🫠 Psychonaut POV

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Welcome to Tricycle Day. We're the psychedelics newsletter that's much more comfy on a three-wheeler than a jet. The only G's we're pulling are gratitude and grounding breaths. 🌬️

Matthew "Whiz" Buckley went from landing F-18s on aircraft carriers to trading millions on Wall Street, but it took losing 16 fellow pilots and hitting rock bottom with addiction to discover his true mission. Now this former Navy fighter pilot is leading the charge to bring psychedelic healing to veterans and first responders through his No Fallen Heroes Foundation.

We asked Whiz how ibogaine saved his life after decades of trauma, why he thinks psilocybin could work just as well for treating brain injuries, and what happened when he walked into the VA Secretary's office to make the case for psychedelic therapy.

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What were the life experiences that led you to start the No Fallen Heroes Foundation?

It's been a lifelong journey that tracks back to my childhood. I was born and raised in south Philadelphia, one of six kids in a typical Irish Catholic family. I was sexually abused as a child, and then my middle sister Monica was killed by a drunk driver when she was 19. Her death was like a hand grenade to our family. I had a lot of childhood trauma and lost my faith for decades.

And what would somebody with childhood trauma do? Go in the military. I always knew I wanted to fly fighter jets off an aircraft carrier. So I became a Navy F-18 fighter pilot, and in 15 years of flying fighters, I lost 16 buddies in mishaps. They were all training accidents, not combat losses, which is even more devastating because it feels preventable. I also lost four F-18 brothers to suicide, including my best friend who was a groomsman in my wedding.

After 9/11, I got furloughed from American Airlines, where I’d been working as a commercial pilot, and ended up on Wall Street with a volatility options trading firm. I went from a fighter squadron where you trust people with your life to an office where I couldn't trust somebody to watch my wallet for five minutes. It was a horrible atmosphere. That pushed me further away from my wife, kids, and mission. I got wrapped up in the cocaine and alcohol culture. I was making more money than ever but feeling hollow.

Five years ago, when my most recent F-18 buddy killed himself, I looked at my wife and said, “We're not pharaohs. They're not going to put this money in our casket.” So we started a foundation to try and do something about veteran suicide. Then a close friend told me about Navy SEALs going to Mexico for psychedelic therapy. I signed right up, but I had no idea what I was getting into.

Which psychedelic medicine has been most helpful for your healing? Why do you think it worked for the specific challenges fighter pilots face?

Ibogaine, hands down. The anti-addictive properties are huge because there's a lot of alcoholics in aviation. Veteran aviators going to work at commercial airlines often have to lie to the FAA about their PTSD and self-medication. That makes them even more depressed because these are honorable people used to telling the truth.

More importantly, ibogaine helps with brain repair. Landing a jet on a carrier isn't healthy. If you sit in your car and a crane lifts you to the second floor and drops you, that's the force. Then there’s the catapult shot, which goes from zero to 200 miles per hour in a second, sending your brain to the back of your head. For a decade, I used to fly the F-18 on the edge of consciousness pulling nine Gs. Most likely, I had traumatic brain injury, and ibogaine helps repair or create new neural pathways.

My experience with ibogaine lasted 12 or 14 hours. It was the most challenging and spiritual event of my existence. I got to see my sister again and my father who died of a broken heart. I reconnected with God and was on my knees begging for forgiveness. With just a wave of energy, all my anger was gone. If I even smelled alcohol up to a year after the Ibogaine, I got physically sick.

Can you tell us about the study you're working on with Experience Onward in Oregon? What are you hoping to learn?

We're doing an athlete-veteran traumatic brain injury study with Daniel Carcillo. He’s got athletes diagnosed with TBI—a Super Bowl champ, NHL players, boxers—and I'm bringing veterans with TBI. We're going to do all the blood work and brain scans beforehand, then the psilocybin journey, then integration and measurements at 30, 60, and 90 days.

All these anecdotal stories we tell are great, but lawmakers and scientists need the data to shift the narrative. Before he opened his psilocybin service center, Danny had seven diagnosed concussions as a hockey player, and psilocybin regrew his neural pathways. He spent half a million bucks of his own money to track all that data himself.

I'm excited because this research could help validate that psilocybin is as good as Ibogaine for TBI. We still need the anecdotes to support the data because data's boring without an emotional story. Having veterans and MMA guys recover from traumatic brain injury is going to be compelling. Everything's above board since Experience Onward is licensed in Oregon.

You recently met with VA Secretary Doug Collins about psychedelics for veterans. How did that conversation go, and what do you hope it might lead to?

It was incredible timing. A hundred days into the administration, I hadn't heard anything bullish on psychedelics despite JD Vance talking about it on Rogan, Pete Hegseth sharing his friends’ life-saving experiences, and RFK Jr. tweeting that ibogaine being Schedule I is "absurd." So I took a flamethrower to the VA Secretary on Twitter, and he responded. The next day I woke up to a direct message from Secretary Collins saying he loved what I was doing and wanted to meet.

I walked into VA headquarters and went up to the 10th floor corner office overlooking the White House. The secretary came in and said, "If anybody's gonna do this, it's going to be us. And if it's gonna happen, it's going to be now."

I hit him with two main points. First, vouchers: If a vet goes to Oregon or Mexico, saves their own life, and saves the VA money on medications and PTSD therapy, why can't they give you the receipt and get reimbursed? Second, research: Don't reinvent the wheel and start studies from day zero. There's existing data from people like Dr. Deborah Mash who's been working with ibogaine since the early 90s.

I told him, you're an Air Force colonel, so you know how the military works. We don't attack A to get to B to get to C; we attack A through D in parallel. He was very receptive. We talked for over an hour. It was my four-year anniversary from sitting with the medicine, and there I was meeting with the VA Secretary. Pretty incredible full circle moment.

What's your take on the biopharma companies developing novel psychedelic compounds? Do you see that as the right approach?

I'm on the fence. Look, I get it. We want our Starbucks, and we want it now. Someone only has an hour to heal between yoga and picking the kids up. Not many people want to get their ass kicked for 14 hours like I did with ibogaine.

Some people can’t sit with the medicine. Maybe they have heart issues or a family history of schizophrenia. For those people, if you can take a pill and heal, good on you. But taking the sacred out of the psychedelic makes me pause. I needed those 14 hours. It was like a divine court case overseen by God. It wasn't as simple as "love your wife, stop drinking, go home." I needed all of it.

I'm on the advisory board for DemeRx with Dr. Mash. She's developing noribogaine, a non-psychedelic metabolite of ibogaine that still has the anti-addictive properties. It could potentially treat the 29 million Americans with alcohol use disorder with just a couple capsules. I support the effort, but I'm there to keep an eye on it. I want to make sure there's a program where veterans don't pay a dime.

My fear is that Big Pharma swoops in and buys these companies for obscene amounts of money just to shelve the medicine. Or that they come out with something new that's $30,000 for a single use. But I sleep at night knowing you can't patent a root, toad, or fungus.

Why don't we attack in parallel? There's something to be said for taking days off, being present with fellow humans, and seeing others heal. But if someone is squeezing healing between work and school, who am I to judge? The world's on fire, and I hope the rise of these medicines intersects with that soon. If it's going to help the world heal, do it.

Want more from Whiz?

Make a donation or apply for a grant from the No Fallen Heroes Foundation.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.