Round Top’s Rick Perry Approves of Psychedelics

Fayette County resident and former Texas Governor Rick Perry supports legalizing marijuana, LSD, MDMA, magic mushrooms and a host of other psychedelic drugs for therapeutic use.

Texas Monthly’s Christopher Hooks interviewed Perry about his advocacy for psychedelics for a story that appears in the magazine’s June 2022 issue.

In the story, Perry said he first became interested in psychedelic drugs after he befriended former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell. Luttrell penned the book “Lone Survivor” about Operation Red Wings, a 2005 mission in the Afghanistan War in which everyone else in Luttrell’s team died. He later deployed to Iraq where he suffered injuries and was medically discharged.

Luttrell suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) upon his return from war. Perry and his wife Anita befriended Luttrell and the war hero even lived with the Perrys for a while when Perry was Governor.

The story says that in 2017, Perry began hearing from Luttrell about Navy SEALs with PTSD who were going to Mexico to try psychedelic drugs.

The SEALs were “going down and literally coming back and proclaiming that it had changed their lives in a powerfully positive way,” Perry said, “and in some cases saying, ‘It saved my life.’ ”

Perry, the conservative former Governor and Trump cabinet appointee, goes on to criticize the origins of U.S. drug policy. He cites an interview with President Richard Nixon’s White House counsel John Ehrlichman in which Ehrlichman admits to listing marijuana and LSD as Schedule 1 drugs for political reasons.

Perry said that Nixon “hated hippies, and he hated Blacks,” and that LSD and marijuana were included on Nixon’s list of the most illegal drugs in order to “disrupt their communities.” Perry described learning this history as “eye-opening.”