Gang Weed Conservatism III: Rebekah Mercer and the Pharmacological Warriors

This ain't no party. This ain't no disco. This ain't no fooling around.

Last week, we discussed how a network of terminally online Thiel-funded weirdos were pushing psychedelic drug use on their audiences. But this psychedelic project extends into the mainstream right as well.

In July 2022, the Intercept reported that Dan Crenshaw and AOC were able to see eye to eyes on amending the National Defense Authorization Act to increase access to psychedelics for veterans and active duty military members.

This kind of heartwarming bipartisanship could also be seen at the state level. Former Texas Governor and Republican Primary candidate Rick Perry has shown strong support for House Bill 1802. Proposed by Democratic State Representative Alex Dominguez, it would launch a study into the potential uses of psilocybin (i.e. magic mushrooms) in treating PTSD and depression in veterans.

As the Republican Governor of Texas, Perry happily pounded the drum against the flow of drugs across the border. At the same time, Perry has long had a curious relationship with Big Pharma. In 2007, he issued an executive order mandating that all Texas schoolgirls receive Gardasil, the HPV vaccine for which the company Merck had managed to secure FDA approval and a patent just the previous year. Free at the point of use, of course, paid for by the State of Texas. A very generous program from a Republican Governor who called the passage of Obamacare a “criminal act!”

Some Democrats asked some questions, and pointed out that Merck had recently given him a $5,000 contribution, out of a total $28,500 since 2001. Rick Perry naturally responded that no serious person could believe that a Governor of Texas could be bought for such an insultingly low price. They weren’t his top donor, not by a long shot. What his opponents, including Michelle Bachman in the 2011 Republican primary, had more difficulty articulating was that his Chief of Staff, Mike Toomey, had just been hired by Merck as a lobbyist.¹ In the end, the legislature overturned the order, and the issue has been forgotten.

Today, Perry says that his change of heart on psilocybin, and only psilocybin, is a result of his work with veterans, many of whom travel to Mexico in order to self-medicate with magic mushrooms. “All of that properly done in the right type of clinical setting will save a multitude of lives,” Perry said. “I'm convinced of it. I have seen it enough of these young men.” One of those young men was Marcus Luttrell, a former Navy SEAL and host on TheBlaze working for Glenn Beck.

And Texas isn’t the only state doing things like this. In May 2023, the Kentucky Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, under a Republican Governor and a Republican Attorney General², announced a plan to spend $46 Million researching a safer version of ibogaine, an African psychedelic drug that appears to help combat drug addiction, with only minor side effects like acute heart failure. If we recall that morphine was invented to get people off of opium, heroin invented to get people off of morphine, and oxycodone to get people off of heroin³, then we are approaching levels of swallowing a spider to catch a fly that shouldn't even be possible.

Ibogaine was also a drug of interest in the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program, which I assure you we will discuss in significant detail later.

Oklahoma, Missouri, Washington, Arizona and Minnesota have all pursued similar initiatives. Bloomberg identifies multiple think tanks pushing these bills, all of which have bipartisan support. Retired Marine Lt. General Martin Steele⁴ runs Reason For Hope, a nonprofit that has supported the Breakthrough Therapies Act, jointly authored by Corey Booker (D-NJ) and Nancy Mace (R-SC). Biden is expected to sign it at the end of his first term. Retired Navy SEAL Marcus Capone⁵ runs Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions (VETS), and is co-founder of Tara Mind, a corporation which according to its other cofounder will “feed healthcare data — including from VETS’s past work — into artificial-intelligence programs to match veterans with psychedelic substances and clinics.”

A major backer of Tara Mind is the venture capital firm Red Cell Partners. Looking at their board, we see that their director, Wes Bush, is the former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Northrop Grumman. Their Chairman is former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, “the first John S. McCain Distinguished Fellow at the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University, and a member of the Board of Directors at the Atlantic Council.” Their Chief Investment officer, Roger W. Ferguson Jr., was Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve from 1999 to 2006. One of the founders, Josh Lobel, “sits on the Board of Directors of the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation and the Advisory Board for the Center for Global Risk and Security at RAND.” Lead Independent Director Jack Rowe tops off his resume with “Chairman and CEO of Aetna,” and President Yisroel Brumer was Acting Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation at the DoD under Mark Esper.

The CEO of Red Cell is Grant Verstandig. An impressive resume lists, among many other things, an adviser to the National Security Agency on artificial intelligence. He is also the other co-founder of Tara Mind. He informs Bloomberg News that Tara Mind is also vetting ketamine clinics to make sure they’re safe for veterans to work with, noting that active duty military might even be improved if they could manage PTSD through psychedelic therapy.

Let’s be clear. Ketamine is a legitimate painkiller. It is prescribed in hospitals all the time. It is also a derivative of PCP. And this company wants to prescribe it in deliberate pursuit of its hallucinogenic side effects.

Grant Verstandig also has some interesting comments about MK-ULTRA, by the way. He says: “MK-ULTRA was one of the darkest times in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency. But this isn’t the CIA coming at you with drugs to see what can be used for espionage or blackmail, this is the opposite; this is special-ops soldiers who have come home with invisible wounds. We’ve partnered to produce life-changing therapies for them.”

Thanks for that, Grant!

This is also as good a time as any to talk about Ernst Junger. The son of a German businessman, Junger wanted a life of adventure. He broke German law to join the French foreign Legion at 18, before being deported to Germany just in time to fight in the First Weltkrieg. He fought at the Somme, was wounded three times in other battles, and was awarded the Iron Cross among other medals. He would later describe the war as a mystical experience, and his wartime journals would be compiled into his memoir, Storm of Steel.⁶

After the war, which Junger assured everyone was the coolest thing that ever happened to him, Junger would spend the rest of his life alternating between writing stories about freethinking individualist sigma males (like himself) and self-medicating with a smorgasbord of psychaoctive drugs. Ether, cocaine, hashish, mescaline, LSD, this self-described national conservative did them all. He actually invented the term psychonaut to describe those people who used these drugs to explore the higher planes of meaning. He would regularly go on acid trips with Albert Hoffmann hismelf, the man who invented LSD and synthesized psilocybin.

Let’s go back to Dan Crenshaw and AOC. As part of Dan Crenshaw’s committee testimony in favor of giving magic mushrooms to depressed soldiers, he cited the story of retired Army Sergeant Johnathan Lubecky. After suffering a traumatic brain injury in Iraq in 2006, having to undergo multiple operations that required him to take dozens of pills per day, and attempting suicide five times, Lubecky found his salvation in an MDMA-assisted therapy study. He would go on to serve as Rand Paul’s Veteran liaison during the 2016 campaign, and be a major presence at CPAC 2018. An article in Psymposia notes that Lubecky “can be seen on his personal social media accounts posing with politicians and operatives across the political spectrum, including Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Joe Biden, Alex Jones, Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Rand Paul (R-KY), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker.”

Today, Lubecky works as a lobbyist for the same nonprofit that introduced him to MDMA in the first place: MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.⁷ MAPS was founded in 1986 by Rick Doblin, with the mission to mainstream pharmaceutical psychedelics by putting them through FDA-approved clinical trials.

As David Nickles and Lily Kay Ross of the psychedelic industry watchdog Psymposia reported earlier this year, Doblin has been operating under the belief that MDMA was a “safe and effective adjunct to psychotherapy” well before there was documented clinical evidence for it. He just needed public opinion to catch up to his own. The choice for MAPS to take MDMA through clinical trials hinged on Doblin’s belief that it was a relatively mild psychedelic that didn’t frighten the general public. The molecule was less burdened with cultural preconceptions than classical psychedelics such as LSD or mushrooms, he believed, and an obvious first step toward wider acceptance.

In his book, Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal, Tom Schroder wrote that Doblin didn’t necessarily want a government career, but “he did want to know how to manipulate the levers and pulleys that could move public policy on the issue of psychedelic medicine.” Doblin interviewed with the CIA at one point while at Harvard, but declined a position when asked if he was interested in creating psychological profiles of world leaders. He stuck with his work at MAPS instead.⁸

In MAPS’ early years, organizational messaging focused on using psychedelics to treat populations like survivors of sexual assault, cancer patients and drug addicts. Veterans and military service members were largely absent from the public messaging. That changed in 1994, when MAPS secured FDA approval to conduct a Phase 1 safety trial with MDMA in human subjects, and also announced a partnership with Dr. Manuel Madriz Marin, the chief psychiatrist at the Military Hospital in Managua, Nicaragua, to study the effectiveness of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in the treatment of “soldiers and civilians traumatized during the Nicaraguan Civil War.”

[In 1998], Doblin defined a shift in MAPS’ media strategy. Moving forward, the organization would seek to illustrate the benefits of psychedelics to “even the most conservative members of our society.”

When Psymposia questioned Doblin about Thiel in 2018, Doblin replied, “What I wish were different were not that Peter Thiel have not invested in COMPASS, but I wish he would have donated to MAPS…Republicans need [psychedelics] more than anyone else.”

Well, it’s not so bad, because MAPS has a conservative patron of its own: the Mercer Family Foundation. In 2018, the Mercer Foundation donated $1 Million to MAPS.  “With this gift,” Doblin said at the time, “the Mercers are on the forefront of scientifically rigorous medical innovation. We’re inspired and deeply grateful for their commitment [and they] are to be commended for their gift.”

Just as I was writing this very section of this very article, CNBC revealed that both Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer are considering becoming major investors in a multi-million dollar media company that Tucker Carlson has been in the process of creating after his firing by Fox News. Which is as good a way as any to demonstrate that the Mercer Family Foundation is a Republican mega-donor. A Republican mega-donor with an interest in government programs to provide magic mushrooms and ecstasy to wounded warriors at taxpayer expense.

At least Thiel was kind of libertarian about it.

But maybe it’s not just about the money. After all, unlike with Thiel, I can’t prove any Mercer family investments in psychoactive drugs, only a donation to a pro-drug research institute. This is a political foundation, so maybe the motivation is political?

In their Guardian article, Ellenhorn and Mugianis ask whether the donation was “motivated by a desire to shore up American military resources by palliating the harms suffered by those sent to fight those wars?” You have to admit, launching aggressive wars on foreign populations that lead to your own soldiers suffering devastating physical and psychological traumas, then doping them up with shrooms and molly when they get home to smooth them out is pretty sick, almost something out of Brave New World. Then again, America is kind of a sick country, I think we can all agree by this point.

And they might be onto something, because Amy Lehrner and Rachel Yehuda have basically said as much, in their study “Moral Injury and the Promise of MDMA-Assisted Therapy for PTSD.” What is moral injury? Well, unlike PTSD which comes from when people are subjected to violent and traumatic experiences, moral injury is when you perpetrate a violent and traumatic experience on someone else, feel bad about it, and suspect that maybe you might be a bad person. The article describes a hypothetical veteran “haunted by the many times he stormed into people’s homes at night, turning the house upside down looking for weapons, taking fathers away from crying families to military prisons.” With the power of MDMA, the article says, soldiers can forgive themselves for potential crimes they committed against other people in the wars they fought. Presumably after this “self-forgiveness” was achieved, they might be more willing to go out and do it again.

As I asked last week: Imagine providing this “treatment” to America’s victims of racism, police violence, and over-incarceration?

At this point, the question deserves to be asked: does all of this stuff work at helping vets? To this, I say that I am totally agnostic. The Science says it works after all, and there seems to be a fair bit of anecdotal evidence of traumatized veterans improving their lives after experimenting with psychedelics. All I have against it are my unsophisticated intuitions about damaged minds and psychoactive substances, colored by an upbringing on Reaganite anti drug education. My primary concern is the astroturfed, top-down push for normalized psychedelics on the right.

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This is the third in a series of six articles about a disturbing trend of psychedelic drug use being pushed on the American Right.

The next article, which looks at Elon Musk, Biohackers, and fake dissident podcasts, can be found here:

Gang Weed Conservatism IV: Elon Musk, Grass Toucher

This series will be free for all to read, and I encourage you to share this post and all others in the series as they come.

New releases should come every Saturday morning. If you want to be notified of these articles as soon as they are released, you are encouraged to subscribe to this Substack. Thank you.

1. Today, Toomey runs Texas Lobby Partners and has been called the top lobbyist in the state.

2. A Black Republican Attorney General, by the way. Shine on, fellow king.

3. Further Reading: Opioids for the Masses by Trey Garrison and Richard McClure

4. Some people were just born for their jobs with names like that. No relation to the Steele Dossier that was weaponized against Trump

5. Maybe the real conspiracy is that none of these people are even real. These have got to be fake names, right? Like Sheldon Whitehouse?

6. Luckily for right-wing pseudointellectuals everywhere, Junger rejected Nazi Modernism, instead calling for the creation of a hypermilitarized total mobilization state run by warrior-scholars (like himself). This would be way more based than Hitler. He also hated liberty, security, and the easy life of liberalism in favor of a culture of pain and sacrifice, which is the edgiest thing in the universe. The Nazis kept offering him positions in the party anyway, which Junger repeatedly rejected because they weren’t as based as him. He would spend the Second Weltkrieg as a desk officer in occupied Paris, planning to assassinate Hitler. In a move that was surprising only in its delay, Junger would spend the last year of his life converting to Roman Catholicism, which took a lot of guts and moxy.

7. Looking at the “Our Team” section, I was amused to find that a voting member of their Board of Directors is David Bronner.

“David Bronner is Cosmic Engagement Officer (CEO) of Dr. Bronner’s, the top-selling brand of natural soaps in North America and producer of a range of organic body care and food products. He is a grandson of company founder, Emanuel Bronner, and a fifth-generation soapmaker.”

I’d actually been using Dr. Bronner’s Soap for the past few years (the bottles have very interesting labels) up until a few months ago, when a Twitter thread that no longer exists alerted me to the company’s left wing politics and I made the switch to a more patriotic soap company.

8. This naturally raises the question of why he chose to interview at the CIA at all. What work was he expecting to be offered? What assignment was he hoping to get?