Psychedelics in Uniform: What the Military Did to Soldiers, and What the VA Is Now Asking of Veterans

The Army spent decades dosing enlisted men with psychedelics they weren't told they were taking. Eighty years later, the VA and Pentagon are running versions of the same experiment again — with consent forms, IRBs, and an executive order behind them.

Between 1948 and 1975, the U.S. Army's Medical Research Laboratory at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland ran roughly 7,000 enlisted men through tests of chemical warfare agents and incapacitating drugs — LSD, the glycolate BZ, VX and sarin precursors, mescaline, PCP, and some 250 other compounds. Soldiers signed consent forms that didn't say what they'd actually be given; 741 of them were dosed with LSD specifically, in barracks and in the field at Fort Bragg and Fort Benning, under a program run by Col. James Ketchum, later nicknamed "Dr. Delirium." There was no systematic follow-up. Some of those men carried physical and psychological effects for the rest of their lives and only learned what they'd been given decades later, through Church Committee hearings and FOIA requests.

The 1970 Controlled Substances Act classified LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA as Schedule I, and the Army's psychochemical program wound down soon after. For the next forty-five years, the U.S. military and psychedelics had essentially no relationship at all.

That changed fast. President Trump's April 2025 executive order directed federal health agencies to fast-track psychedelic drug reviews; the VA and HHS followed with a July memorandum of understanding on training and research; the House voted in July to extend the Pentagon's psilocybin, MDMA, ibogaine, and 5-MeO-DMT research program for active-duty PTSD and TBI from a 3-year pilot to 2033, still pending in the Senate. The VA now runs more than 20 active psychedelic-related studies. Here's what's actually happening, drug by drug — and the difference this time is that every one of these programs runs on informed consent.

Eighty Years, in Order

Date	Event
1948–1975	Edgewood Arsenal tests psychedelics and chemical agents on ~7,000 soldiers; 741 dosed with LSD without informed consent
1970	Controlled Substances Act places LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA in Schedule I
1975	Church Committee hearings expose the program; testing ends
1970s–2010s	Schedule I status halts nearly all military and most civilian psychedelic research
2021–2022	Stanford's MISTIC program treats 30 Special Operations veterans with magnesium-ibogaine
Apr 2025	Trump executive order directs agencies to fast-track psychedelic drug review
May 2026	VA opens its first-ever veteran MDMA trial (Providence / West Haven)
Jul 2026	VA–HHS MOU on training and research; House votes to extend DoD research program to 2033
Aug 2026	VA opens PIVOT psilocybin trial; University of Miami's 1994 ibogaine IND transfers to HHS

MDMA: Two Separate Programs, Two Different Populations

The VA opened its first-ever MDMA trial in May, registered as NCT07118839: a randomized, placebo-controlled study led by Dr. Erica Eaton at the Providence VA Medical Center and VA Connecticut in West Haven, enrolling roughly 80 veterans whose PTSD and alcohol use disorder are both present and treatment-resistant. Results aren't expected until May 2030.

That's a veteran population, run by the VA. A separate, Pentagon-funded program targets active-duty soldiers instead: the DoD committed $9.8 million in early 2025 to two MDMA-PTSD studies, one at Emory and one at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center led by Maj. Aaron Wolfgang, enrolling 91 active-duty Army personnel with mild-to-moderate PTSD who aren't expecting redeployment. It's billed as the first MDMA trial ever run on active-duty troops rather than veterans or civilians — a distinct population from the VA's, and neither has reported results yet. Both sit downstream of Resilient Pharmaceuticals' quiet MDMA NDA resubmission to the FDA — whatever happens with that filing will shape whether either of these trials leads anywhere near approval.

Psilocybin: Already the Best Early Data

We've covered this one as it's happened: the VA's PIVOT trial, a 240-person study of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression in veterans, registered in August with results not expected until 2030. And in July, a 12-veteran pilot at Ohio State reported that nine of them no longer met PTSD criteria a month after two psilocybin sessions — a 75% remission rate, in an open-label pilot too small to generalize from, but among the more striking numbers reported in any veteran PTSD trial to date.

Ibogaine: The One With No Cardiac Events, and a Complicated Past

Stanford's MISTIC program treated 30 Special Operations veterans with predominantly mild traumatic brain injury using magnesium-ibogaine — 15 also met criteria for major depression, 14 for an anxiety disorder, 23 for PTSD. Researchers reported significant functional improvement with no serious side effects and no cardiac events, the arrhythmia risk long associated with ibogaine. A follow-up neuroimaging study of the same cohort, using EEG and MRI, is now mapping the mechanism behind the cognitive gains. On the regulatory side, the University of Miami handed its original 1994 ibogaine IND application over to HHS in August — a three-decade-old filing that could shortcut groundwork any new federal ibogaine program would otherwise redo from scratch. Ibogaine itself remains Schedule I and unapproved for any use.

Ketamine: Already Here

Ketamine is the outlier: it was never Schedule I, and the VA's clinical criteria already cover IV ketamine for treatment-resistant depression and depression with severe suicidal ideation at select facilities, alongside FDA-approved esketamine (Spravato) with prior authorization. It works in hours to days rather than the weeks conventional antidepressants take — relevant for a population where roughly one in five post-9/11 veterans returns with PTSD or major depression. Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy specifically for combat trauma is still a research question, not yet standard care.

LSD: The One the Army Actually Used, and the One With No Program Now

Which brings it back to where this piece started. LSD is furthest along of any compound in civilian trials right now — Definium's DT120 just posted a second positive Phase 3 result — and has no dedicated VA or DoD program at all. The compound the Army tested on 741 soldiers without telling them what it was has, eighty years later, no institutional path back into military or veteran medicine.

What's Real and What's Still a Bet

The pattern across all of this: early efficacy signals well above what psychiatry usually produces, in a population that's been genuinely hard to treat — and trial sizes of a few dozen people, with VA-scale results not expected until 2030 or later. The bottlenecks aren't scientific. They're training enough VA and DoD clinicians to run multi-hour, multi-session psychedelic-assisted therapy, building Schedule I-compliant supply chains inside federal facilities, and scaling from a 12-person pilot to a population measured in the hundreds of thousands. Nothing here is approved for veterans or active-duty troops specifically, except ketamine. Everything else is a bet — backed by unusually good early data — that the next five years close the gap between pilot study and standard of care, run by consent this time instead of the alternative.

This is regulatory and research reporting, not medical advice. No compound discussed here beyond ketamine is FDA-approved for the indications mentioned, and none of the trials cited have reported final results.