NY Times - Mindbending may be just the word to describe the Oval Office ceremony on April 18, when President Trump ordered federal agencies to speed up research into the potential therapeutic uses of illegal psychedelic compounds like LSD, peyote and MDMA. Here was a law-and-order Republican and lifelong teetotaler championing the hallucinogenic substances that a previous Republican president, Richard Nixon, had condemned as “public enemy No. 1.”
In the decades since 1970, when Nixon consigned psychedelics to the most restrictive category of federal prohibition, his absolutist, just-say-no approach was embraced by waves of conservative politicians.
They generally held to the view that psychedelics were a morally corrupting intoxicant, the indulgences of hippies, draft-dodgers and other liberal degenerates.
“As someone who has worked with psychedelics for decades, watching the White House event was a very trippy experience,” said Dimitri Mugianis, an underground practitioner who was prosecuted by federal authorities for illegally treating a heroin addict with the psychedelic drug ibogaine.
Mr. Trump’s bold efforts to soften the federal government’s stance on certain illegal drugs have been head-spinning — last month, the Justice Department, at the president’s behest, loosened restrictions on medical marijuana, too.
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