Psychedelic Science 2025 Opens With Pardons, and Talks Including NFL Players, Legal Reform, and Trauma Experts
Lucid News is publishing daily roundups of news from Psychedelic Science 2025, including coverage of talks and events that took place during the last three days of the conference. The coverage below is a continuation of the talks that took place on June 18, the first day of the conference. Our reporters cover NFL players speaking about their psychedelic use, criminal legal reform, healing different types of trauma, attempts to regulate the psychedelic substances DOI and DOC, healing for veterans, and pardons made by Governor Polis on the opening day.
You can read our other coverage of the first day of PS2025 here. Or read our coverage from 2023.
Colorado Governor Jared Polis Offers Pardons During First Day of Psychedelic Science
The first day of the 2025 Psychedelic Science conference in Denver opened with an act of clemency by Colorado Governor Jared Polis. During an address at the conference, Polis announced that he would pardon people who were convicted of state crimes related to psilocybin and psilocin. The executive order issued by Polis provides a full and unconditional pardon for these convictions in Colorado.
“These pardons [are] an important step forward for the individuals who now have this cleared from the record,” said Polis. “But also to really acknowledge the error in public policy that led to their conviction, creating a more just system to break down barriers and help them move on with their lives.”
According to Polis, the pardons would impact “only a handful” of psilocybin possession convictions in Colorado, but said that he would encourage local jurisdictions to also pardon people who had been convicted of these crimes. The governor pointed out that most of these convictions were handed down by local courts. Coloradans who were not pardoned and think they are eligible can apply for clemency through the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
“I am granting full and unconditional pardons for state convictions of possession of psilocybin and psilocin for those 21 years old or older at the time of the offense because possession of psilocybin and psilocin is no longer illegal in the State of Colorado and it should not be held against people since it is not a crime,” Polis said in his executive order.
The pardons issued by Polis are a direct result of the decriminalization of mushrooms containing psilocybin and psilocin for people aged 21 and older, which was passed by Colorado voters in 2022. The law also cleared the way for the state-licensed psilocybin therapy and healing centers, which have now opened in Colorado.
The governor signed another piece of legislation earlier this month, SB25-297, the implementation of the Colorado Natural Medicine Initiative, which granted him the power to issue the pardons. The governor had issued previous pardons for marijuana possession convictions in 2020 and 2021 following changes to the state’s cannabis laws. – Annie Oak Harrison
Healing Different Types of Trauma May Be Helped With Psychedelic Medicine
In a room filled with spectators, Dr. Jeff Morley—former police officer and now a licensed psychologist specializing in trauma—began his talk entitled, “Psychedelic Trauma Healing.” Morley opened by discussing the ways the medical community categorizes trauma, with the DSM criteria placing some people in a box, while leaving others out entirely.
Morley’s experience with trauma is nuanced. He described one of the more traumatizing experiences from his job, which wasn’t the adrenaline-filled, high-speed chases he experienced as an officer, but rather a moment of quiet defeat. When responding to a call from a nine-year-old boy about an abusive father, he failed to collect the evidence needed to implicate him. With no proof, there was nothing they could do—yet he feared for the child’s safety. This, Morley explained, is what he categorizes as “moral distress”: the feeling of helplessness that comes with being a protector who can’t always protect or a healer who can’t always heal.
Morley also opened up about his own experience with psychedelic medicine. For him, it opened up a whole new world—he saw God through ayahuasca experiences that helped him process and release deep levels of trauma from his past. These experiences, he said, taught him about “the power of things having the rightful place in my life… and treating plants and many things as sacred.”
Morley also shared anecdotes about his clients, to whom he has been able to offer MDMA therapy under special access in Canada. One client used several MDMA sessions to peel back layers of trauma after witnessing a tragic fire as a teenager. The first session focused on healing from the initial shock and horror, “coming back into her body… and having deeper compassion for her response then, and even now.” The second dealt with her anger and rage, and the third with grief. “These medicines are not for the faint of heart—for the patient or the therapist,” said Morley.
Morley’s talk reminds us that trauma is not limited to PTSD, but takes many forms, including the secondhand pain of witnessing unfixable ills in everyday life. It’s this kind of moral trauma that he seems most drawn to addressing, believing psychedelics to be a powerful tool in the healing process.
Watch our recap from this talk, including a short interview with Dr. Morley, here. – Joelle DelPrete
NFL Players Share Healing Experiences with Plant Medicines
At the 2023 Psychedelic Science conference, NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers joined podcast host Aubrey Marcus on the main stage to describe his life-changing, career-boosting ayahuasca experiences in the Amazon. This year, three former NFL players joined Marcus on the panel “Healing Beyond the Highlights: Elite Athletes and Psychedelics” to tell their own tales of psychedelic healing.
After a brutal loss in the 2019-2020 NFL playoffs, safety Jordan Poyer started abusing alcohol. “I drank for three months straight. I was so lost in this world, so unaware of my intentions and actions.” Hitting rock bottom prompted him to get sober, and he reached his career zenith with the Buffalo Bills when he was named to the 2021 All-Pro Team. He had reached his highest goal, but he did not feel the fulfillment he had anticipated. Then he heard Rodgers speak about ayahuasca on a podcast and traveled to Costa Rica for a ceremony.
“It opened up my world to everything,” Poyer said. For the first time, he saw himself as not merely an athlete, but “a light being here to help raise collective awareness.”
Robert Gallery, a retired offensive guard, also struggled with alcohol use after his professional career ended. Anger gripped him in sudden bursts, alienating his family. Based on his symptoms, his neurologist diagnosed him with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), and he developed suicidal ideation, thinking at times it was necessary to free his family from himself. Gallery said his life changed when he heard VETS co-founders Marcus and Amber Capone speak about ibogaine on a podcast, prompting him to travel to Mexico for treatment with ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT. He stopped drinking and reported numerous cognitive and emotional benefits.
For former offensive lineman Jon Feliciano, it was DMT that changed things. He became aware of psychedelic healing after watching MAPS founder Rick Doblin on The Joe Rogan Experience. DMT helped Feliciano understand his complex childhood trauma in a new light and focus on how he can show up better for his wife and daughter. Like his fellow athletes, he credited psychedelic medicine for saving his life.
All three emphasized that plant medicines are not magic pills. They related medicine work to “practice” for “the game of daily life.”
“You can’t just come home and do the same things you did before you left,” Poyer said.
“It’s not changing who I am at my core,” Gallery added, emphasizing that ibogaine helped him “open his mind to others for who they are.”
In a landscape once dominated by clinical trials, professional athletes now speak with a loud megaphone on the efficacy of psychedelic medicines. – Sean Lawlor
Lessons from Criminal Legal Reform
On June 18 at Psychedelic Science 2025, panelists presented a critical conversation on the intersection of psychedelic policy and criminal legal reform during a panel titled “Lessons from Criminal Legal Reform: Sentencing, Retroactive Reform, and Clemency.” Moderated by Sia Henry, a seasoned advocate with roots in criminology and psychology, the panel spotlighted the persistent consequences of the War on Drugs and the urgent need for holistic, retroactive justice.
Panelists Donte West and Adrian Rocha of the Last Prisoner Project, alongside Michael Diaz of Better Days Delivery, offered personal and professional insights on the real-world impacts of drug convictions. West and Rocha spoke powerfully about the lasting harm inflicted on communities — particularly Black and Brown — where criminal records hinder access to housing, employment, and education long after a sentence ends. Diaz offered a business-owner’s lens, highlighting how these barriers undermine reentry and perpetuate cycles of marginalization.
A significant portion of the discussion focused on the cumbersome and often inequitable process of record clearance. Panelists explained the patchwork nature of expungement and clemency laws across jurisdictions, underscoring the burden placed on individuals to navigate and pay for their own freedom. The group challenged the claim that automatic expungement is “too expensive” for states, citing it instead as a moral and policy failure.
Optimism emerged in the discussion of Colorado’s new bill allowing pardons for certain psychedelic-related convictions — a tangible step toward justice in a shifting drug policy landscape. But as Henry emphasized, decriminalization is incomplete without retroactive relief. Legal reforms must look backward to repair damage already done.
In a forward-looking segment, panelists urged policymakers to include people charged with drug sales in the conversation. True drug policy reform, they argued, must reckon with the socio-economic realities that push individuals into illicit economies — especially in the absence of legal, regulated pathways.
The session closed on a hopeful note. From automatic expungement campaigns to broader restorative justice movements, the panelists shared their belief in a future where liberation, not punishment, defines our response to substance use.
This panel was a timely, sobering, and ultimately hopeful call to center justice and equity in psychedelic policy reform, making clear that ending the War on Drugs means freeing its casualties.
Watch Sia Henry open this panel here, and listen as panelists take questions from the audience here. – Vaughn Jefferson
The Uphill Battle to Prevent DEA Scheduling of DOI and DOC
This video recaps the PS2025 panel “Perspectives on Drug Scheduling from Two Lawyers Who Took on the DEA” and examines the psychedelic research chemicals 2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodoamphetamine (DOI) and 2,5-dimethoxy-4-chloroamphetamine (DOC). These substances are currently under review by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for placement under Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act, the most restrictive category, reserved for drugs that have no medical use and a high potential for abuse.
The discussion includes comments from moderator Gina Giorgio, Director of Strategy and Development at Students for Sensible Drug Policy, and two attorneys who argued against the DEA placing these substances in Schedule 1, so that they can be researched for their possible therapeutic potential.
On June 20, days after this talk, a judge with the DEA recommended that DOI and DOC be placed in Schedule I. DEA Administrative Law Judge, Paul Soeffing, said he advised the agency to move forward with its plan to place DOI and DOC in this category. – Joelle DelPrete
Psychedelics, Research, and Healing for Veterans at PS2025
Navy Veteran Kegan Gill set the stage for researchers at the 2025 Psychedelic Science conference to talk about the latest investigations into psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for veterans. Gill described how he used ayahuasca to recover from crashing into the ocean at 695 miles per hour—the fastest naval ejection in history.
Then, in a talk titled “Psychedelics for Veterans: The Latest Research and What it Means for Healing the Veteran Community,” Grace Blest-Hopley of Heroic Hearts Project, the organization that sponsored Gill’s ayahuasca therapy, moderated a panel of researchers studying veterans. Lynette Averill of Baylor College of Medicine, and Brandon Weiss and Dylan Orion Caliph of Johns Hopkins University, discussed their latest discoveries and thoughts on psychedelic-assisted treatments for vets.
In his current clinical trial, Weiss is using psilocybin to test how the substance might help veterans recover from PTSD. He is monitoring participants in two-hour intervals in the days before and after their psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy session to examine how the various psychotherapy components of a clinical trial using psychedelics—preparation therapy, integration therapy, and the psychedelic therapy itself—contribute to a person’s recovery.
Weiss reflected on what most interested him: the effect of a psilocybin session itself. “In the majority of our participants,” he says, “there is a rapid decline in symptoms before any psychosocial support.” While he notes that there is still tremendous variability in response — some participants recovered more gradually, and some didn’t respond to the psychedelic therapy at all — he said that this finding challenged the current view of what many believe is the healing component in our current models of therapy.
Averill echoed Weiss’s findings in her own research on psilocybin. The study she and her team designed, which she is the principal investigator for and says is “the country’s first-ever state-funded psychedelic study,” began this February and gives two psilocybin doses to veterans with PTSD. She says that her observation of the veterans’ rapid symptom relief goes beyond just the psychological.
She spoke of a veteran who said he had rage vibrating in his hands. However, at one point during his psilocybin dose, he returned from the bathroom and said, “Oh my God, look at my hands.” They were steady. The veteran said this had not been the case in 15 years. Averill says this is “very exciting,” as it highlights how much potential there is for psilocybin to change a person’s physiology — such as improving their sleep quality and decreasing their baseline heart rate, which are often issues for veterans with PTSD.
Supporting Families and Caregivers
Averill added that there is a need to design studies and therapies that include and support the family and caregivers of veterans. Caliph remarked that in his study, which has enrolled more than 1,000 veterans and spouses receiving primarily ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT treatment, 80-90% of participants were experiencing remission of their symptoms one month after their treatment.
The researchers examined what they believe is the reason for such dramatic improvement in their participants. Averill said the nature of their therapy and support is different from the Westernized medical model of mental health treatment, which typically includes a 15-minute meeting with a psychiatrist, social worker, or psychologist.
“There is a very intentional slowing and presence, and everything is done with intentionality,” she says, attributing this approach to the rapid and robust improvements seen in study participants. “I think psychedelics and psychedelic-assisted therapies have so many components,” said Averill. “They shouldn’t really be revolutionary. They should be the way we’re always approaching these things: keeping humanity at the center. […] I think that’s just missing from so much of what’s happening in health care.”
Looking at upcoming research, Blest-Hopley of Heroic Hearts Project said that their organization will soon be collaborating with the University of Colorado-Boulder to study chronic pain in veterans who are using psychedelic therapies for treatment. He said researchers will be monitoring biomarkers, such as the gut microbiome and heart rate, to develop “a solid amount of evidence on how this work affects veterans.”
Caliph and Averill will be separately studying the families of veterans, including the ripple effects of these therapies. Weiss just began a trial studying psilocybin and MDMA together; participants take MDMA and then psilocybin 30 minutes later. Apart from how the substances could work together, he’s also interested in seeing how psilocybin and MDMA differ in their effects. According to Averill, this growing body of research is showing greater reductions in participants’ CAPS-5 — a clinical scale measuring PTSD symptoms.
Averill adds she is eager to see a “no stone unturned approach to finding any and all tools we have to help people get from potentially tolerating existence to having that foundation to move forward and build lives they want to be living.” – Andrew Meissen