Nearly 60 years later, reports indicate Robert F Kennedy Jr, standing with Trump, backed a presidential executive order designed to accelerate access to psychedelic-based treatments. The contrast captures more than a family irony. It marks a broader political realignment around drugs once tied to the counterculture and treated as radioactive by conservatives.

What the right once cast as a civilizational threat, parts of its coalition now frame as therapy, investment, and political opportunity.

That shift did not emerge from cultural tolerance alone. The new push appears to rest on two powerful engines: veterans’ advocacy and Silicon Valley money. Supporters point to compounds such as ibogaine, derived from a West African shrub, which scientists suggest may help treat chronic mental-health conditions. In that argument, psychedelics move from the margins into a language of recovery, treatment, and pragmatic problem-solving. Add high-profile boosters such as Joe Rogan and the case gains media reach, political pressure, and a direct line to the White House.

The politics matter because this debate no longer centers only on science or stigma. It also centers on who profits, who gains access, and who gets to define legitimacy in the next phase of drug policy. Kojo Koram’s argument, drawn from his new book, places psychedelics inside a larger story about winners and losers in the future of drugs. As the language around hallucinogens shifts from rebellion to treatment, the market logic around them grows harder to ignore.

What happens next will shape more than one corner of healthcare. If the right continues to champion psychedelic medicine, the issue could redraw old ideological lines and speed up commercial investment, regulation, and public acceptance. The bigger question now is not whether psychedelics can return to the mainstream. It is who will control that return — and who will cash out when they do.