Tip of the Wick

The president of the United States just signed an executive order in the Oval Office directing the FDA to expedite review of psychedelics designated as breakthrough therapy drugs. Standing behind him: HHS Secretary RFK Jr., FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, VA Secretary Doug Collins, Joe Rogan, Bryan Hubbard, Congressman Morgan Luttrell (retired Navy SEAL), and his brother Marcus Luttrell (retired Navy SEAL, the “Lone Survivor”). I’ve been working in this field for over a decade. A sitting U.S. president signing an executive order on psychedelic medicine, from the Resolute desk, with that lineup behind him, was not on my 2026 bingo card. It was barely on anyone’s. What was actually signed today matters. The FDA will compress review times for psychedelic new drug applications from roughly a year down to weeks. Makary announced three national priority vouchers will be issued imminently, and the first ibogaine investigational new drug clearance is already in place, opening the door to the first legal human trials of ibogaine on American soil. The order also directs the Attorney General, in coordination with HHS, to begin rescheduling reviews after successful Phase 3 trials. That’s a real bridge from Schedule I to prescribable medicine for any compound that clears the bar. ARPA-H is directed to match-fund state-level psychedelic research programs, with Texas’s $50M ibogaine initiative the obvious first beneficiary. This is not legalization. It’s a federal signal that the regulatory logjam defining this field for decades is finally breaking. The case Trump, Kennedy, Collins, and the Luttrells made today was about veterans. More lives lost to suicide since 9/11 than on the battlefield by a factor of 21. Conventional treatments are failing the people who served, and that reality is the wedge that finally gets psychedelic medicine through the door in Washington. An FDA approval pathway doesn’t produce a country ready to work with these medicines, and that’s the piece almost no one in today’s coverage will touch. Psilocybin, MDMA, and ibogaine are not SSRIs. They require trained practitioners who understand set, setting, trauma, integration, and the phenomenology of altered states. That infrastructure doesn’t get built by executive order. It gets built by the people in this field, right now, doing the work of training coaches, clinicians, and facilitators who can actually hold these experiences well. That’s the work we’ve been doing at the Psychedelic Coaching Institute. Today opens a door we’ve been pushing on for a long time. Whether psychedelic medicine delivers on its promise depends on what the field does next, not what the White House did today.