Psychedelic research timeline
Veterans: the psychedelic research timeline
Veteran research sits across PTSD, depression and traumatic brain injury. MDMA built the controlled-treatment record; ibogaine and retreat cohorts broadened the story while the VA and military began sponsoring their own studies.
Milestones are editorially selected from Blossom’s research catalogue. Future markers are limited to important trials with dated public guidance and are shown as planned, not promised.
Hover any marker to preview its callout on the canvas, then click to pin it. Pinned is what stays open, fills this panel with the full context and links, and is what an export captures. Landmarks stay labelled on the canvas so the exported image reads on its own.
Download the artifact
Exports rasterise the live SVG, so whatever you have toggled is what you get.
The MDMA–PTSD programme
2004 to 2017Veterans enter the early controlled assisted-therapy studies.2004-03
MAPS
The first US patient trial
Michael and Annie Mithoefer open the randomised pilot in Charleston that produces the field’s founding efficacy result.
Twenty patients with chronic treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder, randomised between MDMA-assisted therapy and an inactive placebo, run over six years in a single South Carolina practice. The 2010 publication reports that most people in the active arm no longer met diagnostic criteria, and it has been cited more than 650 times.
This is the number that built the field. Every later trial, every designation and the entire filing rest on the claim that a handful of supervised sessions can do what months of standard treatment often cannot.
Two caveats travelled with it from the start and were never resolved. Twenty patients is a pilot, and comparing an intense psychoactive experience against an inert placebo means almost everyone knew which arm they were in. A 2012 follow-up reported that the improvements held for years and found no evidence of dependence, which strengthened the durability claim considerably. The FDA still considered the durability evidence insufficient fourteen years later.
2008-02
Battlefield ketamine and PTSD
A study of burned service members finds lower PTSD rates among those who received ketamine during their care.
Ketamine’s haemodynamic stability (it does not drop blood pressure the way most anaesthetics do) made it standard in military and trauma medicine long before psychiatry noticed it. This retrospective study asked whether that incidental exposure left any psychiatric trace.
It is a correlation in a wounded population, not a trial, and the sickest patients get different anaesthetics for reasons that also predict PTSD. A later retrospective in 274 war-wounded soldiers is also in Blossom’s set and complicates the picture rather than confirming it.
Kept here because it shows the actual sequence: the signal came from noticing something in routine care, and the trials followed.
Beyond one programme
2018 to 2024Ibogaine, group therapy and TBI cohorts broaden the research question.2018-06
Lancet Psychiatry
Dose-response trial in first responders
A randomised dose-response Phase 2 in veterans, firefighters and police officers publishes in Lancet Psychiatry.
Twenty-six participants, three MDMA doses, blinded and randomised. The higher doses outperformed the lowest, which is the kind of internal dose-response gradient that makes a drug effect more believable than a simple drug-versus-placebo comparison does.
The population is the strategic point. Veterans and first responders are the constituency that gave MDMA its political coalition in Washington, and the reason a compound criminalised in 1985 could be discussed sympathetically in Congress by 2020.
2021-11
Stanford University
Magnesium-ibogaine in veterans
Stanford follows thirty veterans with blast exposure who travelled to a Mexican clinic, and publishes the results in Nature Medicine.
This study did something unusual and rather clever. Rather than trying to obtain approval to dose veterans with ibogaine in the US, the researchers assessed men who were already going to Mexico for treatment, before and after. Magnesium was co-administered specifically to blunt the QT effect, and no cardiac adverse events were reported.
The design is its own limitation, and the authors say so. There is no control group, no blinding and no randomisation, and the participants had selected themselves, paid to travel and expected to improve. Those are exactly the conditions under which self-reported symptom scores move a lot.
It is still the most consequential ibogaine paper of the decade, because it put the compound in Nature Medicine, in a veterans population, at a moment when veterans’ mental health had US political attention. The follow-up imaging and phenomenology papers landed in 2026, and the Texas appropriation two markers down is downstream of this study more than of any other.
2023-10
Portland VA Research Foundation
The VA runs its own group trial
A Portland VA study of group MDMA therapy for veterans completes, a year after the federal rejection.
Group-MVP tested MDMA-assisted therapy delivered to veterans in groups rather than one to one, and completed in September 2025. Group delivery attacks the cost problem directly: the therapist time around each session is the single largest expense in this treatment model, and one clinician cannot supervise one patient for eight hours at scale.
The sponsor is a Veterans Affairs research foundation, not a drug company. Public research kept going after the rejection because the population it serves did not change, and the academic and veteran lane on this canvas is now busier than the commercial one.
Public institutions step in
2025 onwardsVA and military-sponsored trials continue despite commercial uncertainty.2025-06
PAM-VET combines psilocybin and MDMA
A Phase I veteran PTSD study begins testing both psilocybin and MDMA, moving beyond a single-compound assisted-therapy model.
2025-08
A psilocybin retreat cohort reports
An observational cohort reports mental-health and EEG changes in veterans with TBI histories after a psilocybin retreat. The uncontrolled design limits attribution.
2026-05
A new veteran MDMA study is scheduled
A Phase II study of MDMA therapy in veterans with PTSD is registered to begin. Its timing remains planned.
2026-10
U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command
plannedThe US Army runs its own trial
A Phase 2 in serving military personnel, sponsored by US Army Medical Research and Development Command, is due to open in October 2026.
Two years after the FDA refused the application, the US Department of Defense is opening its own MDMA trial in serving service members. The registry lists a start in October 2026 and completion in October 2028.
Government sponsorship changes the incentives in a way worth naming. The Army has no product to sell and no share price, which removes the commercial motive that the advisory committee treated as a source of bias. It also has a large population with post-traumatic stress disorder and few good options, which is why it is here.
Whether it can solve the blinding problem the FDA raised is unknown. Nothing in the registry record suggests a novel control design.
Veterans
PTSD, blast injury and public-sector psychedelic research
Research Landscape
What the registered trials connected to Veterans look like when you line them up. Counts come from Blossom’s trial records as of August 2026.
How fast is Veterans research growing?
SourcedRegistered trials by recorded study-start year; 2 earlier trials began before 2013. Click a year for the running total.
Don't read as total research effort: only registered trials with a recorded start date are counted (31 of 31 tracked). Recent years under-count because of registration lag; striped bars are still filling in or are planned starts.
What's live right now, and what stopped?
SourcedRegistry status of all 31 Veterans trials Blossom tracks. Orange marks trials recruiting or opening.
- Recruiting or opening
- 1032%
- Underway, not recruiting
- 13%
- Completed
- 1342%
- Stopped early
- 516%
- Unknown / other
- 26%
Don't read stopped trials as failures: trials end early for funding, recruitment, and strategy reasons too. Status is as last synced from the registry; some 'recruiting' trials may already have finished.
Which compounds carry the Veterans research?
SourcedTrials per compound. Orange marks the most-studied compound.
Don't read shares as adding to 100%: a trial testing several compounds counts once per compound, and placebo comparator arms are not shown. Trial volume signals research attention, not evidence quality.
Publication Landscape
How the 54 papers Blossom links to Veterans line up by year, compound and journal. This is the psychedelic-relevant literature in Blossom's records as of August 2026, not the condition's full medical literature.
How has Veterans research grown?
SourcedTracked papers by publication year; 2 earlier papers published before 2012. Click a year for the running total.
Don't read as total output: only the 54 of 54 tracked papers with a recorded publication date are counted, and these are the psychedelic-relevant papers Blossom tracks, not a complete bibliography. The current year is still filling in.
Which compounds shape Veterans?
SourcedTracked papers per compound. Orange marks the largest literature.
A paper studying several compounds counts once per compound, and placebo comparator arms are not shown. These are the psychedelic-relevant papers Blossom tracks.
Where is Veterans research published?
SourcedTracked papers per journal. Orange marks the most-used journal.
Counts the journal recorded on each tracked paper; papers without a journal on file are omitted. Blossom tracks psychedelic-relevant papers rather than each journal's full catalogue.