Rick Perry, Drug Pusher [View all]

How did the former governor become a leading advocate for psychedelics?


Turn your recorder on,” Rick Perry said, “and I’ll tell you how the right-wing, knuckle-dragging, conservative Republican governor of Texas even allowed his name to be used in the same sentence with ‘psychedelics.’ ” This was a story, he warned, that could take fifteen or twenty minutes to tell. Instead, the governor who ran Texas for nearly half of my life extolled the benefits of such drugs as MDMA (a.k.a. Ecstasy), psilocybin mushrooms, and ibogaine for the better part of an hour and a half.

Perry has been a force in Texas politics for nearly 38 years, since his election to a House seat in 1984. He held statewide office for 24 years and served as governor for 15. In long-standing Texas tradition, he made good money while in public service. He is not known as a bleeding-heart crusader.

Which makes it all the stranger that Perry has become an activist, and for an issue many Democrats in office still won’t touch with a barge pole: the legalization of psychedelic drugs for therapeutic use. Though folks may not be primed to accept medical advice from Perry, who got a D in a class called Meats at Texas A&M, he’s in good company with psychologists and scientists around the country. “I’m an animal science major, I’m not a brain scientist, but I’ve studied this,” Perry said. “These compounds somehow reset the brain.”

If administered in controlled settings and with the help of doctors, he holds, psychedelics could improve millions of Americans’ well-being. If Texas makes these drugs legal, he thinks, other states will fall in line.

Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/rick-perry-drug-pusher/