By Dean Maddox, Public Safety & Crime Reporter

President Trump recently signed an executive order fast-tracking approval of the psychedelic drug ibogaine, a substance some herald as a miracle cure that can help people get off other drugs like cocaine and potentially serve as a promising treatment for mental health disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Critics, however, are urging caution. While many advocates for fast-tracking drugs to the market have focused on potentially life-saving treatments for terminal diseases, psychotropic drugs for mental health have a history that indicates a more critical approach is warranted. Oftentimes such interventions have proven not only ineffective but ultimately harmful on a massive scale.

Heroin was also heralded as a drug promised to help people get off of drugs — in that case, opium. As it turned out, the cure was as bad or worse than the addiction it replaced. Meanwhile, even drugs like SSRIs for depression have come under renewed scrutiny, with a 2022 meta-analysis debunking the longstanding “chemical imbalance” theory. Over the last several decades, billions of dollars in judgments have been paid to victims of harm by psychotropic drugs. Investigations into how these harms occurred have revealed widespread cover-ups by pharmaceutical companies that did not reveal the true extent of the risks they were aware of.

As is the case now with ibogaine, the evidence is not particularly substantial and rests largely on a small-sample study conducted at Stanford.

The mistakes of the past combined with new research into how mental health works should inform how we move forward with ibogaine. Scientists now know brain chemistry is not only delicate but is driven by the individual. Neuropathways are created by conscious decisions to choose to think and act a certain way. The brain’s anterior midcingulate cortex, or aMCC, grows in response to one’s own decision to do hard things.

The answer to mental health is known more than ever not to lie in a pill but in oneself. Perhaps not the answer everyone wants, but ultimately the one the evidence points toward. With all of the carnage caused by psychotropic drugs, both legal and illegal, past experience, science, and wisdom all demand we proceed with caution.