The Psychedelics Boom Is Here. Black and Latino Communities — Who Paid for the Drug War — Are Being Left Out Again.

As Trump accelerates psychedelic therapies and Big Pharma writes billion-dollar checks, the communities that bore the heaviest cost of prohibition are being systematically written out of who gets healed — and who gets rich.

By Maya Torres | May 1, 2026

There is a particular cruelty in watching a revolution arrive with a receipt that says: not for you.

Last month, flanked by Joe Rogan and a circle of MAHA loyalists, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to fast-track psychedelic research, expand clinical trials, and clear regulatory pathways for therapeutic use. Within days, pharmaceutical giant AbbVie’s billion-dollar acquisition of a psilocybin-adjacent compound had aged from novelty to inevitable. The global psychedelics market is projected to hit $11.7 billion by 2029.

The boom is real. What’s also real: Black, Latino, and Indigenous Americans are almost entirely absent from the clinical trial data driving it — and largely locked out of the business conversation before it even begins.

“We’re watching the same movie play out,” said one harm reduction advocate working in Los Angeles’s South Central neighborhood, who asked not to be named because her organization depends on federal grants. “Cannabis legalization happened and the people who went to prison for weed weren’t the ones who got the dispensary licenses. Now psychedelics are becoming medicine and we’re already not in the room.”

The Research Gap Is Stark

The STAT News analysis published this morning — co-authored by researchers who study mental illness and addiction — puts numbers to what advocates have been saying for years. Clinical psychedelic trials have enrolled overwhelmingly white participants. The landmark MAPS MDMA-assisted therapy trials, which propelled PTSD treatment conversations for a decade, drew patient populations that were roughly 85 percent white. Psilocybin depression trials have fared little better.

This is not a minor methodological footnote. Mental health conditions — depression, PTSD, addiction — affect Black and Latino Americans at rates that reflect the layered traumas of poverty, structural racism, and yes, decades of policing that treated drug use as a criminal problem rather than a public health one. Yet the therapeutic solutions emerging from that same era are being built almost entirely on data from white, educated, and largely affluent research subjects.

The result: clinicians will soon have a suite of powerful new tools with almost no evidence base for how those tools perform across populations.

“If the trials don’t look like America, the treatments won’t work for America,” said Dr. Carl Hart, the Columbia University neuroscientist and longtime critic of racially skewed drug research. “We’ve known this problem exists in psychopharmacology broadly for 30 years. Psychedelics are just the latest version of it.”

Ibogaine and the Indigenous Exception That Isn’t One

The most politically charged compound in the current boom is ibogaine — a long-acting psychedelic derived from the West African iboga plant, with promising early data on opioid dependence and traumatic brain injury. It’s the one Trump’s order mentions most explicitly, and it has bipartisan support because of its potential for veterans.

Here is what gets left out of most of those conversations: iboga is a sacred medicine for the Bwiti people of Central Africa. Its global commercialization — now accelerating under a U.S. presidential directive — is proceeding largely without those communities at the table. Indigenous advocates in North America have raised similar concerns about psilocybin mushrooms, long embedded in the ceremonial practices of dozens of Mexican and Central American communities, and about ayahuasca.

“They want the medicine, not the people who kept it alive,” said one Indigenous healing practitioner from Oaxaca, speaking through a translator at a harm reduction conference in March. “That’s not a revolution. That’s just a new kind of extraction.”

Access Will Not Be Incidental

Even if the research gaps close — even if future trials are designed with racial equity as a mandate rather than an afterthought — there remains the question of cost.

Ketamine infusions, currently the only legally available psychedelic-adjacent therapy in most of the U.S., run $400 to $800 per session and are rarely covered by insurance. When MDMA-assisted therapy was recommended by the FDA’s advisory panel before approval stalled, estimates placed a full course of treatment at $15,000 or more. Psilocybin therapy in Oregon, where guided sessions are now legal, costs thousands of dollars — and is explicitly not covered by Medicaid.

The pattern is familiar because it is cannabis. Medical cannabis dispensaries opened across the country while millions of people — disproportionately Black and Latino — remained incarcerated for the same plants. Social equity licensing programs were promised and then hollowed out by bureaucratic delay, underfunding, and incumbent industry lobbying.

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which has done more than any single organization to advance therapeutic psychedelic research, has acknowledged the equity gap and committed to training programs for practitioners of color. But practitioners need patients who can afford care, and patients need therapists who look like them and understand their communities.

“Clinical access without community access is just medicine for the already-resourced,” said Ifetayo Harvey, founder of People of Color Psychedelic Collective, in a 2025 interview. Her organization has been raising these alarms since before the boom. “That’s not healing the harm. That’s extending the disparity under a new name.”

A Chance to Do This Differently

The psychedelic moment is genuinely new in one important way: it is happening in public, in real time, with advocates who know exactly what went wrong with cannabis and are naming the failure points now rather than after the market closes.

There are researchers — most of them women, most of them people of color, most of them working without the resources their white male counterparts attract — who are specifically designing trials for Black and Latino communities, recruiting in churches and community health centers and barbershops rather than university waiting rooms. There are Indigenous advocates filing formal objections to patent applications for compounds rooted in their ceremonial traditions. There are harm reduction workers documenting unguided use in communities that can’t afford clinics, building the evidence base that funded researchers haven’t bothered to construct.

None of this is happening because of the Trump executive order. It is happening despite the current framework.

The question isn’t whether psychedelics will transform American mental health care. Evidence suggests they might. The question is whether that transformation will reach everyone equally — or whether it will arrive, as so many medical breakthroughs before it have arrived, at an address that people from certain zip codes can’t afford to visit.

The people who paid the highest price for the drug war deserve more than a front-row seat to the drug gold rush. They deserve a share of what’s being built.

Whether this industry — and the government accelerating it — can reckon honestly with that debt remains, for now, an open question.

Maya Torres covers national cannabis and drug policy for CannabisInquirer.com with a focus on equity, expungement, and medical access.