by Federico Soldani – November 6th 2024
Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States of America on November 5th, 2024, for the second time after his victory in 2016.
Many of the figures close to Trump as major supporters both politically and in the media have a singular characteristic in common: they are public supporters, if not declared users, of hallucinogens. Substances such as ketamine, peyote or mescaline, magic mushrooms or psilocybin, ibogaine, DMT, LSD and the like.
Several of them have also disclosed that they have received psychiatric or brain-related diagnoses, from autism spectrum disorders like Musk, to a brain parasite, drug addiction and other neurological problems like Kennedy, to a major crisis due to a anti-anxiety drugs – benzodiazepines – dependence like psychologist Jordan Peterson. The list of people and disorders goes on.
What explains so many supporters of hallucinogens and people who have even declared neuro-psychiatric diagnoses?
See Trump, his worst critics, and diagnosis outside of a clinical context (2020) – PsyPolitics and also From citizens to patients: a threat to resist (2020) – PsyPolitics.
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In 2019, under the Trump administration, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the use of a nasal spray containing esketamine, a version of the hallucinogen ketamine, for the treatment of depression resistant to conventional treatments.
This decision marked the first-ever approval of a hallucinogen for psychiatric use by the FDA. Subsequently, President Donald J. Trump encouraged the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to broadly adopt this treatment for veterans with treatment-resistant depression, including those with suicidal tendencies. See also Trump, mass hallucinogens, and the cyber-psychedelic transformation of capitalism (2020) – PsyPolitics. The FDA is currently evaluating several such substances for therapeutic use, some of them under fast-track procedures.
During the presidential election campaign, a guest on MSNBC’s wildly popular morning show ‘Morning Joe’ suggested that Trump had been appearing at times incoherent or confused because of so-called microdoses of hallucinogens that Trump was taking like his friend Musk: but these highly unusual claims, especially in politics, have apparently not found any support or confirmation so far. Joanna Coles, host of Morning Joe: Trump is probably ‘microdosing’ like Elon Musk – The Daily Beast 2024.
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Elon Musk, the well-known tech entrepreneur and owner of Twitter, a site he renamed X, has expressed an interest in using hallucinogens, both personally and as a public advocate, and even told the public while presenting the Saturday Night Live a few years ago that he had been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder.
Elon Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was an active member of Technocracy Inc. in Canada, a movement whose key figure was Harold Loeb that promoted the idea of a society governed by Soviet-style technocrats and that placed a strong emphasis on healthcare as a method of governance, including the political use of psychiatry. See the 2021 series of fourteen articles in PsyPolitics, ‘Life in a Technocracy’, 1933: A soviet of technicians… in America? (2021) – PsyPolitics.
Loeb, in his 1933 utopia “Life in a Technocracy” – a book rediscovered on PsyPolitics in 2021 – theorized the use of visions induced at will to make people understand, or believe they understand, the meaning of life. To attain visions at will? Loeb, 1933: “When a being is in possession of them, he knows or thinks he knows the meaning of life” (2024) – PsyPolitics.
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Robert Kennedy Jr., the Trump presidential candidate who recently made headlines in the New York Times for admitting that a literal worm, or parasite, had eaten part of his brain, is expected to play a major role in the Trump administration’s healthcare efforts. See the New York Times article: R.F.K. Jr. Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain. The presidential candidate has faced previously undisclosed health issues, including a parasite that he said ate part of his brain. NYT 2024 and also Dr. Gupta explains what could have led to RFK Jr. having a worm in his brain – CNN 2024.
Bob Kennedy Jr has publicly expressed his support for the decriminalization and use of hallucinogens even for mental health, including children as possible beneficiaries of these powerful drugs, literally “in ways that could benefit our children”. This position is in line with the statements of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), the largest association for hallucinogens in America, and other similar associations regarding the “psychedelic families” and the use of hallucinogens even in children.
The figure of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, who Bob Kennedy Jr. openly says he was inspired by, was at the center of these themes, as previously discussed on PsyPolitics, see “Codex Jung”, gnostic gospels and UFOs (2024) – PsyPolitics [in Italian] and the series of three articles on the birth of the term “psychedelic”: ‘Pneumadelic’? Osmond, 1957: “my preference is ‘psychelytic’ or ‘psychedelic’” (2021) – PsyPolitics.
British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who coined the word “psychedelic” in a game a rhymes with writer Aldous Huxley, in the 1957 paper in which he mentioned a “personal communication” by Jung and for the first time he introduced his suggestion to call hallucinogens or psychotomimetics either “psychelytic” or “psychedelic”, wrote: “Our psychotomimetics resemble the hypothetical endotoxin that Carl Jung called toxin-X and that we have called M (mescaline-like) substance.”
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Joe Rogan, perhaps the most famous podcaster today, was publicly thanked from the stage during Trump’s victory speech after the vote on November 5, 2024. A few days before the vote, Trump had given a three-hour interview to Rogan, who then formally endorsed him. Rogan is considered the most important online propagandist in the world. The interview touched on UFOs, among other topics. This interview was considered by many – after being viewed tens of millions of times, even by a young audience – a very important contribution to Trump’s campaign, to the point that Rogan was among the very few named and thanked from Trump’s victory stage.
Rogan has his face with the psychedelic third eye in the symbol of his show – The Joe Rogan Experience [pictured above]. Rogan is an outspoken believer in hallucinogens and frequently discusses topics such as hallucinogens and UFOs on his show.
Similarly, psychologist Jordan Peterson and influencer Russell Brand – both openly pro-Trump and with tens of millions of online followers – have expressed multiple times their support for the use of hallucinogens, often contrasted with older psychiatric medications such as anti-anxiety drugs, antidepressants, or antipsychotics. See, for example, Hallucinogens: Antidepressants Hype, Cubed (2023) – PsyPolitics.
It is also interesting and relevant to note how Julius Evola, an Italian philosopher of the fascist and post-war period who influenced the ideologist of Trump’s first presidential campaign, Steve Bannon, showed a marked interest in hallucinogens in his writings. See Evola on Hallucinogens (2020) – PsyPolitics.
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The PsyPolitics website coined and introduced concepts such as “mass hallucinogens” and “cyber-psychedelic capitalism” for the very first time in 2020, which are linked to the activities and period of the first Trump administration including the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting a growing attention towards the integration of hallucinogens with the digital sphere in contemporary society. In this regard, with respect to the origins of such integration, see another article in which relevant figures such as experimental psychologist Heinrich Klüver about mescaline and hallucinations and other around him were identified as key figures: Origins of the Cyber-Psychedelic Subculture (2021) – PsyPolitics.
Despite this trend, Massachusetts recently rejected a referendum to legalize hallucinogens, which however received a majority in favor in the US urban centers of Boston and Cambridge, home to many universities including Harvard and MIT: Election Results: Massachusetts Question 4, Legalize Psychedelics – NYT 2024. See also Hallucinogens for all: Bad for public health, Good for private wealth. A Final Analysis of the Massachusetts ballot question – The Psychiatry Letter 2024.
Similar referendums had already passed largely unnoticed in 2020 in Washington, D.C. and Oregon – a campaign funded by Facebook/Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, another scoop that PsyPolitics delivedered to the Italian public in 2020 – with the decriminalization of drugs including, crucially, hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms. In the same weeks, the world’s first hallucinogen company, Compass Pathways, went public on the NASDAQ, a scoop made for the Italian public on PsyPolitics. Other cannabis referendums have failed in this US election cycle aside from one on medical or therapeutic cannabis in Nebraska and the decriminalization of limited quantities of cannabis in Dallas, Texas. See also Hallucinogens Go Stock Market (and More): A Breakthrough in the US – ilGiornale.it (2020) and NASDAQ, Oregon, and Washington D.C.: Three Steps Towards 21st-Century, Global, and Cyber-Psychedelic Capitalism (2020) – PsyPolitics.
However, the high concentration of key figures not only supporters but also close to the future Trump administration and in favor of hallucinogens suggests a potential expansion of the use – therapeutic or otherwise – of these very powerful substances and a greater social acceptance of the most powerful drugs known and which profoundly alter the sense of reality.
It is therefore to be expected that we will see increasing propaganda in favor of hallucinogens in the United States in the coming years and subsequently around the world, with potential significant implications for health and social policies in the United States and elsewhere globally.
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What explains this incredible concentration of people in favor of powerful drugs like hallucinogens – including candidates for the coming second Trump administration – around the 45th and now 47th President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump ?
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Cite this article as: Federico Soldani, “Novermber 5th: Trump and hallucinogens (2024)” in PsyPolitics, November 6, 2024, https://psypolitics.org/2024/11/10/november-5th-trump-and-hallucinogens-2024/
Last Updated on November 10, 2024 by Federico Soldani