Andrew Jacobs, A Long, Strange Trip: How the G.O.P. Came to Embrace Psychedelic Drugs, NYTimes, May 3, 2026.
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.” [...]
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.
But experts in the field are not entirely surprised.
They note a steady easing of public opposition to psychedelics in recent years, much of it shaped by research that has chipped away at the stigma by demonstrating the drugs’ potential to treat intractable mental health conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and substance abuse.
There's much more at the link.