Testimony Before Missouri House Veteran’s Committee on Psychedelic Assisted Therapy
Good morning. My name is William Wisner and I am the Executive Director of the Grunt Style Foundation, a 501c3 nonprofit serving the Active Duty, National Guard, Reserve, and military Veteran community. Our organization focuses our efforts on issues of housing and food insecurities, military transition into the civilian sector, and mental health and wellness. Grunt Style Foundation is also a founding member of the Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition (VMHLC), led by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Martin R. Steele. The opinions I am sharing today are an accurate reflection of the position of both organizations, and in some instances, are a summary of previous testimony before the United States Congress on this same topic.
Even as more Veterans than ever before are accessing mental health treatments, death by suicide continues to rise. The unfortunate reality of our nation’s mental health crisis highlights the limitations of effective therapies for stress and trauma-related concerns such as PTSD, depression, and suicidal ideation. We have seen minimal progress in new pharmacologic treatments, despite having only two FDA-approved medications for PTSD, which are slow acting and have significant limitations and side effects - some of which can prove lethal.
Grunt Style Foundation and the VMHLC are focused on opening access to MDMA - and psilocybin-assisted therapy for Veterans who are at serious risk and have exhausted all other options. These thousands of Veterans who have nearly lost all hope after struggling through ineffective medications and therapies - which often leave them worse off than where they started - eventually resort to leaving the country they served in a last-ditch effort to receive psychedelic-assisted therapy in other countries where they could legally access this life-saving treatment. Mounting evidence suggests fast-acting therapeutics like MDMA and psilocybin - currently classified as Schedule I drugs under the Controlled Substances Act - have great potential to offer this level of healing to individuals suffering from a variety of mental health conditions.
The motto of the Veterans Administration is “to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.” It is morally unacceptable that our nation’s Veterans should be forced to take such extreme, and often detrimentally expensive routes to potentially lifesaving interventions. It is unacceptable that this happens while government debates what more research needs to be done before granting such a chance at life here at home while ignoring the facts of the consequences of the current paradigm. There is simply no reasonable justification for the status quo when MDMA and psilocybin-assisted therapies both have been granted a Breakthrough Therapy designation by the FDA, which is a “process designed to expedite the development and review of drugs that are intended to treat a serious condition and preliminary clinical evidence indicates that the drug may demonstrate substantial improvement over available therapy on a clinically significant endpoint. How can we justify a regulatory system that actively suppresses this entire class of potential treatments when:
Virtually every metric of our nation’s mental health has regressed for several decades;
Estimated Veteran suicide range from 16 to as many as 44 per day, with male Veterans two-to-three times as likely to die by suicide than their civilian counterparts, and female Veterans six times as likely;
For every death by suicide, an estimated more than 30 others attempt suicide (estimate based on reported attempts, and many go unreported and untreated);
And the devastating economic and societal costs of suicide are estimated at well over $69 Billion annually
The government should do everything possible to support, or at least not stand in the way of, urgently needed investigation of, and access to, novel therapeutics with the potential to offer relief and healing to individuals who have been failed by current treatments, especially those which can offer rapid and robust improvements.
Members of the VMHLC have supported over 1,100 Veterans to receive psychedelic-assisted therapy outside our nation’s borders. We have worked with many of these Veterans who were not only saved from suicide, but also found a renewed sense of purpose, meaning, and connection to themselves, their families, and their communities after undergoing this form of treatment. For most of these Veterans, psychedelic-assisted therapy has proven not only lifesaving, but life-restoring. A large majority of participants also rated the psychedelic experience as one of the most personally meaningful, spiritually significant, and psychologically insightful events of their lives. Beyond MDMA and psilocybin, many Veterans (particularly within the Special Operation Forces community) have been successfully treated with a combination therapy of Ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT, as well as Ayahausca (DMT), with a retrospective study reporting very large reductions in suicidal ideation, cognitive impairment, and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety.
We are only now starting to rediscover what our ancestors knew thousands of years ago, and it is our Veteran community that is attempting to lead our society beyond our arrogance in an effort to save ourselves. This effort is driven out of love for our brothers and sisters and tempered by the knowledge of what the consequences can be when trusting our government to do the right thing and honor their oath as they care for those that have borne the battle. The Veteran knows all too well about empty promises given as part of the process of how politics works. From toxic exposures to mental health, our era of Veteran is stepping up to ensure that the errors of our past are corrected. We are not victims and we do not want to complain. We did our job, and for some, there is a price that is still being paid. Now, we just want to deal with that reality as best as we are able. So here I am today, urging you to support any progress which removes certain burdensome regulations that impede research and development of - and ultimately access to - these potentially lifesaving modalities. If we can prevent even one more suicide among our Veterans, then we are obligated to do so. Time is of the essence. Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you today and for your kind attention.
This testimony was presented before the Missouri House of Representatives Veterans Committee in February 2023
