I met up with Sen. Jesse Salomon (D-Shoreline) to talk about drugs. 

We sat at a back table in Cafe Aroma, a Shoreline coffee shop that got busted in 2024 for hosting a bondage event without the proper licenses. On his bicep, a tattoo of an ancient scroll with a Biblical verse peeked out of the sleeve of Salomon’s Trophy Husband T-shirt. Across the street was Landmark’s Crest Cinema Center, where I’d just seen the new Knives Out movie. I told him this. “What’s Knives Out?” Salomon asked. He did not know of movies, only hallucinogens. 

For the last four years, Salomon has introduced legislation in Olympia to try to regulate and open access to psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms. The closest he’s gotten to progress is his 2023 bill that put $2 million toward a University of Washington study on the therapeutic application of shrooms.

The results should be published in about a year, according to Dr. Nathan Sackett, who is running the trial at UW. “These clinical trials are painfully slow,” he says. “I hope that it'll at least provide some evidence for some folks… and hopefully that'll move the needle ever so slightly in terms of future funding and future research around efficacy and safety long-term.”

At least, that’s what Salomon’s banking on. And maybe it’ll help with his new bill in the legislature to give medical professionals the power to prescribe psilocybin. 

When Salomon reached out for an interview, I assumed it was about this latest psilocybin bill, so I suggested we microdose shrooms at the Pacific Science Center’s laser dome during their Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon show. Salomon said no. I suggested we could do the K-Pop Demon Hunters showing instead? Still, no. Salomon doesn’t microdose. 

So, we met for a standard, ropeless interview at the cafe. Except it still wasn’t what I expected. Salomon didn’t talk about psilocybin much, he wanted to talk about ibogaine. 

Ibogaine, a psychoactive compound found in an African rainforest shrub, is having a moment across the political spectrum. The reason? Some believe the drug might be a panacea—especially for addiction, traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress, and depression. Two 2024 studies—one conducted at Stanford University and another published in the journal Nature—showed that veterans who used ibogaine saw leaps and bounds of improvement in their PTSD and traumatic brain injuries. But no matter how promising ibogaine may seem, this early research is far from conclusive. The trials were small-scale and not placebo-controlled. Much of the data is anecdotal. 

Still, the ibogaine hype has caught on. Liberals see a potential game changer in how we treat mental health and addiction; Republicans envision a new way to suture the mental lacerations of war. But it’s not legal here. Salomon wants to change the limitations on ibogaine. And he almost did back before ibogaine was cool.

In 2024, Salomon worked with Sen. Kevin Van De Wege (D-Sequim) to propose an amendment to add $250,000 to the state’s supplemental budget for ibogaine-assisted therapy research. Their attempts to increase that amount or conduct additional studies are, like this psilocybin pursuit, stalled. But with that initial money, Dr. Sackett conducted an observational study on the drug in Mexico, where he observed the treatments at an ibogaine clinic “to better understand the safety profile and the clinical outcomes.” The results should be published later this year.

However, conservatives are the ones most enamored with ibogaine right now. The drug’s biggest supporter is none other than former Texas governor Rick Perry, who cofounded Americans for Ibogaine, the largest ibogaine advocacy group in the country, after serving as energy secretary during President Donald Trump’s first term. In June, his successor, Texas governor Greg Abbott, signed over $50 million in public funds toward ibogaine research, in large part due to the size of Texas’s veteran population. 

Republican operative Rex Elsass, one of the most powerful men in conservative politics, is a fan of the drug. So is Texas congressman and former Navy Seal Morgan Luttrell. Boxer Conor McGregor said he was visited by a vision of Jesus when he did ibogaine at a clinic in Mexico. Notably, ibogaine did not cure Hunter Biden’s drug and alcohol addictions in 2014 (or solve his laptop problems, which ibogaine cannot do). 

Mexico is the spot for ibogaine clinics, according to Dr. Eduardo Ramirez Juárez, the clinical director at Beond, an ibogaine facility in Cancún. “It’s because Mexico is the best,” Juárez says. He laughs. “No, it’s because ibogaine is in a legal gray area here.” It is neither legal nor illegal, and it’s not regulated. So, clinics like Juárez’s have sprouted up. Veterans and people with substance use disorders are flocking there to try this seemingly magic medicine, sometimes as a last resort. 

Salomon doesn’t have PTSD, or a TBI, or a substance-use disorder, he simply wanted to be more perceptive. So Salomon spent seven medically supervised days at Beond. The clinic administered two doses of ibogaine: a macro “flood” dose at a medical facility, and a second, smaller dose poolside several days later, where he was surrounded by veterans and depressed and anxious people in search of relief. A lot of people who’ve tried it, have found just that.

Do We Even Know How This Works?

Juárez, who went to medical school and then spent most of his career doing emergency medicine on cruise ships and oil rigs, believes the drug is therapeutic because he’s seen the results. “You can see it as a master key that opens different doors in your brain but mainly will act in the cortex and mesolimbic area,” he explains. The cerebral cortex is the “gray matter” of the brain, the outer layer housing everything responsible for who we are and how we act: attention span, perception, awareness, consciousness, memory, thought, and language. The mesolimbic area is the reward pathway, dopamine-releasing neurons that regulate motivation and desire. Pleasurable by definition, but hell when knocked out of whack.

Once ibogaine has reached those areas, according to Juárez, it stops the release of glutamate and dopamine for at least a couple of hours and at most a couple of days. It has a regulating effect, he says, that’s particularly helpful for addicts and people with mental health conditions. 

Ibogaine also releases proteins that fix broken connections in the brain, acting as construction crew for those with traumatic brain injuries. However, it can be a wrecking crew, too. If administered without magnesium, ibogaine can cause arrhythmia, so the heart  beats irregularly. Sometimes that causes cardiac arrest. As of 2021, the drug has killed at least 33 people worldwide, according to public data.

But these clinics say they know the risk. They screen patients for heart conditions, administer magnesium, and have staff cardiologists. Safely done, the experience can be spiritual and psychedelic, magical and life changing, Juárez says. But he’s just one guy.

“I'll tell you the truth about Ibogaine,” says Dr. David Edward Olson, director of the Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics at University of California Davis. “We really have no idea how it works.”

Olson, who researches the drug, believes “there’s a lot of promise” in ibogaine, but “most of the information that we have is from anecdotal reports and some open, labeled clinical trials,” he says.

Olson was the lead author on a UC Davis study about synthesizing ibogaine into a drug that mitigates the heart-stopping risks of the substance in its raw form. He said a lot of people took the Stanford study as proof that ibogaine is more effective than other treatments for TBI and substance abuse. But that data is simply “not sufficient” to draw such a broad conclusion. And there are still many questions.

“With classic psychedelics, we have a pretty good idea of how they work,” Olson says. “We know the receptors, we know the pathways, but ibogaine is a bit more mysterious. We don't even really know the optimal doses for Ibogaine.”

What we do know, Juárez says, is that ibogaine has an impact on mesolimbic circuitry, the parts of the brain involved in reward. “And it does seem to produce long-lasting effects,” Olson says. That’s a sign of “neuroplasticity,” or brain repair. “It's as simple as, a synapse is broken, you give someone the drug, that synapse that was broken gets reconstituted,” Olson says. “And so that's how a drug like ibogaine might produce these rapid and sustained therapeutic effects, especially for something like traumatic brain injury.”

Salomon’s Big Mexican Trip

At Beond, Salomon was paired with a professional trip sitter, a coach to prepare him for the intense psychedelic experience. He was a veteran, “buff as hell,” with a buzz cut and tattoos, says Salomon.

A “pretty standard military guy, like, not a hippie,” he says. Ibogaine was the man’s last resort, Salomon says. “He was like, ‘It was this or a casket. I was at the end of my rope.’” 

His name was Jon Stevens, a Marine Corps special operations veteran who served for 13 years. Near the end of his military career, something shifted, tossing him into “a pit of despair” at the bottom of which he felt “completely dead inside.” Then there was the pain.

“On the way out, I got injured,” Stevens explains, speaking at the fast clip of a military man. During a parachute training jump gone wrong, he broke his pelvis, fractured his hip, and shattered an eye socket. Back in civilian life, he reached for pills and alcohol to ease the physical and psychological pain. He sought out every treatment the VA had to offer.

“I was a candidate for two brain clinics in the United States after the military,” Stevens says. “They told me all my problems weren't just PTSD. I had brain damage, but there really wasn't anything they could do for me.” Their treatment? Stick to a high-fat diet. Read. Do puzzles. 

Nothing changed until he tried ibogaine. 

“It took down the prison walls I built around myself, the reasons why I can't do things or why I'm not successful, and also reminded me who I was,” Stevens says. “It made me like myself again.”

Stevens had plans to become a nurse practitioner, which he ditched to become an ibogaine coach. He started out coaching veterans. In the last year, working with a nonprofit called Beond Service, Stevens helped bring 15 cohorts of veterans and first responders—around 100 people—down to the Beond for ibogaine treatment. 

“Ibogaine is a beautiful medicine,” Stevens says. 

Salomon saw the beauty for himself in a room with two other patients. As he lay in a hospital bed hooked up to monitors, medical professionals gave Salomon a pill of ibogaine. The flavor was nearly indescribable, bitter and closest to diesel fuel, Salomon says. 

A cardiologist came in every hour to check his heart; a nurse stayed by his side for the entire 10-hour trip. A curated playlist of mostly trance, EDM, and “What a Wonderful World” by Louie Armstrong drowned out the beeping, droning hospital equipment. To “go deeper” into himself, he wore the sunglasses provided by the clinic.

People on ibogaine often report experiencing a “life review,” as if the drug is laying their whole life out before them. Salomon didn’t experience that. He threw up “like 15 times,” and grieved his mother’s death.

“She had been killed in a car accident years ago.” Salomon says, his voice catching. “I had to organize the funeral and be strong for that whole process. And I had never really thought about it, and then, in such a therapeutic environment, it just came out.” 

Salomon came back from Mexico ready to reignite the ibogaine conversation he started.

The Money? What Money?

It really is just a conversation.

“I haven’t been able to get any traction in the legislature,” he says. Within Washington’s pinched purse of a budget, Salomon didn’t see a penny of funding, but smelled a coming check. 

Over the next 15 years, the state will receive $105.6 million from Purdue Pharma, which settled after states sued the company for causing the opiate crisis by pushing its drug oxycontin. Another $16 million will be coming our way from other drugmakers. Most of the funds received so far are spoken for. But Salomon wants ibogaine to get a slice of future payouts

“It's not for everybody, and it doesn't need to be, but it does need to be an option,” Salomon says. This year, though, the only drug he’s pushing in the legislature is psilocybin. He’s the shroom guy, after all, and he knows the ibogaine funds are more of a long game. But when the settlement money comes …

“Then you can call dibs?” I ask.

“I would hope so, but it’s not that easy,” he says. “All the budget writers aren’t quite all on board yet.” 

“You gotta get all the budget writers to the clinic,” I joke.

“It could happen,” Salomon says, not joking. “If they want to do it, we can make it happen.”