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W. Bryan Hubbard speaks a lot about divinity. He thinks that psychedelic drugs have divine origin and can put you in touch with a higher power. He also believes that his role in catalyzing the most prominent political action supporting psychedelics to date was divinely orchestrated.And so meeting him at Trinity United Methodist Church in downtown Denver felt natural. The late-April light streamed through stained-glass windows while Hubbard, a broad-shouldered man with straight posture, settled into a pew. His brown hair was pulled back into a low bun, and he wore a plaid shirt and blue jeans. In a southern lilt, he described how he’s been generating previously unheard-of Republican enthusiasm for psychedelics, in particular for a drug called ibogaine. Though robust data from U.S.-based clinical trials about this drug are lacking, some researchers—along with a number of enthusiasts—believe that ibogaine may help people with opioid addiction and withdrawal, and perhaps PTSD and traumatic brain injuries too.On a Saturday morning a couple of weeks before Hubbard and I met, Donald Trump signed an executive order that directed several federal agencies to accelerate research on psychedelics—including ibogaine—as treatments for mental-health conditions. Rumors about such an order had circulated among psychedelics insiders since the beginning of April, when Joe Rogan had hosted Hubbard and former Texas Governor Rick Perry on his podcast. When the headphones came off, Hubbard told me, he decided to ask Rogan for a favor: Would he contact the president about ibogaine? As Rogan recounted at the Oval Office, “Trump’s reply was, ‘Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval?’” (At the signing, Trump didn’t know at first how to pronounce the word ibogaine, though he did jokingly ask if he could have some.)From the beginning of Trump’s second presidency, many psychedelics enthusiasts hoped that his administration would be favorable to the medical use of psychedelic drugs. MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression seemed to be the likeliest candidates, given that both regimens are in the late phases of clinical trials. But the final push for Trump’s most consequential psychedelics policy was linked to a drug whose benefits are supported by only a handful of preclinical studies and a single Phase 1 trial.That strange turn speaks to Hubbard’s advocacy over the past few years. His success can be partly attributed to the fact that a meat-eating southerner and lifelong Republican is not the typical psychedelics spokesperson. But it also reflects a bigger shift in the political culture of psychedelics since the days of LSD-taking environmentalists and anti–Vietnam War protesters. Perry, a conservative as well, has been a prominent ibogaine supporter since he tried the drug in a Mexican medical clinic in 2023. Many high-profile combat veterans want medical access to ibogaine. Hubbard, who had posters of Ronald Reagan in his childhood bedroom, said that these days, he has more success proselytizing for ibogaine on the right than on the left. “I have been able to talk to the most religiously fundamentalist, white, Republican conservatives that you would imagine,” he told me. And many of them are on board.In the dimly lit sanctuary of the church, Hubbard explained how he used to have the “typical conservative” view of psychedelics: “that these were a bunch of subversive, hippie drugs that made people roll around in the mud naked, and they had no beneficial or helpful purpose.” Then, in 2018, he read a Scientific American article that mentioned research on psilocybin for the treatment of alcohol-use disorder that piqued his curiosity. He estimated he had about a dozen psilocybin trips over the next four years.In 2022, Hubbard, a lawyer, was offered a position as chair of the Kentucky Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, in charge of distributing nearly $1 billion in settlement money from opioid companies to programs for addiction prevention, treatment, and recovery. Hubbard hosted town halls, where, he told me, “the sum-total message from the people who came to attend, was, We don’t think that you have either the competence or the honesty to do anything that’s going to help us.” Hubbard, eager for a new solution, turned to a psychedelics Substack writer he admired to ask if she knew of any compound that might help with opioid addiction. As he tells it, she responded, “Have you ever heard of ibogaine?”Ibogaine is derived from a shrub called Tabernanthe iboga, which grows in Central and West Africa. In Gabon, iboga root is used in ritualistic ceremonies in the Bwiti tradition. Those ceremonies mark the transition to adulthood and can be grueling. “The experience was intended as a kind of temporary death,” the French anthropologist Julien Bonhomme wrote in a chapter of the book Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics.After the compound was isolated in Europe at the turn of the 20th century, an ibogaine-based drug was sold in France as a mild stimulant (low doses can increase energy), but it stopped being manufactured after athletes took it to enhance their performance. In 1962, an American with a heroin addiction, Howard Lotsof, received a gift of ibogaine from a chemist friend and noticed that his cravings disappeared after he took the drug. He shared it with other people who had heroin addictions and found that some of them also reduced their use and sidestepped major withdrawal symptoms. Some quit using entirely. Thanks to stories like Lotsof’s, even today, “ibogaine comes with this tremendous amount of mythology around its benefits for opioid disorder,” Joji Suzuki, an addiction psychiatrist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told me.Lotsof tried to get scientists around the world to set up a proper clinical trial. But by the 1990s, such attempts had mostly stalled. Instead, advocacy groups raised money to send people desperate for addiction treatment, and later veterans, to ibogaine clinics outside the U.S., including in Saint Kitts, Mexico, and the Netherlands. In those settings, ibogaine leads to a trip that lasts anywhere from 12 to 36 hours. At first, a person has vivid, dreamlike hallucinations, often scenes from their own life. That’s followed by periods of contemplation, energized wakefulness, and, purportedly, a vanishing of withdrawal symptoms. The drug can also induce nausea and vomiting and has serious cardiac risks. Using it safely requires continuous heart monitoring, and some clinics now offer intravenous magnesium to reduce the chances of heart complications.Few studies have examined ibogaine’s effects on opioid-use disorder and other conditions, and they tend to be on very small groups of people, many of whom sought out ibogaine on their own. In one observational study, 88 people who had gone to a clinic in Mexico between 2012 and 2015 filled out a survey. A majority said that ibogaine reduced their opioid-withdrawal symptoms, and at the time of the survey, 41 percent were abstinent. In a more recent, often-cited paper from Stanford, researchers scanned the brains of veterans with traumatic brain injuries before and after they went to a clinic in Mexico. Most of the veterans’ symptoms significantly improved. But the study had no control group, and the participants were atypical: male former Special Operations Forces veterans who were motivated enough to pay to travel for the treatment. Without further study, it’s hard to say how the effects they experienced might generalize to other populations.[Read: Tripping on nothing]Despite the scant hard evidence, Hubbard saw ibogaine as the solution his state needed. Within a year of learning about the drug, he drafted a proposal to dedicate 5 percent of the state’s opioid-settlement funds to researching ibogaine for opioid-use disorder. In addition to its potential to treat addiction, Hubbard believed ibogaine to be the ideal political candidate for state-funded psychedelics research in general. LSD and mushrooms came with baggage—notably the belief that they would make you go crazy or start wearing tie-dye—but no one had heard of ibogaine. It wasn’t a recreational drug, and had little potential to become one thanks to its often-punishing physical side effects. “I thought there was an opportunity to introduce ibogaine as a blank slate,” Hubbard said. In November of 2023, Hubbard and his wife even traveled to a clinic in Mexico to try ibogaine for themselves.But then, political turnover killed the project. In late 2023, Hubbard alleges, a new state attorney general, Russell Coleman, pushed him out. “He expressed great displeasure with my public advocacy for ibogaine in Kentucky,” Hubbard wrote in his resignation letter. (Coleman did not respond to requests for comment.)Hubbard, though, remained convinced that the need for new opioid-addiction treatments, as well as the potential benefits for veterans, made ibogaine the ultimate bipartisan psychedelic. In 2025, he and Perry founded their nonprofit, Americans for Ibogaine, and successfully lobbied for Texas to pass a $50 million fund-matching bill for ibogaine research. AFI has also been lobbying for a multistate partnership that would create a nationwide ibogaine trial. Lawmakers in red states—including Tennessee, Missouri, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and West Virginia—have led the charge on introducing, and in some cases passing, laws that support research on ibogaine. Even Kentucky recently passed a framework to study the use of ibogaine to treat substance-use disorders. Hubbard called it “full-circle justice.”Psychedelics come with no inherent ideologies, of course. “Psychedelics seem to appear throughout history at moments when people are deeply questioning something,” Erika Dyck, a historian of medicine and psychedelics at the University of Saskatchewan, in Canada, told me.This is how Hubbard understands any Republican acceptance of psychedelics. The new support coming from the right, he believes, mirrors the left’s mindset in the 1960s: a response to the widespread distrust of powerful people and federal institutions, and the resulting sense of disillusionment. “The right’s embrace of psychedelics is its own countercultural response,” he said. (The fact psychedelics may help American service members is certainly a helpful selling point too.)Hubbard told me that his own politics are informed by his ancestors, who were coal miners from the mountains of Virginia, western North Carolina, and East Kentucky. One of his greatest influences, he said, is the United Mine Workers of America, a union that organized around improving working conditions and increasing wages. He said his great-great-grandfather, along with four of his brothers, crossed the Ohio River to fight against the South during the Civil War. Psychedelics, by his reckoning, are crucial for “everybody who wants to have a shot at living with any measure of freedom or dignity.”Listening to Hubbard muse about universal human rights and freedom, it’s easy to understand why he’s frequently compared to a preacher. His remarks about the medical benefits of ibogaine quickly morph into pronouncements of the sacredness of humankind. “I see the science as a gateway to the spirituality,” he said. The 4,202-pipe organ gleamed over us.Psychedelics and religion are no strangers. These compounds are used as religious sacraments in both Indigenous traditions and contemporary psychedelic churches. The author Aldous Huxley, who wrote about his own mescaline experience in The Doors of Perception, went on to argue that psychedelics would lead to mass spiritual evolution. (More recently, psychedelics researchers and advocates have said the same.) One of the most infamous studies of the 1960s involved a Harvard Ph.D. student giving mushrooms to divinity students because of the drugs’ ability to reliably induce mystical experiences. Lucas Richert, a historian of medicine and pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me Hubbard is so effective because he taps into that legacy. Hubbard’s advocacy becomes “as much a moral argument or a nationalistic argument, as a biomedical or regulatory argument,” Richert said. Hubbard is also not the only 21st-century conservative making the connection: Perry recently wrote the foreword for a book called The Christian’s Guide to Psychedelics.For all his success with the right, Hubbard worries he’s not reaching, and is maybe even alienating, essential groups, including public-health experts and medical professionals. The American Psychiatric Association, for example, released a response to Trump’s executive order welcoming federal investment in research, but cautioning that there was “currently inadequate scientific evidence for endorsing the use of psychedelics to treat any psychiatric disorder except within the context of approved investigational studies.” Other psychedelics researchers have expressed wariness at how simplistically advocates like Hubbard sometimes present the drugs: as quick, miraculous cures, rather than difficult psychological and physical experiences that don’t work for everyone and can come with challenging side effects.Opinions may be shifting even among the public-health establishment. Nora Volkow, the longtime director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said in 2024 that ibogaine was unlikely to ever receive approval as a treatment for opioid addiction. But at the American Psychiatric Association conference earlier this month, her presentation included positive remarks on ibogaine and other psychedelics, the industry news site Psychedelic Alpha reported. Still, Hubbard remains concerned about his audience. The week after we met, he testified at the Ohio capitol in support of legislation to establish ibogaine research in the state. When I asked him how it went, he said, “I wish that some of the audiences that I had the opportunity to speak to had a lot more Democrats and were a lot less white. That’s probably my biggest preoccupation right now.”[Read: The horseshoe theory of psychedelics]Suzuki, too, told me he worries about the politicization of psychedelics. If Republican enthusiasm can remove bureaucratic barriers to research on ibogaine and other drugs, he said, “I’m fully in support of it.” But too much partisan support could risk undermining the credibility of his and other researchers’ work. “The impression that I would want to avoid is that this particular project or that particular drug is being approved only because of their alignment with the current administration.”In an ideal world, politics wouldn’t be able to soil good research. But partisan strife has a long reach. In Denver, I had originally arranged to meet Hubbard at a different church nearby. But the day before the scheduled appointment, I got a rush of emails and calls from a woman who worked there. She told me that after searching Hubbard’s name online, she would not be willing to host us. The church is progressive, and Hubbard, thanks to his association with Trump and Rogan, could alienate the congregation.When I relayed this story to Hubbard, he momentarily appeared taken aback, then recovered. The woman’s reluctance, he said, was a sign of how divided the country is—exactly why psychedelics were needed to “restore the nation’s soul.” Before we left the church, I looked back at stained-glass windows depicting Jesus rising from the dead, winged and crowned, representing a link between the divine and humankind. Psychedelics, I thought, are undergoing a resurrection of their own. But it’s unclear if their worshippers will be willing to gather under the same roof.