Veterans have been the tip of the spear of psychedelic policy reform. It was veterans who first stood before skeptical legislatures and testified about treatment-resistant PTSD, veterans who gave these campaigns their most persuasive stories, veterans whose sacrifice made lawmakers on both sides of the aisle willing to take a second look at Schedule I substances. That hasn’t changed, and it shouldn’t.
But something else has changed. Walk into a statehouse hearing room on psychedelic policy today, and the veteran testifying is just as likely to be sitting next to a firefighter, a police lieutenant, or an EMT. Over the past year, state after state has watched its psychedelic policy coalition grow past the population that built it. States that spent years on the sidelines are now writing some of the most consequential legislation in the country. Neither trend dilutes what veterans started. Both are what veterans have been asking for all along.
In Oklahoma, that shift had a name: the Casey Skudin 343 Fund, founded in memory of a New York City firefighter and named for the 343 members of the Fire Department of New York who died on September 11, 2001. The fund’s CEO, Nate Morgans, led the grassroots campaign behind House Bill 3834, the Oklahoma Breakthrough Therapy Act, sponsored by Rep. Stan May and Sen. Avery Frix, which authorizes the state to contract with drug developers for clinical trials of ibogaine. The bill passed the Oklahoma House 68-23 in March, cleared the Senate 69-21 in late April, and was signed by Gov. Kevin Stitt on May 12. Morgans told Filter that the effort ran without lobbyists, built instead on months of legislators hearing directly from people who had lived through addiction and trauma. It’s a familiar model to anyone who has watched veterans do the same thing in other statehouses, now carried forward by first responders themselves.
Texas offers a similar picture in reverse. When lawmakers passed House Bill 3717 and Senate Bill 2308 in 2025, committing $50 million to ibogaine drug development trials, the coalition behind it wasn’t limited to the veterans’ groups that had led the state’s earlier psychedelic research bill in 2021. The official witness list for HB 3717 includes the Austin EMS Association among the bill’s registered supporters. The emergency medical workers who respond to the same overdoses, the same suicide attempts, and the same scenes of trauma that veterans describe are no longer content to watch from outside the process.
The Law Enforcement Action Partnership has been doing this work longer than almost anyone. The national organization of police, prosecutors, and judges has testified in psychedelic policy debates across the country for years, and its members were part of the coalition supporting Massachusetts’s psilocybin therapy pilot legislation. Sarko Gergerian, a Massachusetts police lieutenant and LEAP member, testified before the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Mental Health, Substance Use and Recovery in support of H.4200, telling lawmakers that residents were already leaving the state to access care that wasn’t yet available at home. That’s the same argument veterans have made for years about traveling abroad for treatment, now coming from behind a badge instead of a uniform.
Missouri may be the clearest example. The bill that passed the Missouri House 137-11 this spring, later amended to add ibogaine alongside psilocybin, was introduced by Rep. Richard West, a former police officer. West has said he was skeptical of psychedelic therapies at first, until he read the research. His legislation now extends access to veterans and first responders side by side.
In North Carolina, the expansion is written directly into the bill’s text. Senate Bill 1018, the Healing through Evidence-based Access to Lifesaving Care Act, would appropriate $5.4 million to study psychedelic medicines including MDMA, psilocybin, and ibogaine. The bill covers first responders and other trauma survivors alongside veterans. I was in Raleigh on June 16 for a Day of Action on the bill, and the argument I made there was that North Carolina’s veterans deserve better than the status quo. The same is true of the state’s first responders, and the HEAL Act says so explicitly.
Veterans have long argued that healing shouldn’t be limited to the population that opened the door. In state after state, that argument is now showing up in bill text, in witness lists, and in testimony from people who never wore a military uniform but carry the same invisible wounds.
The same expansion is happening geographically. States once assumed to be years behind on psychedelic policy are now writing the playbook.
Iowa is the most striking case. House File 978, which would create a state-licensed medical psilocybin program, passed the Iowa House 84-6 in April 2025, a bipartisan supermajority in a state rarely associated with drug policy reform. The bill stalled in the Senate and hasn’t become law. Its framework outlived the session anyway. The American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative model-legislation clearinghouse whose bills get adapted in statehouses nationwide, has since adopted a therapeutic psilocybin model policy for veterans and first responders along the same lines. ALEC is an unlikely vehicle for expanded psychedelic access, and its involvement says something about how far the politics have moved. A state once written off as a late arrival is supplying language other states borrow from, even though its own bill has yet to cross the finish line.
Massachusetts tells a similar story on a longer timeline. In August 2024, Gov. Maura Healey signed the HERO Act, which created a working group to study psychedelic therapies including psilocybin, ketamine, and MDMA for veterans’ mental health. Two years later, that groundwork paid off. On July 8, 2026, the Massachusetts House passed its economic development bill 148-2, carrying an amendment that would establish a five-year pilot program allowing up to three licensed mental health clinics to offer supervised psychedelic-assisted treatment. The amendment itself passed unanimously. The bill still needs Senate approval and the governor’s signature. If it gets both, these would the first psilocybin treatment centers on the East Coast.
None of this is happening in isolation. It’s unfolding alongside continued movement in Utah and Georgia, which makes this a national map rather than a regional one. The states leading it aren’t always the ones people expect.
It would be easy to read all of this as mission creep, as if expanding beyond veterans somehow dilutes what veterans built. The opposite is true.
A coalition that includes veterans, police officers, firefighters, and EMTs alongside researchers and clinicians is much harder to dismiss as fringe. When a former police officer sponsors the bill, when an EMS association appears on a witness list, when a police lieutenant testifies for a therapy pilot, lawmakers are hearing the same conclusion arrived at independently by people with very different relationships to the state. That kind of convergence builds a durability no single population, however sympathetic, can build alone.
It also reflects growing acceptance of the underlying science and growing demand for treatment options that work across communities carrying similar burdens of trauma. Firefighters, police officers, and paramedics face rates of PTSD, depression, and suicide that rival those of combat veterans. They face repeated exposure to trauma, a culture that discourages asking for help, and treatment options that too often fall short. It should surprise no one that these communities are arriving at the same answer veterans did.
Each new state and each new professional community is a bridge to a broader swath of the American public. That’s not a distraction from the veteran-led work that opened this door. It’s what success looks like.
None of this changes what veterans have built or the urgency of the work still ahead of them. Veterans opened the door to this conversation, and they remain at the center of it in every state named here. But they’ve said for years that the healing they fought for shouldn’t stop with them. In statehouses from Oklahoma to Massachusetts, that’s no longer an argument. It’s a fact, showing up in bill text and witness lists across the country.
