A decorated Marine told me he had to step outside the law to save his own life. After years of following the rules, the only therapy that worked for his trauma was one he was not allowed to receive legally. His story is not an outlier. It is the predictable result of a system that forces people who are out of options to choose between suffering and breaking the law.
There is a particular kind of cruelty in telling someone who has exhausted every approved treatment that they must simply wait. Wait for another trial. Wait for another committee. Wait for a system that is moving slower than their suffering.
I have met veterans who did everything their country asked of them and then some. They survived war. They came home. They went to therapy, took the pills, followed the rules. And still they woke up every morning with panic, despair, or a quiet sense that life had slipped out of reach. For some of them, the only thing that helped was a therapy they were not legally allowed to receive.
I most recently heard this story from Gary Hess, a decorated Marine Corps infantry officer who served in combat and spent years afterward trying, and failing, to find relief from severe trauma. Like many veterans, Gary did everything the system asked of him. He went through conventional therapies. He took the prescribed medications. None of it worked.
What finally helped was psychedelic-assisted therapy. But there was a catch.
To access it, Gary had to step outside the law, or leave the country he served in order to seek treatment.
Today, Gary is not just a survivor. He is a national leader in the fight to end veteran suicide, working at the center of policy efforts to expand access to breakthrough mental health care. His credibility comes not from theory, but from lived experience. He knows what it means to come home from war and discover that the tools offered for healing are simply not enough.
And his story, sadly, is not unique.
Every day, veterans and others with life-threatening or treatment-resistant conditions are forced into impossible choices. Some travel overseas for care. Others turn to underground providers, unregulated and unsupported. When the law blocks safe access, it does not eliminate demand. It simply pushes people into riskier situations.
That is not a failure of science. It is a failure of policy.
The Freedom to Heal Act is a modest bill with an unambitious premise: if a patient is facing a life-threatening condition, has exhausted all approved treatments, and a drug has already passed basic human safety testing, then the government should not stand in the way of a doctor and patient deciding together whether to try it.
This principle already exists in American law. It is called Right to Try. It was signed into law in 2018, during the Trump administration, with broad political support and a simple moral logic: when time is running out, patients should not be trapped by process.
But when Congress passed Right to Try, it left out an entire class of compounds because of how they are scheduled under the Controlled Substances Act. MDMA and psilocybin, despite decades of research and promising clinical data, were excluded by default.
The Freedom to Heal Act corrects that omission. It does not legalize recreational drug use. It does not short-circuit the FDA. It does not open the floodgates. It simply allows doctors to access certain investigational therapies, under supervision, for patients who have run out of time.
Much of the resistance to this idea comes from fear. Psychedelics still carry cultural baggage. For some readers, the word conjures images from the 1960s rather than modern clinical settings. But policy should not be shaped by stigma or nostalgia. It should be shaped by evidence and lived reality.
Here is that reality: Americans are already seeking these therapies. Veterans are traveling overseas to receive them. Others are turning to underground providers because the alternative is unbearable. When laws make lawful care impossible, they do not protect patients. They abandon them.
Other countries have recognized this. Australia not only allows psychiatrists to prescribe MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin, their Department of Veterans Affairs actually reimburses these treatments. Switzerland has permitted controlled therapeutic use for years. These systems are not chaotic. They are careful. Patients are screened. Therapists are trained. Outcomes are tracked.
And people are getting better.
This is not a partisan issue, and the bill reflects that. The Freedom to Heal Act is supported by Democrats and Republicans who do not agree on much else, but agree on this: the current system is failing people who are out of options.
This is where the moral case becomes unavoidable.
If we accept that adults have the right to refuse treatment, then we must also accept that, in extremis, they have the right to pursue it. Especially when the alternative is continued suffering, institutional abandonment, or death.
The Freedom to Heal Act does not ask Americans to agree on psychedelics. It asks something simpler: whether we trust doctors and patients more than blanket prohibitions written decades ago for different reasons, in a different era.
No one is suggesting these therapies are magic, or that research should stop. Clinical trials must continue, and standards must remain high. But compassion and caution are not opposites. We are capable of holding both at once.
A system that forces veterans to leave the country for care, or patients to break the law to survive, is not a system worth defending. It is a system that has lost sight of its purpose. Freedom to Heal would not fix everything. But it would fix something important. It would tell people like Gary Hess, and countless others like him, that the country they served has not given up on them.
Sometimes the most responsible thing government can do is step aside.