Pioneering Hope: Inside The Veteran's Organization Advancing Psychedelics Reform Policy

Reason for Hope, the national nonprofit that promotes drug reform and educates federal and state officials and stakeholders on psychedelic-assisted therapies (PAT) spoke to Benzinga about its ongoing campaigns.

Co-founder and executive director attorney Brett Waters has participated in the drafting of Connecticut and New York psychedelic legislation and briefings for the White House Domestic Policy Council as well as HHS and Congress members on the need for an interagency psychedelic task force.

Co-founder, CEO, founder and president of the National Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition, Ret. Marine LtGen Martin Steele has served as executive director of military partnerships at the research and innovation office at the University of South Florida around comorbidities of TBI, PTSD, military sexual trauma, prosthetics, robotics and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE.)

From Personal Stories To Collective Well-Being

Waters’ path to this work began with his mother's suicide some years ago. Having also lost his grandfather to suicide, he volunteered with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Later he began doing research on psychedelics, connecting him with his prior experience with psilocybin mushrooms. 

“The 80s and 90s research on psilocybin’s effects and its durability shocked me at the time, but beyond that I never really looked into it again for many years,” he told Benzinga. “At that point, it was too late for my mom. If I had known then what I know now, I certainly would have done many things differently.”

After seeing there was so much lacking in terms of education in addition to the legal barriers and backward policies that blocked research into the field, Waters created Reason for Hope. 

For his part, Steele found inspiration in many figures in his life and military career: his stepfather, a fighter pilot and  WWII POW in Germany; his mentors during the Vietnam War, “all WWII and Korean War people” and the many individuals suffering from PTSD-related trauma he came into contact with during his nearly 35 years in the Marine Corps.

Neither SSRIs administered by the VA nor medications provided by the Marine Corps proved effective for veterans, so once retired Steele began working at the university. In 2015, he was appointed to the VA Commission on Care.

With at least 22 war veterans per day committing suicide, its task was to recommend to the president and Congress either privatization or elimination of the VA because "it was failing” or its continuation. 

Choosing the third option, the group made 18 recommendations, 15 of which were accepted and became the MISSION Act, the PACT Act and the WISE Act. 

“The VA could still do much more by expanding its size and scope and not being so risk-averse regarding these alternative medicines,” said Steele, noting the large number of special operators with TBI and PTSD comorbidities they saw going outside the country “to get treatment to save their lives.”

Both paths finally joined. Waters and Steele jointly worked on HR1393, the Breakthrough Therapies Act, calling for psychedelics rescheduling to expand the size and scope of the research and treatment protocols required, “not just for veterans but our populations of first responders, police, firefighters, nurses, medical people, and the U.S. population as a whole, facing the current mental health crisis,” Steele explained.

The bill, holding enough bicameral and bipartisan support to get through Congress, would then be the “major first step” toward changing the entire spectrum of mental health treatment in the U.S., they both said.

Next: Close Up On Reason For Hope’s Advocacy Efforts & Congressional ‘Breakthrough Therapies’ Act

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash