Post: Nine veterans with PTSD went to Mexico for a psychedelic retreat. This is how they feel nearly a year later.

Last year, for the first time, the Veterans Administration announced it would begin funding its own clinical trials to treat post traumatic stress disorder, depression and addiction, using two psychedelic drugs psilocybin and MDMA. Even if these trials are successful, it would be years before the VA could prescribe either drug for its patients. Thousands of veterans who are suffering aren’t waiting, desperate for help, they’re attending psychedelic retreats in countries where the drugs are legal to use, mostly in indigenous ceremonies. This past March we were invited to join nine veterans who traveled to the west coast of Mexico for a psychedelic journey they hoped would finally help ease their pain.

They came to Mexico from all over the United States, a group of nine veterans — with invisible wounds that are hard to heal.

Their destination: a remote village near Puerto Vallarta for a week-long psychedelic retreat.

It was a voyage into the unknown, but a risk worth taking for TJ Duff, a former Navy sailor.

Anderson Cooper: Are you optimistic?

TJ Duff: Being optimistic is hard for me. Because I’ve been through a lot of therapy, a lot of different treatments. And not a lotta success.

Duff was 18 when he joined the Navy. Months into his first deployment aboard the USS Cole, he says he narrowly escaped death, when two suicide bombers attacked the ship in Yemen, killing 17 sailors. TJ Duff TJ Duff: Everyone around me was killed. There’s bodies, alive and dead, being piled up in the midships. And– I think that’s really where I just started holding everything in.

Randy Weaver: Don’t have it where I’m– I’m jumping in ditches when I hear loud noises. My PTSD’s– is kind of a self-destructive form.

Randy Weaver is a police officer in New York. A former staff sergeant in the Army, he was diagnosed with PTSD in 2007, after returning home from tours in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan.Randy Weaver: It’s the constant, you know, what if I had done this? What if we did that, you know?Anderson Cooper: Are those things you want to revisit while you’re taking the psilocybin?Randy Weaver: Yeah. […]

Nine veterans with PTSD went to Mexico for a psychedelic retreat. This is how they feel nearly a year later.