Politics
VA Rejects Psychedelic-Focused Veterans Group’s Grant Application For Suicide Prevention Program
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is facing criticism after rejecting a grant application from an organization that helps connect veterans to programs abroad where they can receive psychedelic therapy to treat serious mental health conditions.
While VA Secretary Doug Collins has been vocal about his support for expanding access to psychedelics like ibogaine in hopes of curbing the suicide epidemic among veterans, the organization No Fallen Heroes that supports efforts to facilitate the alternative treatment was told last month that it did not qualify for a suicide-prevention grant program.
No Fallen Heroes “has been doing the work our government talks about but rarely delivers” for the past five years, Matthew “Whiz” Buckle, a Navy “TOPGUN” veteran who founded the group, said. “We’ve saved and changed the lives of over 100 veterans and first responders through real, trauma-informed support and sacred-medicine healing retreats.”
The mission of the organization is specifically to mitigate the veteran suicide crisis, yet No Fallen Heroes “received a rejection letter from the VA for the Staff Sergeant Parker Gordon Fox Suicide Prevention Grant” after an “exhaustive, in-depth application that our team poured their heart into,” he said.
“We can assume why. We use psychedelic-assisted (sacrament-assisted) healing—the very thing saving the lives the VA keeps losing,” Buckley said. “But that’s the point: What we’re doing as a country clearly isn’t working. It is time to do something new.”
The rejection for the grant comes months after Buckle met with VA staff, and the secretary himself, to discuss the therapeutic potential of psychedelic medicine for the veteran community. Collins then raised the issue directly with President Donald Trump during a cabinet meeting in May.
Collins “even mentioned nonprofits like No Fallen Heroes using these compounds to save and change lives,” the veteran said. “So clearly, the VA bureaucracy is not listening to its own leadership. Shocking, I know.”
“If the VA and Secretary Collins believe there are organizations doing more to prevent veteran suicide than we are, I’d genuinely love to meet them. Because our track record speaks for itself,” he said. “We’re not here to wait. We’re not here to ask permission. Lead. Follow. Or get out of the way. Our heroes don’t have time for bureaucracy.”
In the rejection letter, VA didn’t address the substance of the grant application. Rather, it said simply that the applicant did not meet “threshold requirements” to qualify, so they were deemed ineligible.
“We regret to inform you that your agency’s SSG Fox SPGP application did not meet one or more of the requirements in 38 C.F.R. § 78.20 for threshold review, and it is therefore not eligible to be considered for funding,” Todd Burnett, acting director of the VA Office of Suicide Prevention, wrote.
Marijuana Moment reached out to VA for comment about the grant application rejection, but a representative did not respond by the time of publication.
Meanwhile, a former U.S. senator said recently that she’s personally spoken to both Collins and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the therapeutic potential of psychedelics like ibogaine—and both members of Trump’s cabinet were receptive to reform on the issue.
While former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) mentioned that Collins wasn’t especially familiar with psychedelics therapy before joining the Trump administration, the secretary has since become one of the most vocal proponents of advancing reform to facilitate access for veterans.
In July, for example, the VA secretary touted his role in promoting psychedelics access for veterans with serious mental health conditions, saying he “opened that door probably wider than most ever thought” was possible.
“I’m the first VA secretary—actually, in a Cabinet meeting about a month and a half ago—to actually bring up psychedelics in a Cabinet meeting,” Collins said at the time. “I think what we got to look at is we’ve got to put alternatives on the map. The VA is going to do our job. We’re going to do within the law and do what we have to do.”
The secretary also said over the summer that he’s “very open” to expanding access to psychedelics therapy for veterans—emphasizing that he’s intent on finding ways to “cure” people with serious mental health conditions and not just treat their surface-level symptoms.
Collins noted that VA either internally or through private partnerships is actively conducting about a dozen clinical trials into “various different substances that we’re seeing actually really good results on,” including one based at VA Bronx Health Care that’s investigating MDMA-assisted therapy with “actually really, really good results.”
Image courtesy of CostaPPR.
