A veteran wore an eye cover and headphones during an ibogaine therapy retreat at a clinic near Tijuana, Mexico, in July. A van full of U.S. Special Operations veterans crossed the border into Mexico on a sunny day in July to execute a mission that, even to them, sounded pretty far out.
Over a period of 48 hours, they planned to swallow a psychedelic extract from the bark of a West African shrub, fall into a void of dark hallucinations and then have their consciousness shattered by smoking the poison of a desert toad.
The objective was to find what they had so far been unable to locate anywhere else: relief from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury symptoms.
“It does sound a little extreme, but I’ve tried everything else, and it didn’t work,” said a retired Army Green Beret named Jason, who, like others in the van, asked that his full name not be published because of the stigma associated with using psychedelics.
A long combat career exposed to weapons blasts had left him struggling with depression and anger, a frayed memory and addled concentration. He was on the verge of divorce. Recently, he said, he had put a gun to his head.
“I don’t know if this will work,” Jason said of psychedelic therapy. “But at this point, I have nothing to lose.”
Psychedelic therapy trips like this are increasingly common among military veterans. For years, psychedelic clinics in Mexico were a little-known last-ditch treatment for people struggling with drug addiction. More recently, veterans have found that they also got lasting relief from mental health issues they had struggled with since combat.
No one tracks how many veterans seek psychedelic treatment in Mexico. Clinic owners estimate they now treat a few thousand American veterans a year, and say the number is steadily growing. Many of the veterans have free access to the U.S. veterans’ health care system but find standard treatments for combat-related mental health issues to be ineffective .The Department of Veterans Affairs announced this month that, for the first time in more than 50 years, it would fund research into psychedelic […]
Seeking Relief From Brain Injury, Some Veterans Turn to Psychedelics
