The PhilaDelic Fall Forum laid out a roadmap for wider use of ibogaine and mushrooms to treat addiction and depression as stigma fades. Leading chemists, psychiatrists, treatment professionals, academics and activists gathered to expand the medical use of psychedelic drugs.
After spending the day with therapists, scientists and patients at the PhilaDelic Fall Forum, it was clear that the increasingly visible trend of using psychedelics to treat opioid addiction — and a wide range of other mental illnesses — has been moving forward in more ways than ever.
The historic gathering of more than 400 medical, scientific and treatment professionals laid out a road map for wider use of psychedelics in the U.S., including a push expected in 2026 for legislation in more than 10 states to fund ibogaine research.
Organized by the Penn Psychedelics Collaborative at the University of Pennsylvania, the forum advanced the idea that even though ibogaine, mushrooms and other psychedelic drugs remain prohibited under U.S. law, they continue to offer treatment options and potential breakthroughs for mental illnesses that are ravaging the health of Americans.
“If we can get the right message across…we could inspire change and activism behind the idea that psychedelics are powerful medicines to help people,” said T. Peterson Wagner, associate director of the Penn Psychedelics Collaborative and the main organizer of the forum, which was held Nov. 22, 2025. “They offer so much promise and potential, but you also have to have a little bit of skepticism about people promising the moon.”
The mind-blowing facts and figures from the lineup of blockbuster speakers provided scientific backing for more action on psychedelics. But the human stories of suffering, hopelessness and heartbreak relieved by ibogaine, psilocybin and other psychedelics seemed to connect even more deeply.
In a testimonial that drew tears and sobs from the audience, Andrew J. Walker, CEO of the non-profit 22forYou Project and an advocate for alternative plant therapies for veterans, law enforcement and first responders, said he turned to ayahuasca and ketamine treatments after conventional medicine failed to ease his deep depression.
“My experience saved my life,” he said. “I was catatonic with depression, staring at the TV all day while it was off. I kept thinking about killing myself without breaking my family’s heart.”
Firefighter Joseph McKay said he suffered from cluster headaches after his experiences in Lower Manhattan in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed 343 firefighters, including some of his close friends.
“I became addicted to OxyContin and I planned to take my life — I was trying to figure out how to make it look like an accident,” McKay said.
As a last resort, he called a friend of a friend who knew someone who used to go to Grateful Dead concerts, and he tried mushrooms, which “woke me up” and helped ease his post-traumatic stress and headaches. He also used MDMA.
Evelyn Shoop, a nurse practitioner, said her experience with mushrooms was uncomfortable due to nausea during the treatment, but they helped her realize she had cultivated a hatred toward herself for her whole life. The insight helped her gain a fresh perspective with more self-sympathy.
Jared Rinehart, a former Marine and military contractor, said psychedelics helped him cope with anger, excessive drinking and stress.
“I owe my entire life to psychedelic medicine — my problems were because of me,” Rinehart said. “It will only show you — it won’t do any heavy lifting…it can help you highlight things to change.”
For now, many of these treatments would be illegal in most states and at the federal level, but ketamine, which is classified as a less restricted drug, is on the rise in clinics around the country that have grown to nearly 1,000 locations.
Here’s how these treatments typically work.
Instead of a prescription that you fill and then take home, most medical practitioners will provide a dose of mushrooms, ketamine, ibogaine or MDMA in a therapeutic setting.
For ibogaine, these sessions typically happen in places outside the U.S., such as Canada, Mexico and Brazil, while mushrooms and MDMA have been used in some trials and in states where they are legal, including Colorado, Oregon and New Mexico. A therapist is on hand for the experience as a guide.
The most common reason for seeking treatment is to deal with mental illness, but some people travel to these destinations in search of self-awareness or for other personal reasons.
Treatments may run well past $10,000 in some cases. An ibogaine treatment typically requires travel expenses and a stay of several nights at a clinic for screening and counseling after the experience itself, which may last up to 48 hours.
Meanwhile, ketamine clinics have cropped up all over the country for treatments that range in cost from less than $100 to well into the thousands. Johnson & Johnson launched a pharmaceutical version of ketamine called esketamine, which it sells under the name Spravato, a nasal spray available in the U.S. beginning in 2019.
If you want to go completely commando on ketamine, there’s an illicit market for it through postings on Instagram and other social media, but this is not recommended.
While psychedelics still have a social stigma of being sinful or excessively dangerous, they’ve been with our species every step of the way.
Humans have always been drawn to substances that widen consciousness. I’d argue that Adam and Eve ate fruit from the tree of knowledge because they wanted to expand their minds and have a good trip.
Psychedelics like peyote cactus buttons or ibogaine from a plant in West Africa have been used for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples. I even remember one friend’s dad, who took peyote as a young doctor at a Native American reservation in the 1950s, before it was considered cool.
LSD entered the mainstream in the early 1960s with Harvard Professor Timothy Leary, who became a pop culture icon after meeting up with “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” author Ken Kesey, as told in the classic Tom Wolfe book, “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”
That trend peaked at the 1969 Woodstock festival in Bethel, N.Y., when attendees were warned not to take the brown acid.
Unfortunately, this all caught the attention of President Richard Nixon, who vowed to crack down on the hippies who were allegedly stealing America’s youth by turning them into drug addicts and then getting them to join the fight against the war in Vietnam.
Nixon established the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1970 and classified marijuana, LSD, peyote, psilocybin, toad venom, DMT from ayahuasca, and ibogaine as Schedule I drugs, meaning they offered no therapeutic value whatsoever and threatened the public with a “high potential for abuse” along with heroin.
Ketamine landed as a Schedule III drug, which opened the door for potential medical use, while cocaine was placed as a Schedule II drug with some medical use.
This all matters because the classification of drugs helps determine the cost and effort needed to potentially introduce new psychedelic drugs with FDA approval. This process typically takes years and tens of millions of dollars, at least, to generate the data needed through human trials.
Schedule I drugs are largely barred from pharmaceutical applications. This continues to generate a strong headwind against research at the federal level to get the ball rolling on potential new product introductions from the world of psychedelics.
The stigma around psychedelics remained strong for many years, and at High Times in the 1990s, the topic would often come up when we’d gather on Friday afternoons at 4:20 pm to imbibe the latest weed.
Mushrooms from the friendly cow fields of Vermont often entered the conversation, for laughs and concerts, along with the typical talk of the latest pot strains from California.
Occasionally, someone would talk about their LSD experiences or debate the meanings of the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” by the Beatles.
We were curious when High Times writer and Peru traveler Peter Gorman ingested ayahuasca through a blow pipe attached to his nose and then wrote about the subsequent mind-blowing experience. It seemed like a painful way to trip.
For the most part, we focused on cannabis and its relatively mild psychoactive effects as the most popular way to get high at High Times.
Recreational users seeking mystical experiences continue to be part of the fan base for psychedelics, but the move to turn them into FDA-approved medicines, starting with ketamine, began picking up steam as cannabis became legal in many states in recent years.
This push is being driven by the need to address both the raging opioid epidemic and the millions of hard-to-treat depression cases facing the country.
Veterans continue to commit suicide at an elevated rate as they struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.
Fentanyl claimed about 80,000 U.S. lives in 2023 — or 219 people for every calendar day of the year. Alcohol poisoning kills 178,000 people a year and it’s not even on the list of controlled substances by the federal government, nor is tobacco, which kills about 490,000 people a year.
Psychiatrist Michael Thase pointed out the ineffectiveness of antidepressants in about a quarter of patients and said the safety of the medicines has improved over the years, but they still don’t work for everybody.
Drugs in development, such as GH Research’s toad venom-derived GH001, are in clinical trials and show promise, along with psilocybin, he said. Optimism is high around a reclassification of psilocybin and potential FDA approval in 2026 or 2027, he added.
“I’ve never seen such excitement and enthusiasm for new drugs,” Thase said.
Ibogaine drew much attention at PhilaDelic as a drug that works in a complex way that can actually help restore drug-damaged neurons in the brains of addicts.
Columbia University chemist Dalibor Sames, co-founder of Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals, which is developing GM-3009 as a derivative of the ibogaine molecule that’s safer for the heart, shared a simplified description of how ibogaine works:
Imagine you’re the mayor of New York City and the citizens desperately want you to fix the clogged traffic in Times Square. You can choose to send more traffic cops to the immediate area. Or you could summon an elite team to fan out across the city to clear out choke points around the city — a more upstream approach to the problem. Ibogaine works like the elite team, not the traffic cops.
“It’s a very intelligent molecular octopus,” Sames said of ibogaine. “It re-edits your brain.”
While it’s promising, it may cost up to $2 billion to develop safe and legal ibogaine in the U.S., he said.
Anna Rose Childress, an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, is working on a psilocybin trial with human subjects that began this fall and will continue for about 20 months.
“Fear is a barrier we’re facing,” she said. “We need help with peer reviews [of the data from the trial], but there’s still a stigma around studying psychedelics.”
On the medicine front for psilocybin, Compass Pathways Plc is developing COMP360, a synthetic psilocybin, to be administered with psychological support.
The drug has won breakthrough therapy status from the FDA to launch its second Phase 3 trials in the first quarter of 2026 to treat PTSD. Earlier studies have shown that COMP360 “was generally well tolerated and demonstrated both rapid and durable improvement in symptoms from baseline observed following a single administration,” the company has said.
Meanwhile, in Colorado, Rhonda DeSantis of Psylutions, one of the first regulated cultivators of psilocybin in the state, said she was inspired to launch the company after mushrooms helped her heal from an abusive relationship with her now ex-husband. Taken as a medicine, psilocybin helps treat PTSD, pain, anxiety and treatment-resistant depression, she said.
“One of our clients is a minister who doesn’t even drink, who had a low-dose session for an hour,” she said.
Along with mushrooms, the focus for much of the forum was directed at the potential benefits of ibogaine.
Kim Adams, CEO of LYT Marketing Alchemy, moderated a panel on ibogaine therapy programs in Canada, Mexico and Brazil, where thousands of people have been treated.
Bruno Rasmussen-Chavez said Brazil legalized ibogaine for prescriptions in 2016 to help cope with the country’s widespread crack cocaine addiction problem.
Like others, his approach includes thorough medical screening for heart or kidney conditions before allowing patients to get treatment. People with schizophrenia or symptoms of psychosis are not permitted to undergo the treatment.
“There are risks, but it’s not as dangerous if you do it in the right way,” Rasmussen-Chavez said. “The patient must be in a good state of health…and you must be around, checking everything.”
Brooklyn-based Dr. Maurice Hinson, founder of MediRootz Medical Group, said it may take 15 to 20 years of therapy to accomplish the benefits of one dose of ibogaine, which can help patients tap into mystical parts of their mind.
“We are spiritual beings…but spirituality is absent from much of our societal structure,” he said.
He’s heard of 120 deaths from ibogaine over the past 35 years, compared to 3,000 people a year who die from methadone used to treat addiction to heroin and opioids.
The path to wider use of ibogaine would include reclassifying it to Schedule III from Schedule I, conducting human trials, winning FDA approval, establishing regulated treatment centers, and getting insurers to reimburse patients for the medicine. He did not estimate how long this could take.
While such a process is difficult and lengthy, ibogaine has been picking up steam in recent years with support from ex-Texas Gov. Perry and others.
In a historic move for ibogaine, the Texas Legislature in June passed a measure to provide $50 million in funding for ibogaine research.
Lawyer and activist T. Bryan Hubbard, who worked with Perry and appeared with him on Joe Rogan’s show, said he’s working on legislation in 12 more states to open up support for more studies of ibogaine in his capacity as CEO of the advocacy group Ibogaine for Americans. Hubbard met Perry when he was studying the use of millions of dollars in opioid lawsuit settlements to fund ibogaine research in Kentucky.
“We are in an existential struggle for survival,” said Hubbard, who has seen first-hand the ravages of the opioid epidemic in depressed coal mining states. “It’s like the moon shot of our times.”
Steve Gelsi is a former High Times contributor and ex-cannabis reporter for MarketWatch.com
This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.
Photo by christopher lemercier on Unsplash
