Veterans seek psychedelic therapy abroad as VA studies domestic PTSD treatments

Nine veterans boarded a plane to Mexico in March 2024 with a shared weight they couldn't shake. They came from across the country—a Navy sailor who survived a suicide bombing, an Army ranger turned firefighter, a police officer who'd worn the same memorial bracelet for twenty years. What bound them was not just service but suffering: the kind of post-traumatic stress that had outlasted every treatment the Veterans Administration could offer. They were traveling to a remote village near Puerto Vallarta for something the VA couldn't yet provide—a week-long retreat centered on psilocybin, the psychoactive compound found in certain mushrooms, used for centuries in indigenous ceremonies.

TJ Duff was eighteen when he joined the Navy. During his first deployment aboard the USS Cole, two suicide bombers attacked the ship in Yemen, killing seventeen sailors around him. "Everyone around me was killed," he said. "There's bodies, alive and dead, being piled up in the midships." That's where he began holding everything in. Randy Weaver, a New York police officer and former Army staff sergeant, had been diagnosed with PTSD in 2007 after tours in Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. For two decades he'd worn a bracelet inscribed with the name of Staff Sergeant Anthony Lagman, his friend killed in a 2004 firefight in Afghanistan. Ed Glover, a Marine and firefighter for twenty-two years, described the cumulative toll of witnessing trauma day after day. Michael Giardina, a Navy veteran, carried wounds that predated his service—an emotionally abusive father who'd taken his own life seventeen years earlier, a sister who died by suicide five months before the retreat. These men had tried the standard arsenal: talk therapy, exposure therapy, meditation, antidepressants. Nothing had worked well enough.

The retreat was organized by the Heroic Hearts Project, a nonprofit founded in 2017 by Jesse Gould, a former Army ranger who'd experienced his own transformation through psychedelics. The organization had already helped more than a thousand veterans access these compounds in countries where they were legal. To participate, the nine had to wean themselves off psychiatric medications under medical supervision, undergo screening, and confirm no family history of psychosis or schizophrenia. A local doctor was on site, but no mental health professionals. The traditional healers hired to conduct the ceremonies stirred ground mushrooms into tea. The veterans drank, put on blindfolds, and lay down to wait.

About an hour in, Michael Giardina raised his hand for help. His foot began to shake, then his whole body convulsed. By the third hour, the psilocybin had fully arrived. Randy Weaver and TJ Duff barely moved. Ed Glover appeared caught between rapture and deep sorrow. Five hours later, when the compound began to wear off, they removed their blindfolds to the afternoon sun. The next day, they gathered to process what had happened. Giardina described it as feeling like an exorcism. Glover said he'd taken the last breath of every victim and friend he'd lost. Weaver spoke of flying back with soldiers who'd died, of being spiritually present on a medevac helicopter he'd never actually been on—and finding something like peace in that revisiting. Duff, however, found the experience unsettling and frightening. He participated in a second ceremony but left the next day. He later reported that the retreat had triggered a dangerous mental health decline; he returned home and restarted antidepressant medication.

Nearly a year later, eight of the nine veterans reported that their symptoms had improved significantly. Ed Glover, who had contemplated suicide almost daily before the retreat—who had come close with a note and a gun—said he hadn't had a single suicidal thought since returning home. He retired from firefighting shortly after. Randy Weaver's suicidal ideation had stopped entirely. The experience had given him something therapy never had: a way to revisit the gap in his psyche, to see his fallen friends again, to find closure in a space where the mind could move differently than it did in waking life.

Meanwhile, the Veterans Administration was moving toward legitimacy for these compounds. In 2024, the VA announced it would fund its own clinical trials using psilocybin and MDMA to treat PTSD, depression, and addiction. A small phase-two VA trial using MDMA combined with therapy had shown remarkable results: forty-five percent of participants achieved complete remission, described as a return to normal emotional functioning—a success rate that dwarfed current standard treatments like SSRIs and prolonged exposure therapy. The FDA had rejected one pharmaceutical application for MDMA-assisted therapy in 2024, citing insufficient evidence, but the VA was now involved in twenty clinical trials across multiple psychedelic compounds. Dr. Shereef Elnahal, the VA's top doctor, expressed cautious optimism, though he acknowledged the retreats raised legitimate concerns about safety and monitoring. "They're seeking these therapies because they do not see our current options for them to be effective enough, and they're in a state of desperation," he said. In April 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to accelerate research and approval of psychedelic drugs as mental health treatments, directing federal agencies to ease restrictions that had long limited scientific study. The timeline for VA prescription access remained uncertain—possibly a couple of years, Elnahal suggested—but the direction had shifted. Thousands of veterans were no longer waiting.