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Kyrsten Sinema’s old enemies on the left better brace themselves: The former senator is now embracing psychedelics and cozying up to MAHA.
After infuriating progressives time and again for stonewalling their priorities, the Arizona Democrat-turned-Independent decided not to seek reelection last year and instead became a senior adviser at the law and lobbying firm Hogan Lovells. She’s since taken up the cause of psychedelic medicine — pro bono, she says.
Her drug of choice? Ibogaine, a psychedelic derived from an African shrub, and which she went down to Mexico to try for herself. She and other advocates want ibogaine studied in state-funded clinical trials and eventually hope to win Food and Drug Administration approval of the drug as a mental health treatment.
And she thinks now is their chance with President Donald Trump in office.
“We are in this magical, unique time,” Sinema said of Trump’s health department, led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime believer in psychedelics’ potential to help people, particularly veterans, with illnesses like post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.
Sinema was making her remarks earlier this month before roughly 200 attendees at a conference of Americans for Ibogaine, a group co-founded by Rick Perry, the former Texas GOP governor who has made psychedelic medicine advocacy his life’s work after leaving government.
Advocates have had some recent success. Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill in June that secured $50 million in state funding for ibogaine research. In Arizona, Sinema successfully lobbied Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to include $5 million in ibogaine research funding in the state’s budget.
In an interview with POLITICO Magazine at the conference, Sinema noted the crowd included “super conservative people in the room — MAGA, MAHA — and then there’s full-on hippies.”
And like Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, which also unites odd bedfellows on the right and left, the embrace of ibogaine faces skepticism from many in the medical establishment.https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/11/23/kyrsten-sinema-maha-psychedelic-ibogaine-interview-00664454
