WASHINGTON — Liberal New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Texas conservative Rep. Dan Crenshaw are teaming up in hopes of letting troops take psychedelic drugs to recover from war.
The goal is to treat illnesses like post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury — notoriously intractable ailments that skyrocketed among service members who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. PTSD is double what it was for Vietnam-era vets, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say more than 450,000 U.S. war fighters suffered TBI from 2000 to 2021.
Those numbers — and a growing stack of data suggest unorthodox treatments with psychedelics help — were enough to bring two of Congress's more unorthodox members together.
“This is a real wild coalition,” said Crenshaw, a former Navy Seal who lost an eye to an improvised explosive in Afghanistan.
He said he has friends who came home from war damaged and were not cured until they found a way to try psychedelics, which are not legal in the United States, even to study except under restrictive conditions.
“I was turned on to this issue because I had so many friends … who were going down to a specific clinic and doing ibogaine — one treatment of ibogaine would cure them,” he said, referring to a psychedelic drug.
“Psychedelics have shown so much promise,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “We desperately need…
