🌎 If World Leaders Took Psychedelics...

👋 Welcome

Hey friends!

This week feels like a snapshot of the psychedelic movement growing up.

Use is rising. Research is getting sharper. Lawmakers are moving from curiosity into preparation. And inside the community, some of the biggest old assumptions are being questioned with more serious evidence.

This week, we’re looking at new science, state-level policy movement, and one debate people in this space have had for decades:

Would psychedelics actually change the people in power?

Let’s get into it.

🔝 Weekly Highlights

• 🍄 Psilocybin use in the USA is booming

  A new report shows psilocybin use is rising quickly across the United States, adding pressure for better education, public health guidance, and responsible policy as mainstream interest grows. See the data
  

• 🏛️ The VA may be getting ready for what comes next

  The Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee reviewed a bipartisan bill that would force the VA to prepare for emerging mental health treatments, including psychedelic-assisted therapies. Read more

🧬 Quick Hits

RESEARCH 🔬

• 🧠 One small dose. A measurable emotional shift

  A new study suggests a single low dose of LSD may influence reward-related brain activity and emotional processing in people with depressed mood. View the study
  

• 🌿 Ayahuasca enters one of the hardest conversations in mental health

  Early findings suggest ayahuasca-assisted therapy may help reduce suicidal thoughts in people with treatment-resistant depression. Explore the findings
  

• 🧬 Mega-analysis maps psychedelic brain changes

  An international analysis is helping researchers see how psychedelics alter brain activity across larger datasets and multiple studies. Dig into the analysis
  

• 🤝 Autism research may have a new psychedelic question

  A new paper explores whether psychedelics could influence social-affective brain circuits relevant to autism research and future treatment models. Open the paper

POLICY 🏛️

• ⚖️ Oklahoma puts ibogaine on the research map

  Oklahoma’s Senate advanced a bill that would support state-funded research into ibogaine, especially around addiction and trauma-related care. Follow the update
  

• 🧪 Louisiana makes a serious move on psychedelic therapy

  Louisiana’s SB43 would create a psychedelic-assisted therapy framework focused on addiction and treatment-resistant mental illness, though it is still pending House introduction. Check the statuses
  

• 🧠 Tennessee joins the ibogaine conversation

  Tennessee approved legislation to study ibogaine for addiction and PTSD, adding another state to the growing ibogaine policy map. See what passed

CULTURE 🎭

• 🧠 Psychedelics are pulling philosophy back into the room

  A PSA piece explores how philosophy may help the field think more deeply about consciousness, meaning, reality, and the future of psychedelic science. Read the interview

🌈 Main Feature

Would psychedelics actually change a world leader?

There’s a question that comes up constantly in the psychedelic world.

Sometimes it’s serious. Sometimes it’s half-joking. Sometimes it’s born from pure exhaustion after watching the news for too long.

What would happen if political leaders took psychedelics?

Would they become more compassionate?
Less rigid?
More connected to ordinary people?
Less obsessed with control, punishment, borders, enemies, and power?

It’s an old idea. The 1960s counterculture carried a version of it. Modern psychedelic culture still carries it too. Behind the memes about presidents drinking ayahuasca or mushrooms solving world peace, there’s a real belief many people hold: that psychedelics might soften authoritarian thinking.

Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris tweeted yesterday that this question had been revisited in a 2026 paper from Otto Simonsson, Taylor Lyons, Joseph Marks, Hannes Kettner, Leor Roseman, Eline Haijen, Mendel Kaelen, and Carhart-Harris himself. The findings put one of the psychedelic community’s most familiar beliefs under pressure.

The researchers looked at data from three separate studies with different designs and groups: people using psychedelics on their own, healthy volunteers receiving psilocybin, and patients with depression receiving psilocybin or escitalopram. Across all three, they found no significant changes in authoritarian attitudes after psychedelic use.

That does not mean psychedelics have no relationship to politics.

It means the popular story may be too clean.

The study’s conclusion is careful: the latest evidence is not compelling that psychedelic use reliably pushes authoritarian attitudes in one direction.

And honestly, that feels important.

Because within the psychedelic community, this debate has always had two sides.

One side sees these experiences as ego-softening, heart-opening, perspective-expanding events that could make leaders more humane. The other side argues that psychedelics are not political software updates. They can amplify what is already there. They can be shaped by context, ideology, social environment, and the people holding the container.

The authors note that psychedelics may act as non-specific amplifiers of the social and political context surrounding the experience, meaning the setting around the person could matter as much as the substance itself.

So the better question may not be:

What if leaders took psychedelics?

It may be:

Who are they with? What are they being shown? What beliefs are being reinforced? What kind of system are they returning to afterward?

That is where the romantic version of the idea starts to break down.

A psychedelic experience might help someone feel awe, grief, love, terror, humility, or connection. But those feelings do not automatically become good policy. They do not automatically undo ideology. They do not automatically turn a powerful person into a wise one.

The study also has limits. The authors point out that participants already had relatively low authoritarian scores at baseline, which may have left little room for scores to fall. They also lacked deeper data on context, political media exposure, facilitator beliefs, and other factors that could shape outcomes.

That nuance matters.

The takeaway is not that the conversation is over.

The takeaway is that psychedelics are probably not magic moral medicine.

They may open a window. They may increase sensitivity. They may loosen patterns. But what enters through that window still depends on the person, the context, the culture, and the structure around them.

For political leaders, that makes the fantasy more complicated.

Maybe a psychedelic experience could help some leaders see themselves differently. Maybe it could deepen empathy in the right conditions. Maybe it could also reinforce grandiosity, certainty, or messianic thinking in the wrong ones.

Both possibilities deserve to be taken seriously.

That is what makes this study useful. It cools down the myth without dismissing the mystery.

Psychedelics may change people.

But they do not appear to reliably change authoritarian attitudes just because someone takes them.

And in a world desperate for better leaders, that distinction matters.

👉 Read the full study

🎁 The Archive Just Opened Its Doors

As the psychedelic conversation grows, history matters more than ever.

Our good friend Kyle at Psychedelic Archives has spent years helping preserve and share the art, culture, stories, and strange little details that shaped this movement long before it entered the mainstream. With more than 1.5 million followers on Instagram, his work has introduced waves of new people to the deeper roots of psychedelic culture.

That kind of work takes time. It takes care. And it takes support.

Kyle just launched a new shop, and we want to help get the word out. Every purchase helps support his mission so he can keep bringing psychedelic history to life for the next generation of curious minds, researchers, artists, and explorers.

👉 Explore the Psychedelic Archives shop

👋 Signoff

That’s it for this week.

The science keeps moving. The policy landscape keeps shifting. And the culture keeps asking bigger questions as psychedelics move further into the mainstream.

Some of those questions are exciting. Some are uncomfortable. All of them matter.

Have a great week!

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