Trump's psychedelic whisperer and his mission to heal Britain

Bryan Hubbard, the Republican Party's unlikely psychedelic evangelist, becomes even more animated when I ask him about his experiences of tripping — despite being forced to repeatedly witness his own passing during a high-dose psilocybin mushroom trip a few years ago.

- MATTHA BUSBY

“Whenever death would come, I was always in a hospital, all these tubes coming out of me, all my family gathered around my bed, crying and shaking their heads,” he says, sitting beside me on a sofa in a Shoreditch hotel lobby bar.

“Then I would pass away, and I would enter an indescribably beautiful celestial plane. It’s going to make me cry thinking about it, oh my...” The 50-year-old lawyer from Tennessee is welling up, overcome by the memory of the profound experience. He takes a couple of seconds to wipe away his tears and continues: “I was flooded with the most ineffably joyful, all-encompassing love that I think one has the capacity to feel, then I'd be reborn,” he says with a preaching pastor’s poetic flair. “I felt the love of God in a way that I had never felt in my life.”

It all seems quite woo-woo. But Hubbard, who is in London to speak at the SXSW conference, would not be seen dead in tie-dye, not even during a hallucination. He is a lifelong GOP voter and practising Christian who did not trip until 2018. Somehow, he has become “the Republican psychedelic whisperer” making the gospel of psychedelic reform palatable throughout Red country.

It was earlier this year that Hubbard set in motion a historic chain of events that led US President Donald Trump to sign an executive order accelerating research into psychedelic therapies and expanding access to end-of-life patients — the biggest green light yet for an oft-maligned field long caught in the crosshairs of a politically motivated war on drugs.

Oval Office conversion