This story was first published in Reporting Texas, a student newsroom of the University of Texas at Austin.
On April 7, 53-year-old Navy veteran Mark Miller hailed a taxi to Audie L. Murphy Memorial Veterans Hospital in San Antonio.
Once there, at 12:34 p.m., he pulled out his phone and sent a final text message to his father.
“Papa, I love you very much and I always will,” he wrote.
He then pulled out a gun and shot himself in the hospital parking lot.
Eight days earlier, Miller had visited that same hospital seeking help for mental health issues. In an interview with KSAT, Miller’s father said his son struggled with depression and anxiety since retiring from the service in 2007. He’d previously made plans to commit suicide in Costa Rica before being talked out of it by loved ones, according to the report.
Despite that medical history, the best the doctor could do during Miller’s April 1 appointment was to prescribe Seroquel — an antipsychotic medication used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder — according to a lengthy Facebook post written by his father that’s since gone viral.
“Why would Mark do such a hideous thing? I know exactly why,” Miller’s father wrote in the social media post. “He is making a powerful statement to the VA and to the world on behalf of thousands of veterans. Veterans that have been neglected and pushed to the brink of disaster. Veteran’s, who’s [sic] voices have been silenced and whose plights have been ignored.”
Miller’s father continued, writing in the post that the VA should emphasize psychotherapy and other alternatives instead antidepressants, which some studies say could increase the risk of suicide.
Miller’s story isn’t unique. Twenty-nine-percent of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom veterans, and 21% of Gulf War veterans report suffering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at some point in their lives. In 2022, 17.6 veterans took their lives daily, according to data from the VA.
However, there is hope.
The staggering number of veteran suicides, combined with Texas’ large population of former service members, has led the state to become what some experts are calling the center of the “psychedelic revolution.”
A slew of bills filed in the Texas Legislature this session aim to expand the use of psychedelic drugs to treat veterans, and some of those have garnered broad, bipartisan support. That includes House Bill 3137, which if passed, would earmark the largest appropriation of public funds for psychedelic research in U.S. history.
What’s more, research already being conducted on psychedelics as a treatment for PTSD at the University of Texas at Austin and Baylor College of Medicine appear to be promising.
Although psychedelic research has garnered support among Texas lawmakers, hurdles remain, including getting FDA approval to bring the treatments to the public.
Psychedelic Legislation
Surprisingly, deep-red Texas has become one of the leading innovators in what some researchers and experts are calling the “psychedelic revolution.”
The University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical School is home to the Charmaine & Gordon McGill Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy, which, upon its 2021 launch, was the nation’s first such research center at a public university.
Meanwhile, ongoing studies and clinical trials at Baylor College of Medicine into whether those with PTSD can be treated with psychedelics are the first state-funded psychedelic research since the Controlled Substance Act of 1971.
“It’s good to see that these institutions have begun to shift their thinking and recognize that psychedelics are not these dangerous gateway demon drugs that will make you go crazy and jump out of a window — which was the predominant propaganda in the ’60s — but really that these compounds have a very promising therapeutic potential,” said Dr. Greg Fonzo, co-director of UT Austin’s psychedelic research center.
This groundbreaking, publicly funded research at UT Austin and Baylor were made possible because of House Bill 1802, enacted in 2021 with bipartisan support. Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, allowed the legislation to become law without signing it.
Under HB 1802, the state allowed the Texas Department of State Health Services, in collaboration with the Texas Medical Board, to conduct studies into the use of psychoplastogens such as MDMA, ketamine and psilocybin to treat conditions including depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, chronic pain, migraines and PTSD.
“It’s a really amazing thing, especially in the state of Texas, given the sort of classical view of conservative politics that is mired in the state,” Fonzo said.
Even though two-dozen other states have legalized recreational cannabis, movement to relax rules on that substance appear to be stalled in the Texas Lege. Yet Lone Star State lawmakers voted across the aisle to use taxpayer money to study magic mushrooms.
“The approach we took with HB 1802 was to find a group of humans that everybody would support politically: veterans,” said former House Rep. Alex Dominguez, D-Brownsville, who authored the legislation. “By really leaning into House members’ willingness not just to support veterans, but being afraid of being called out for not supporting veterans, really put a lot of political pressure on people to not just be supportive but be receptive to the idea of this bill.”
That same political tactic is still effective.
At a time when Texas lawmakers are considering bills that would ban the sale of THC-containing hemp products, House Bill 3717, if passed, would be the largest appropriation of public funds for psychedelic research in U.S. history. And it’s managed to garner broad bipartisan support.
Authored by Rep. Cody Harris, R-Tyler, HB 3717, dubbed the “Texas Ibogaine Initiative,” would allocate $100 million for research on the medical benefits of ibogaine, a traditional African psychedelic plant that, in low doses, has been proven to treat addiction and depression in mice.
Of that sum, half would be public money, with the remaining coming from the private sector.
“It shows that [lawmakers] can distinguish some things and people get it,” Dominguez said. “I think this allows other public policy makers the permission to begin the discussion and say, ‘Well, maybe the taboo regarding this type of substance is not what it was 20 or 30 years ago.’”
Adding urgency among advocates and supporters in the House is the Trump administration’s reported plan to axe 80,000 employees at the VA.
Although initial research appears promising, Fonzo warned the hundreds of attendees of the Third Annual Texas Mushroom Conference earlier this month in Austin that psychoplastogens aren’t a panacea.
“They do not cure mental illness, they do not work for everybody, but for a certain subset of people, they will be a valuable therapeutic,” he said.
Psychedelics and PTSD
The biggest benefit that psychoplastogens have over other treatments such as talk therapy, anti-depressants, ant-psychotics and other FDA-approved drugs, is the speed with which PTSD patients experience results, said Dr. Lynette Averill, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences neuropsychiatry at Baylor Medical School.
“I certainly do not intend to minimize the slow-acting things,” said Averill, Baylor’s lead researcher into psychedelic therapy. “[Anti-depression drugs] and talk therapy are crucial interventions that do work very well for some people. The challenge is, for many people, even in the best scenarios, is that it’s weeks to months to actually see significant benefits.”
Averill also noted the negative side effects that some patients experience with SSRI use, including weight gain, low sex drive and emotional numbing.
On the other hand, Averill’s research at Baylor — which received $2 million in funding through HB 1802 — has shown that psychoplastogens have a “rapid-acting and robust effect on neuroplasticity.” Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to adapt and change by reorganizing synaptic connections.
“It’s happening in a number of hours to days, rather than weeks to months, which I think is quite literally life-saving,” Averill said. “That’s the case even with significantly trauma-exposed individuals with very chronic, severe histories. We are seeing people with significant changes in five hours.”
According to Averill’s research, psychoplastogens allow those suffering from PTSD to reexamine past trauma and view it in a different light.
She compared PTSD to going down a ski slope. Once those memories and guilt are ingrained in a veteran’s mind, their thoughts and past trauma always end up racing downhill toward the same conclusion.
However, psychoplatogens lay down a fresh coat of snow on that ski slope, as Averill put it, allowing PTSD patients to take new paths when navigating past trauma.
“A couple of weeks ago, one of our veterans said he felt like the dose gave him a tactical advantage from which he could really reevaluate everything and relearn those memories in a more accurate and less painful way, and select the pieces he wanted to keep,” Averill said.
Some researchers have taken it a step further.
David Nichols, a professor emeritus at Purdue University, has previously claimed that psychedelics can excite and stimulate neurons in the brain, allowing patients to access and relive memories in explicit detail.
“The things that are not normally processed, the unconscious materials. Those are normally below our level of conscious awareness,” Nichols said during a presentation at SXSW 2023. “But, that material can be accessed by these neuronal cells when they’re more excitable.”
However, Manoj Doss, a research fellow at UT Austin’s Dell Medical School Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science who studies psychedelics’ effects on memory, disputes Nichols’ claims that psychedelics can allow patients to recall exact details of memories.
“There’s actually not a lot of evidence to the idea that if you have repressed memories that the drug might be able to help you unlock them,” Doss said. “The evidence is not there for that yet, and if anything, it seems to be, if you try to retrieve memories under the effects of psychedelics, it might actually distort your memory and produce false memories.”
Mushroom Boutique
While Averill’s research at Baylor focuses on PTSD treatment, Fonzo’s ongoing clinical trials at UT Austin are examining whether psychoplastogens can treat chronic and treatment-resistant depression. He’s also looking into how to prescribe the most effective dosage to meet patients’ needs.
“It just illustrates another thing we really don’t know,” Fonzo said. “What is the right rate of dosing? How frequently are people going to need to take psychedelics in order to really capitalize on that therapeutic effect? Does that diminish over time? We know, for example, that’s a common issue with ketamine. There’s just a ton of work to be done in this area.”
Once Fonzo and other researchers at Dell Medical School figure out what dose to describe patients depending on their symptoms, UT Austin’s and Baylor’s next steps — potentially with the help of HB 3717’s funding — is to collaborate with state government agencies to figure out how this type of therapy could be rolled out to the public on a mass scale.
That’s easier said than done, according to Fonzo.
Psychedelic therapies that use psilocybin can last 6-8 hours, meaning at least two licensed practitioners would have to “trip sit” their patient. Fonzo said two would be the minimum in case one had to step out to use the restroom or grab lunch.
Other costs include an EKG, blood pressure monitoring, lab work and physical exams to ensure that the patient is fit enough to undergo the trip.
“My sense is — if and when it gets approved — [this therapy] will first come out in very small, sort of boutique-like settings,” Fonzo said.
Initially, the treatments would most likely not be part of most basic healthcare plans, Fonzo also warned. What’s more, patients would need to demonstrate that every other treatment had failed before insurance companies would even consider covering such an endeavor.
Group administration is being explored as a more cost-effective solution. However, Fonzo said that may not be a viable option.
“If anyone has done group therapy in the past, you may have had somebody in your group that you wish wasn’t here,” he said. “The other problem with that is it’s a little bit harder to control the dynamic in a group setting.”
Using faster-acting psychoplastogens with shorter trips, including DMT, which only lasts about 90 minutes, could also be another alternative. Indeed, some drug companies are spending millions of dollars engineering synthetic compounds that have the same positive effects as psychedelics with shorter trips, or no trips at all.
“If those drugs can produce a therapeutic benefit on par with the psychedelic experience in the absence of inducing a shift in one’s state of consciousness, then that is really useful because then you don’t need to take it in a specialized setting,” Fonzo said.
Canadian pharmaceutical company Cybin’s drug CYB003 — a synthetic psychedelic with similar effects as psilocybin except with a shorter trip duration — was granted “breakthrough therapy” designation by the FDA last year.
The sought-after status, which has also been awarded to LSD and MDMA in recent years, means the FDA accepts that these therapies are as good, if not better, in terms of outcomes than what’s conventionally available.
Even so, the federal government is still a long way off from approving psilocybin for medical treatment, Fonzo warns.
FDA approval
If passed this session by the Texas Legislature, Senate Bill 3005, introduced by State Sen. Cesar Blanco, R-El Paso, and companion House Bill 4014, filed by Rep. John Bucy, D-Austin, would permit psychedelic therapies to be administered to non-clinical trial patients pending FDA approval. That means researchers at UT Austin and Baylor wouldn’t need to wait for the DEA to reschedule to begin treating the masses.
Although that seems promising, the FDA’s decision last year to reject public use of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD created a major setback for researchers and patients, according to experts.
Even so, the reasoning behind the FDA’s rejection was more complex than mere skepticism about the merits of psychoplastogens.
The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, an independent nonprofit that analyzes the evidence for clinical and cost effective treatments, determined that the MDMA study submitted by Lykos Therapeutics found that “therapists encouraged favorable reports by patients.” Further, the agency maintained that the publicly available evidence didn’t effectively weigh the benefits of therapy against potential harms.
Further complicating matters, one of the patients in the study was sexually abused, and the study’s authors failed to disclose their affiliation with the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, creating a conflict of interest.
For a drug-induced therapy to gain FDA approval, researchers must conduct a double-blind study to prove the positive effects of the treatment — creating yet another hurdle for approval. The problem, of course, is that it would be obvious which trial subjects got a placebo and which received a psychoplastogen such as MDMA or psilocybin.
However, there could be a workaround, Fonzo said.
In the case of MDMA, researchers are trying to use comparators, including methamphetamines and amphetamines, in the double-blind study so that patients will have a more difficult time determining whether they were given a placebo.
Although patients given a comparative stimulant might believe they received MDMA, those comparative substances may be different enough to lack the drug’s therapeutic effects. That difference could create a valid study, according to Fonzo.
“I think if there was a good faith effort put forth to the FDA showing that we did everything we could in order to try and get around this issue, I don’t think it will be as much of a problem the next time around,” he added.
What’s next
Time is ticking down on Texas’ current legislative session, which ends June 2. Although the $100 million Texas Ibogaine Initiative passed the House Public Health Committee without amendments last week, no date has been set for its hearing on the House floor.
However, with the publicity surrounding the death of San Antonio veteran Miller and building bipartisan support for psychedelic treatments for veterans, former House member Dominguez remains optimistic.
“We’re not talking about dropping acid and going on a trip. We’re really talking about very specific dosing to save someone’s life,” he said. “I think being able to bring in the emotion, along with the science, really is a one-two combo that makes it really hard for somebody to say no. Because you’re either saying no to the science, which says it can work, or you’re saying no to a veteran who just fought for you.”
Meanwhile, Baylor researcher Averill worries more veterans like Miller will suffer preventable deaths if meaningful legislation and FDA approval don’t come soon.
“We are at a point in our society where we are in a severe mental health crisis, where we have to be considering these sorts of things,” she said. “Because so many people can’t wait for full FDA approval and scalability.”
Although that might be true, Fonzo cautioned attendees of the Texas Mushroom Conference that using psychedelics under the table, both medically and recreationally, could jeopardize support for and ultimate approval of the therapy.
“One of the things that can definitely derail a movement like this is a negative news story about somebody who decided to take too many mushrooms at [the ACL Music Festival], thought they were Jesus Christ and decided to jump off stage and have a traumatic brain injury.”
The Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day by dialing 988.
Veterans suffering from PTSD are invited to apply as trial participants in Dr. Lynette Averill’s clinical trials at Baylor College of Medicine by emailing emerging@bcm.edu.
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This article appears in Apr 30 – May 13, 2025.
