The world’s most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, reached out privately in April to the world’s most powerful man, Donald Trump, to discuss the healing power of ibogaine, a psychedelic made from the root bark of a Central African shrub that researchers are studying as a treatment for addiction and trauma. Trump responded by text, “‘Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let’s do it,’” Rogan announced weeks later, when he stood behind the president in the Oval Office for the signing of an executive order on psychedelic therapies. “It was literally that quick.”But it wasn’t that simple. After hearing from Rogan, the president told his team at the Department of Health and Human Services to change the policy, and the team sent a draft executive order to the White House Domestic Policy Council. That’s when things got messy. In the days that followed, Rogan’s allies engaged in battle with a mid-level White House health adviser, Dr. Heidi Overton. As a deputy assistant to the president who focuses on health policy, Overton ran a process to revise the draft in coordination with other stakeholders, including the Departments of Justice and Veterans Affairs.Members of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement were furious, convinced that Overton, not for the first time, had undermined Trump’s own desires. The friction, which has not been previously reported, became so intense that Rogan and W. Bryan Hubbard, the CEO of Americans for Ibogaine, a nonprofit that champions the drug’s therapeutic benefits, threatened to pull out of the signing ceremony if they did not have a say in Overton’s final edits, according to three people familiar with the events.Overton’s efforts on the Domestic Policy Council shrank the roughly 1,400-word HHS draft to about 900 words by the time Trump signed his name. Entire sections were removed, including those calling for a psychedelic-therapy czar and treatment-funding reforms, according to a draft we reviewed. A $250 million research fund became a $50 million partnership with states. In the end, the document accelerated review for some drugs and pushed the government to reschedule psychedelic substances that perform well in large clinical trials, enough to persuade Rogan and Hubbard to show for the signing.Overton is one of the most powerful public-health officials in Trump’s orbit who has little public profile. Her job, as a senior health-policy official on the White House Domestic Policy Council, is to convert the president’s priorities into the… [TheTopNews] Read More.
3 weeks ago
