🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We're the psychedelics newsletter whose idea of a contact sport is five minutes of unbroken eye contact. 😳

Robert Gallery got picked second in the 2004 NFL Draft. Then he spent the next eight years collecting concussions. (Ouch.) Ibogaine did what the painkillers couldn’t, and now he runs a nonprofit pushing the league to take psychedelic therapy seriously.

We asked Robert why for a full day he thought taking ibogaine was a mistake, what connects athletes and veterans in the psychedelic conversation, and how he’s pitching the NFL to get on board.

This experience is a weekend group psilocybin journey at Sangam Healing Center in Lakewood, Colorado, just outside Denver. The format is simple: Friday evening preparation, a full-day guided journey on Saturday, and a Sunday morning integration session. Groups are capped at 8 with at least one licensed facilitator for every four participants. Sangam's approach is trauma-informed and draws on a mix of breathwork, meditation, somatic practice, and Ayurvedic tradition.

When I retired, my body was done. I'd had ten surgeries over my career, three of them in my last off-season alone. I went back to training camp, and two weeks in, I was taking painkillers just to get out of bed. I knew I wasn’t going to make it. But the mental side was just as hard. When you can't perform at a level you've held for years, it messes with you.

After retirement came the failure complex and the identity crisis. I went from a completely structured life to sitting at home with a young child I barely knew, having spent entire seasons leaving before my family woke up and coming home after they were asleep.

Playing at that level, you have to go to a dark place to perform. That mentality doesn't switch off overnight. I started having outbursts and suicidal thoughts. I heard voices telling me my family would be better off without me. When a brain scan from my workers' comp case showed significant damage from years of subconcussive hits, that gave me hope. At least there was a physical explanation for what I was going through.

After a year and a half of sleep protocols, hormones, and light therapy, I was fractionally better. Then I heard Marcus and Amber Capone on the Team Never Quit podcast talking about ibogaine. Three weeks later I was in Mexico, off my antidepressants cold turkey, because I had nothing to lose.

The ibogaine felt like watching a reel of my life on an old TV screen. Images floated by, and I'd sort them. Throw the ones I didn't want into the atmosphere, pull the ones I wanted toward my heart. The day after, I was deathly sick. I couldn't move my legs. They put me in a wheelchair, and I was sure I’d taken it too far.

The most traction is coming from former athletes who are struggling. People hear my story and say, “that sounds like me.” After ibogaine, I was more open to talking about my experience, and that openness has been contagious. We've probably helped seven to ten guys get to a clinic in the past six months alone.

The biggest obstacle, like any organization doing this work, is funding. Not every athlete made the money people assume. There are guys who bounced around practice squads for years, made the minimum, and then are done. To them, an ibogaine treatment isn't accessible. So we want to give grants, and that takes money we're still building toward.

I've also built relationships on the research side. I was close with Dr. Nolan Williams before his passing, and I've worked with veterans organizations who are doing the same kind of advocacy. For guys like me with documented traumatic brain injury (TBI), the neurological evidence is there. That matters, because some people need to see the science before they'll take a personal story seriously.

On the legislative side, there's real frustration. You'll sit down with a politician who's completely on board, and then when it’s time to vote, they go the other way because of political pressure. But what happened with the Texas Ibogaine Initiative shows this isn't a fringe conversation anymore.

I'm an ambassador for the Americans for Ibogaine mission, so my role right now is largely supporting wherever state-level bills are moving. Texas was the big win. Getting state-funded ibogaine research off the ground was proof of concept, and now a lot of other states are trying to follow. I'm helping wherever I can be useful, which mostly means showing up and telling my story.

I'm scheduled to give testimony on a psilocybin bill in Iowa, where I was born and raised, and we're hoping to make a push in California, where I live now. We're not writing legislation. We're advocating for the people who are. I know how to tell my story, and I trust the people who understand the legal mechanics.

Some bills I’ve read have given me pause. But getting things moving matters more than getting them perfect on the first try. The infighting in the psychedelic community about whose approach is cleanest is not productive. Everyone's trying to get to the same place.

When I did ibogaine, I went through a VETS program with Navy SEALs, fighter pilots, and Air Force TACPs. I had massive imposter syndrome. I kept thinking, I'm just a football player, while these guys went to war. At one point, one of them grabbed me by the shirt and said, “Shut the hell up that you're just a football player. What’s happened to your brain on the field is the same as what’s happened to ours.” That changed something.

People's heartstrings get pulled for veterans, as they should. Athletes are met with skepticism, at best. “What do you have to complain about? You got paid to play a game?” The big contracts make headlines. You don't hear about the guy on a practice squad minimum who spent five years getting cut just to make a roster, ending up with barely enough to pay off his debt. So the empathy isn’t there, and neither is the assumption that you’d need help paying for treatment.

The through line is TBI. What playing football for many years does to your brain is real and documented, and it causes the same things you see in veterans: the suicide, the rage, the guys who've hurt their families. That's not a character flaw. You can't dismiss a brain scan the way you can dismiss "spoiled athletes who can't handle retirement."

This isn't a competition for sympathy. It's the same injury, and the more we stand together, the harder it is to ignore either of us.

The case starts with the indisputable fact that a concussion is inflammation. Ibogaine has anti-inflammatory effects. If you can show real neurological benefits for players still in the league, NFL owners start doing different math. At that point, it’s not alternative medicine. Now it’s safety infrastructure.

That’s a long term play. The NFL is a multi-billion dollar business, and it responds to data and money. But the league has moved before. When I started, you could play on painkillers, but THC in your system was an automatic fail. That's changed. We're already having early conversations with stakeholders, and the approach right now is education. The word "illegal" stops a lot of rooms before you even get started, so you build the case until the reflex softens.

My biggest ask for the league is transparency. Thursday night football is the obvious example. We all know playing Sunday night and suiting up again Thursday isn't good for a player's body. They should own that. The league has made real progress on concussion protocol, and nobody's trying to burn it down. Most of us would do it all over again. We just want guys taken care of as they’re playing and when it's over.

Join the Athletes for Care network, or make a donation to fund research and advocacy.

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

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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.