The Federal Summit on Psychedelic Medicine at the National Press Club felt like a field trying to organize itself around a reality already arriving. I attended the summit and spent the day in those conversations.
Hosted by the Psychedelic Medicine Coalition, the summit brought together policymakers, federal agency representatives, researchers, clinicians, veterans advocates, nonprofit leaders, and industry figures to work through how psychedelic medicine moves from research promise into responsible healthcare delivery.
The atmosphere was focused and practical. People kept returning to the same concern: how does this scale without the field fragmenting politically, clinically, or institutionally? Federal-state harmonization, training standards, REMS implementation, informed consent, rescheduling, and the fragility of executive branch support all fed into that question.
It felt less like a victory lap and more like an operational meeting a field trying to get serious about implementation before the political window closes.
From Symbolic Progress to Infrastructure
Shortly before the summit, President Donald Trump signed an executive order (April 18) directing federal agencies to accelerate research and treatment pathways for psychedelic compounds in serious mental illness, referencing FDA Breakthrough Therapy designations and reduced barriers to research and treatment development.
Speakers were direct about what that order cannot do alone. Administrations change, priorities shift, and bureaucracies can slow implementation regardless of political rhetoric. Representatives Lou Correa and Jack Bergman, co-chairs of the Congressional Psychedelics Advancing Therapies Caucus, argued that sustained constituent engagement and political pressure remain prerequisites for moving psychedelic medicine beyond isolated pilot programs into durable healthcare systems.
Texas drew repeated attention for its investment in ibogaine research. Other states are moving at very different speeds. This is a source of frustration and a driver of the day’s persistent focus on harmonization.
Veterans and the Ethics of Delay
Speakers returned repeatedly to suicide, trauma, addiction, and treatment-resistant mental health conditions in veteran populations. Many veterans seek treatment outside the United States because domestic pathways remain limited and illicit.
In a statement following a meeting with VA Secretary Doug Collins, Rep. Correa said: “Today’s rate of up to 20 veteran suicides a day is unacceptable one veteran suicide is unacceptable. Veterans deserve treatment that works, and the science shows that psychedelics have game-changing results.”
Rep. Bergman said in the same statement: “Our veterans didn’t hesitate to fight for us and now it’s up to us to fight for them.”
The question underneath those conversations still has no clean answer: how should policymakers balance scientific caution against the urgency of people suffering now? Participants supported rigorous science and FDA-regulated pathways. They were also frank that researchers and clinicians do not yet fully understand which compounds will work best for which conditions.
ARPA-H and the EVIDENT Initiative
ARPA-H generated some of the strongest interest of the day.
Established in 2022 and modeled after DARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health funds high-risk, high-reward biomedical research that traditional NIH pathways and private capital are not well-positioned to pursue. In April 2026, ARPA-H announced the first research teams for EVIDENT (Evidence-Based Validation and Innovation for Rapid Therapeutics in Behavioral Health) a $139.4 million initiative to develop objective, FDA-ready clinical endpoints for emerging behavioral health therapies. As part of Trump’s executive order on mental illness, EVIDENT will allocate at least $50 million to match state government investments in psychedelic research.
The framing treated mental health as a systems engineering challenge rather than a pharmaceutical pipeline. EVIDENT’s core problem statement: “there are currently no predictive, scalable, or objective standardized measures of behavioral health, which makes it impossible to know what is working, when, and for whom”. This is a particular liability for psychedelic therapies, which resist simple pharmacological models. Context, preparation, psychotherapy, patient selection, integration, therapeutic alliance, and environment all shape results.
Ketamine Clinics as Early Infrastructure
Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy clinics may already be functioning as early infrastructure for the broader field.
Ketamine differs substantially from MDMA, psilocybin, ibogaine, and 5-MeO-DMT. Legal frameworks, risk profiles, and clinical models are not interchangeable. But ketamine clinics are already forcing providers through operational questions psychedelic medicine will eventually face at scale: managing altered states, interfacing psychotherapy with controlled substances, screening patients, and building clinical systems around non-ordinary states of consciousness.
As Rep. Bergman told The Hill: “We have to have the centers set up and we have to have the therapists trained and ready to administer the protocols in this new way.” Waiting until after approval to build those competencies will be more expensive and slower.
Rescheduling Is Becoming a Practical Development Question
Schedule I status creates barriers around research, institutional participation, physician involvement, storage, funding, and drug development. At the summit, rescheduling was treated as a practical clinical and development question, not a countercultural one.
Schedule I classification makes institutions cautious and drives up research costs. Physicians and health systems remain reluctant to engage with clinical trials because of the regulatory burden. Several participants discussed the possibility that future medicinal chemistry could generate patentable compounds that skirt the schedule status problem. Suggesting that this could be an easier solution for pharma than changing the drug schedule status of these compounds. The private sector’s appetite was more measured than some advocates expected.
Daniel Goldberg of Palo Santo, a venture fund with investments in the psychedelic medicine space, told Psychedelics Today: “Virtue signaling was at an all-time low, and problem solving was the theme of the day. After seven years in this space, that gathering in D.C. was the most substantive cross-stakeholder conversation I’ve seen, with federal agency representatives, legislators, scientists, pharma executives, veterans and others engaging candidly on what it will actually take to move the field forward. I came away more optimistic than I’ve been in a long time.”
Training, Standards, and the Limits of Checklists
FDA approval for psychedelic compounds will likely come with a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) the mandatory safety program that governs prescribing, administration, monitoring, and training requirements. For therapies involving hours-long supervised sessions, those requirements will be more demanding than for conventional pharmaceuticals. How training systems prepare providers to meet them at scale was an open question throughout the day.
Psychedelic work also involves capacities that resist traditional medical training. Presence, empathy, the ability to remain grounded during destabilizing experiences these develop through experiential training, not coursework. Another speaker mentioned “some of these skills can’t be trained, but can be measured”.
Pharmacology, documentation, and safety procedures can be standardized. How to prepare a person to sit with someone in an eight-hour psychedelic state is harder to put in a checklist.
Informed Consent Remains a Major Ethical Problem
Psychedelic experiences are unusually difficult to describe in advance. Even well-prepared patients may not fully understand what they are consenting to. Experienced clinicians acknowledge that current consent frameworks are imperfect for experiences this difficult to anticipate. This is a limitation the field recognizes and will need to work through as implementation proceeds, refining approaches as real clinical experience accumulates.
Audience questions pushed into screening and risk prediction. Some of which were, who is a good candidate, whether negative experiences can be anticipated, how clinicians should think about risk tolerance in treatment models that are still being developed.
Storytelling Still Matters
Personal narratives remain one of the primary ways legislators, regulators, clinicians, and the public understand psychedelic medicine. Speakers acknowledged that patient stories around veterans, trauma, addiction, and treatment resistance move political systems in ways that data can’t.
Melissa Lavasani and the Role of Coordination
Attendees independently praised Melissa Lavasani, for the quality of the event and the range of participants it assembled. She is the founder and executive director of the Psychedelic Medicine Coalition, who works closely with Congress to advance sensible psychedelic policy.
For years, researchers, state reform advocates, biotech firms, therapists, nonprofits, harm reduction groups, veterans organizations, and policymakers operated in parallel and sometimes at odds.
This summit suggested harmonization and a tremendous amount of progress in the near term.
