Hubbard and Perry first met in June, 2023, after the ex-governor keynoted a psychedelics conference organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS); Hubbard later reached out to him to see if he could assist with the effort to bring ibogaine to Texas. In October, 2024, the two invited thirty handpicked Texans—veterans, researchers, donors—to a war-council-style meeting in downtown Austin. “I’m the football coach, Bryan is the quarterback, and y’all are the team,” Perry told them.
The veterans were a key part of the team. Unlike in Kentucky, where Hubbard pushed ibogaine as a broader treatment for former opioid addicts, the clinical trials that Hubbard, Perry, and Davidson were proposing, in Texas, would be centered on veterans, in keeping with the psilocybin precedent. Rick Doblin, the founder and president of MAPS, had identified, decades earlier, that veterans, as a sympathetic constituency, were the surest route to bipartisan support. He pointed out that ibogaine’s therapeutic potential had been evident since the nineteen-sixties. “But we need to show that the psychedelics are coming to heal people who society values, and we tend to demonize addicts.” He added, “The fact that you can take psychedelics and stay Christian, stay Republican—that’s the key learning that society needed in order to integrate these drugs.”
In the spring of 2025, the team built momentum through activities such as hosting private screenings of “In Waves and War,” a documentary on Navy SEALs and psychedelic therapy, which they used to recruit dozens of legislators to their cause. At one point, they were holding seventy meetings a day; Davidson described the campaign as the most intense experience of his political career. It was also one of the weirdest. “Most legislative and political efforts are pretty homogenous, but this was the strangest cast of characters you can imagine,” he said. “You’re standing up there next to Navy SEALs, career scientists, MAHA hippies, traditional hippies, first responders—everybody is getting in.”
That May, Hubbard was invited to a closed-door meeting with Texas’s Speaker of the House, Dustin Burrows, and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, to make his case for fifty million dollars in state appropriations to bring ibogaine to Phase III clinical trials—a sum that even his own team doubted he’d land. Hubbard burned a wish ticket, believed to manifest desires, on the balcony of his hotel room before walking to the state capitol. The meeting had been scheduled to run for thirty minutes. After an hour and a half, Hubbard emerged, with his head down, then looked up at his team, who were standing outside waiting for him. He stomped his foot. “Fifty million fucking dollars,” he said. The confirmation came by text two days later. It was like scoring the winning touchdown in the final minutes of a game.
In June, 2025, Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 2308, creating a framework for ibogaine clinical trials funded by partnerships between the state and private drug developers. The bill passed the Texas House 138–2, and the state Senate 27–4. By December, a consortium led by UTHealth Houston and U.T.M.B. Health had been awarded the fifty-million-dollar sum to lead the trials. “Democrats early on were, like, Yes, we support this, but we’re not going to get tagged as the druggies,” Davidson said. “That’s where the conservative influence provides cover. Each side gets permission from the other side to do this.” Hubbard told me that he hopes the win becomes a “big-bang singularity” which other red states will follow. Today, nineteen states have pro-psychedelic legislation passed or pending, including Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.
The city of Austin, meanwhile, “is the psychedelic center of the world at this point,” Paul Austin, the host of the “Third Wave” podcast and a microdosing coach for the entrepreneurial class, told me. A new archetype has emerged from this scene: the rugged libertarian cowboy. In March, at an Americans for Ibogaine event held during SXSW week at a MAHA-adjacent wellness club in Austin, Hubbard, who sports a thick beard and shoulder-length hair, showed up in bluejeans and cowboy boots. Standing onstage near a refrigerator of raw milk, as the scent of barbecue wafted in the air, he delivered a fiery speech outlining ibogaine’s emancipatory potential for the American people, channelling a Western sheriff’s incorruptible sense of justice and a preacher’s thundering conviction. Describing veterans as “ground zero” for addiction and suicide, Hubbard noted that “deaths of despair” have taken a million and a half American lives in the past ten years, a figure he said exceeds the number of U.S. soldiers killed in action since 1776. “I don’t care what culture you come from, what color you are, or what your political-party label is,” he said. “We can look at the foundations of this country as they are now, and we see the crumbling and the cracking and the strain,” he continued, his voice rising. “Yes, this is about ibogaine. But this is about the human condition, and what this country is supposed to be.”
