"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now." — Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet
Saturday morning I climbed into a Lyft outside an Airbnb in San Francisco. I was on my way to speak on a panel called Beyond Protocols at the Psychedelic Culture Conference, a panel about the role of veterans in the increasingly crowded space of psychedelic medicines.
My driver was a small Middle Eastern man with an accent. His name was Mohammed. We started talking and it was easy for us to be pleasant with one another. He mentioned he runs a small keto-friendly bakery on the side, and we talked about that for a while. Then I asked him if he’d always been into baking. He said no, he’d done some things with the military first.
I asked where.
“Afghanistan.”
“Oh, me too. Where in Afghanistan?”
He replied hesitantly.
“Panjwai District.”
My eyes went wide. I’d spent nine months in Panjwai District. What were the chances I was talking to this person? One in a million? One in a billion?
Then he started to talk about “the hill” and I had to interrupt him.
There is exactly one piece of terrain in Panjwai that anyone who served there in a combat capacity would mention by name. A hill called Sperwan Ghar, key terrain, the most contested ground in our area of operations, and the most kinetic stretch of my deployment.
“Sperwan Ghar?”
It was his turn to have his eyes bulge.
“SPERWAN!”
Mohammed was an interpreter for US Special Forces in the exact place I deployed to. He was there in 2010. I was there in 2012.
I told him I’d loved my interpreter. A man named Barry, who spoke both Pashtu and Dari, and was the only interpreter who didn’t hide when it was time to go outside the wire at Sperwan. I’d written him letters of recommendation to come to the States and never knew if he’d made it.
“Barry? I know Barry!” Mohammed said. (How many interpreters named Barry could there be in Panjwai, Afghanistan, after all?) “He lost a leg. But he survived. He’s in Canada now with his family.”
I got Mohammed’s number. He promised to put me in touch with Barry. We fist bumped, grabbing each other by the shoulders, tears in our eyes, two grown men trying to hold the shape of what was happening between us. That on the very morning I was going to speak about veterans and healing on a stage in San Francisco, the driver who picked me up was an interpreter from the same valley I’d left fifteen years ago, that he knew my interpreter, and that my interpreter was alive in Canada with his family.
You can read into it as much or as little as you want.
I’m still processing it. But I’ll tell you what I know about synchronicities, big or small. Things Jung described as meaningfully interconnected psychological and physical events, with no apparent cause and effect relationship.
I’ve come to think of them as a small, barely perceptible trail of breadcrumbs. Not necessarily for me to follow. But proof I’m still on the correct path home.
It took me a few days to piece it together, but I was holding three complicated things on my way to the panel.
The first was my own history. When you are confronted with something so powerfully reminiscent of your past, it seems impossible for your nervous system not to rocket ship you back in time. When we two strangers realized our shared history, the Lyft immediately became charged with emotion. The fact that my closest brushes with death, and the only two times I ever pulled the trigger myself, both happened within walking distance of where Mohammed was working as an interpreter. The fact that he had to do something I can’t fully imagine to get from there to the front seat of a Lyft on a San Francisco highway talking about his dreams of a keto-friendly bakery.
Incredible.
The second was the conference itself. I’d spent the previous days at the Psychedelic Culture Conference, and I’m still processing my experience. The quality of mind and spirit in those rooms was something I have not encountered at that volume anywhere else in my life perhaps besides West Point. Highly academic. Rigorous. But more than that, there was a drive I rarely see anymore. A drive to take what the research and the science gives us and use it in the world as a force for good. Consciousness, intelligence, and morality in the same room, in the same person, in panel after panel. I have been on the constant lookout for this combination my whole adult life. I was inundated with it for three days.
The third was the news that morning. On Saturday, April 18, 2026, the President of the United States, a member of the conservative Republican party, signed an Executive Order directing the FDA and the DEA to accelerate research, approval, and access to psychedelic-based therapies for conditions such as PTSD.
The order also provides $50 million for state programs developing psychedelic treatments and creates a pathway for terminally ill and other eligible patients to access investigational psychedelic drugs, including ibogaine. Say what you want about the optics. Say what you want about the people in the room when he signed it. Say what you want about how nothing has actually changed yet because the FDA still hasn’t approved anything, insurance still won’t cover it, and access for most marginalized populations who desperately need it, including veterans, is still a plane ticket to a retreat center in South America.
You’re probably not wrong. But there are already more than enough people who sit around on their keyboards and naysay. The world doesn’t need any more wannabe intellectualism or virtue-signaling activism on a hamster wheel. It’s far too easy to ignore.
At the very least, this legislation is a step in the right direction to rescheduling these medicines. There is much work left to be done. There always will be.
The question is: Are you going to talk about it?
Or are you going to be about it?
Asymmetries
If I’m going to write honestly about what I felt at that conference, I have to write about the shadow that sits underneath my optimism. There are tensions in this movement that do not resolve because the President gave a cock-eyed thumbs up on national television. And despite what the binary world of the Internet would have you believe, there is room in the truth for more than one thing.
One. Ayahuasca, the brew that has carried me and many others into some of the most important transformations of our lives, is still under threat of being privatized and exploited by people who did not grow up with it. In 1986, an American businessman named Loren Miller obtained a U.S. plant patent on a strain of the ayahuasca vine, which he unforgivably called “Da Vine.” When the indigenous federation representing more than 400 Amazonian groups challenged the patent, the Patent and Trademark Office initially revoked it, then reversed itself on appeal and allowed the patent to stand for the remainder of its term.
The patent is expired now, but the pattern hasn’t gone anywhere, in fact the pattern is being perfected by big money. Pharmaceutical companies are racing to patent components of psychedelic compounds in the hope of establishing new monopolies when the substances become legally available, while the people who have stewarded this knowledge for generations, the Huni Kuin, the Shipibo, the Cofán, are watching their sacraments turn into intellectual property within a system of extraction that was never designed to recognize their relationship to and guardianship of the plants.
Two. The veterans the Executive Order is meant to help are the same veterans the wars are still creating. In 2023, an average between 17 and 18 veterans died by suicide every day in the United States. Since September 11, nearly 150,000 veterans have been lost to suicide. That’s twenty-one times the number of U.S. service members lost in post-9/11 warzones. Meanwhile, the most rigorous trial we have on MDMA-assisted therapy found that after three sessions, 67% of participants no longer met the criteria for PTSD.
Veterans know this. The nonprofit that sponsored the radical beginning of my own healing, called Heroic Hearts Project, currently has a waiting list of over 1,000 veterans seeking financial and logistical support to travel abroad for psychedelic therapy to Mexico, to Peru, to wherever the medicine is legal. They cannot get it here. The country that sent them to war will not yet treat them with the medicine that works.
Furthermore, with the rapidly accelerating acceptance of psychedelic medicines, we run the risk of the US war machine completely co-opting their healing powers as a way to propagate the participation of its most mentally malleable citizens in global conflict. “Here’s your war trauma, here’s your plant medicine, thanks for your service, fuckers. Now get lost. We’ve got another war to plan.”
Three. Access is not the same as integration, and a medicinal protocol is not the same as ceremony. The EO opens a door at the federal level. Whether what walks through that door is a healing tradition or a billing code is a different question entirely. There is a version of this future where psilocybin becomes another antidepressant: fifty minutes with a clinician, a copay, a follow-up. There is another version where the practitioners trained to hold the medicine are people who have been trained by people who have been trained by the people, all the way back to master plant dietas led by practiced Shipibo in the Amazon or rigorous initiation rituals to become a recognized healer in the Bwiti tradition.
Both futures are being built right now. Our choice of what manifests will not be an accident.
Four. I drove with Mohammed through a city where he was safe, and we both understood what it had cost him to earn that safety. I sat in a conference room where some of the most thoughtful people I have ever met talked about how to bring ancient medicine into modern systems, and we all knew that the modern systems are also the ones writing the patents, claiming ownership of something that doesn’t belong to them. The intelligence that builds the clinical trial pipeline, a necessary step, is the same intelligence that decides what gets billed and what gets buried. We are being asked to hold science and wisdom at the same time. To hold rigor and reciprocity together at once.
Nothing about this is easy. Everything about it is complex. So if you think you know the answer, think again. This swirling equation of ever-changing variables requires humility above all else to solve.
In her powerful opening remarks at the conference, Dr. Bia Labate said something I wrote down in my notebook and have not stopped thinking about. She said,
“Complexity is not the enemy of progress. It is a prerequisite for it.”
As someone who prefers things simple, I fought against this statement in my mind, not wanting to believe it was true. But I think it may be the only honest, acceptable frame for what is happening right now.
Anyone telling you this is simple is selling you something. Anyone telling you it is hopeless is also selling you something. The truth is harder, more complicated, and more interesting. We are at the beginning of a real conversation about consciousness, a real conversation about how a country treats the people it sent to war, why a country sends its people to war in the first place, and a real conversation about what it would mean to receive a gift from a culture instead of taking it. None of these conversations have answers yet. And being interconnected as they are, all of them have to be held at once.
I look down at my hands as I type this, examples of complexity right in front of me.
They’re covered in scars and tattoos. A KIA bracelet on my right wrist. Beads and bracelets from plant medicine ceremonies on the left. They are the hands of a veteran who took part in the ultimate form of military violence, the same form of violence propagating a system that exploits the very people whose ancient traditions are now being asked to help heal the world. They are the hands of a boy who raised his right hand because he wanted to serve his country, who wanted to be a protector, who wanted to be strong, who wanted to be a man. They are the hands of someone who learned, throughout and after his service, that the reasons why he joined were not aligned with the reality of what he joined.
They are the hands of someone who had to go into the Amazon jungle to find out that the point of all of this is not having the answers.
The point is asking the questions.
I think the reason Mohammed and I both had tears in our eyes in his Lyft Saturday morning is that we shared the knowledge of what it took for him to be there. The conversation we were having was only possible because of the highway, and the city, and the safety of the vehicle, and the fact that nobody was calling for EOD to come diffuse a bomb.
We were two radically different men who had been through the same valley, having a conversation that valley would never have permitted. And that morning, the President signed an Executive Order that might, in some real yet partial way, begin to address the lie that valley told us: that the other person in the vehicle with us is the threat.
You can call that coincidence. You can call it synchronicity. You can call it whatever you need to call it.
I am calling it a breadcrumb.
It’s 2026 and we are all figuring out how to walk together. Protecting ancient wisdom and the expansion of consciousness with the rigor of modern science, on a common ground of humility and morality. Nobody has the answers. But if we ask the questions together, we can walk this path together.
With gratitude and curiosity,
-Rich
Additional Resources
Accelerating Medical Treatments for Serious Mental Illness — The White House (April 18, 2026) — The full text of the Executive Order signed the morning I’m writing this. Worth reading rather than relying on summaries.
A New Executive Order on Psychedelics: Q&A with I. Glenn Cohen and Mason Marks — Petrie-Flom Center, Harvard Law — The clearest legal analysis I’ve found of what the order actually does versus what it signals.
Protecting Traditional Knowledge: The Ayahuasca Patent Dispute — Center for International Environmental Law — The history of the Loren Miller patent case and the indigenous federation that fought it. Essential context for anyone entering this space.
Chacruna Institute — Bia Labate’s organization. Doing some of the most rigorous and ethically grounded work at the intersection of psychedelic research and indigenous reciprocity.
Heroic Hearts Project — The nonprofit helping veterans access psychedelic therapy abroad. The waiting list is the data point.
Your pieces keep getting better. That breadcrumb might also be called by some a "God wink," and can perhaps be interpreted as your source providing recognition and affirmation of the path you've traveled as well as the direction in which you're going. The thought of potentially commoditizing something sacred such as plant medicine is at minimum uncomfortable and underscores your statement regarding access versus integration. Do the super rich heal through their material profits? Because it seems that medicine and money might be on opposite energetic poles thereby potentially requiring an intermediary to convert something real into something fake. Clearly any answers don't reside with me but perhaps a billionaire who seeks and finds their own healing with a sacred medicine might turn philanthropist and mix some MDMA in the chemtrails along with the heavy metals they're spraying on us.