Rick Perry, Drug Pusher

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.

I’d known about Perry’s advocacy for psychedelic therapy for some time. In April 2021, he returned to the Legislature to endorse a bill offered by Representative Alex Dominguez, a Democrat from Brownsville, that called for a state-funded clinical study on the use of psilocybin mushrooms and ketamine to treat PTSD in veterans. Perry told lawmakers they had a chance to be heroes. “The idea that you come to public service and that you have saved a life,” he said, choking up just a bit, “what a powerful moment in time.”

Perry’s other appearance during the 2021 session, in which he held a press conference at the Capitol on behalf of an anti-COVID air filtration company, was more typical. In his remarks, he didn’t mention having any financial interest in filter sales. When a reporter pressed him, Perry said he served on the board of the manufacturer. A company official later clarified that Perry was a salesperson working on commission. 

When Texas Monthly asked whether he or anyone in his family stands to profit in any way from the decriminalization of psychedelic drugs, Perry declined to comment. But it seems clear that Perry’s interest in the matter extends beyond being a pitchman, if he is one. Last July, at a Texas meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, Perry’s sincerity seemed manifest. While most state elected officials and Trump stalwarts held forth…