May 1, 2026

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Inside the ibogaine rush: How psychedelic therapy is going mainstream

Tracing how psychedelics have undergone a revival in the U.S. and what the White House’s new psychedelic push means for research

By Rachel Feltman, Sushmita Pathak & Alex Sugiura

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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

For years when most people thought about psychedelic drugs, they pictured long-haired tripping hippies either having a ball or risking and wasting their lives, depending on the tenor of the anti-drug messaging one happened to be subject to. That association was cemented in the late 1960s, when modern scientific study of psychedelics—which had been picking up speed since the ’50s—ground to a halt, thanks to government regulation and negative public opinion. But when science ceded psychedelics to the counterculture movement, it abandoned promising results on the power of these drugs to change human minds for the better.

Then, at the turn of the 21st century, Johns Hopkins University received the first regulatory approval to resume the study of psychedelics in the U.S. The university’s research kicked off a full-blown psychedelics renaissance, putting a spotlight on MDMA, psilocybin and other drugs previously known for their recreational effects as potential treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, substance-use disorder and more.

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Last month President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at accelerating access to psychedelic drugs. But what will this actually mean for researchers in the booming field?

Here to walk us through the story is science journalist Jane C. Hu. She writes The Microdose, a newsletter supported by the University of California, Berkeley, Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

Feltman: Thanks so much for coming on to chat with us today.

Jane C. Hu: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Feltman: So why don’t we start by giving our listeners a little context for why psychedelics have been in the news the last few days?

Hu: So April 18 President Trump signed an executive order basically ordering the government to accelerate accessibility for psychedelics. It’s a big move symbolically, just because the Trump administration is really stacked with psychedelics advocates, and so when Trump took office and appointed his secretaries, I think there were a lot of high hopes among psychedelics advocates that there was gonna be some real movement, hadn’t really seen a lot lately, but this is kind of the big news.

Feltman: Yeah, well, and I definitely wanna dig into who those advocates are and, and where that movement is coming from. But first, for our listeners who don’t know, could you give us kind of a primer on, you know, why we’re talking about psychedelics in a therapeutic way in the first place?

Hu: Yeah, so there’s been a huge amount of resurgence in interest in using psychedelics therapeutically, a lot of research into specifically psilocybin, MDMA. Folks might have heard that in 2024 a company called Lykos, which is now called Resilient, submitted a new drug application to the FDA to basically try and get MDMA approved as a drug. That did not go through.

But I feel like over the last few years there’s been a lot of discussion about how to make these drugs accessible for people, not just for therapeutic use but just general use. Oregon and Colorado right now have programs up and running where people can just take psilocybin under the supervision of someone who’s trained as a facilitator.

Feltman: And what does the research say about, you know, what these drugs can accomplish therapeutically?

Hu: There’s been a lot of evidence suggesting that people who are given psilocybin, MDMA and in some cases other psychedelics as well, that it can help with depression, anxiety, PTSD.

We can dive into, you know, some of the nitty-gritty of the research, but overall things are looking at least promising enough that the FDA has granted investigational new drug designation to a lot of companies to basically look into whether these drugs should be approved as medicines later on.

Feltman: Yeah. So I’ve covered this a bit in the past and actually done some psychedelic therapy myself ...

Hu: Mm.

Feltman: And one thing I’ve always thought was interesting is that when I talk to some experts there’s a lot of research suggesting that the therapy component is really important and that, you know, what they call “set and setting” is,