It’s Not Mushrooms: LSD Is the Psychedelic That Marks a Generation of Vets

The figure is 4.8 million. That’s how many American veterans have tried psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, or MDMA at some point and it amounts to more than one in four. It’s not a rounding error, not a fringe, and not the handful of psychonauts you might picture. It’s a population the size of Los Angeles, drawn from the ranks of people who once wore the uniform, and until now nobody had counted them properly.

The counting comes from the 2025 RAND Psychedelics Survey, the first nationally representative attempt to ask veterans, specifically and by substance, what they’ve taken and what they think the law should do about it. Michelle Priest, Terry Schell, Ben Senator, and Beau Kilmer, working out of RAND’s Drug Policy Research Center, put the questions to 10,122 people, of whom 1,339 were veterans, and then did the careful statistical work of making that sample stand in for the whole.

What they found is a portrait of a group that is slightly out ahead of everyone else. Nearly one in four veterans backed legal use of psilocybin. For LSD the figure was 11 percent, for MDMA 9 percent. On the face of it that looks a lot like the general public. But the general public is younger, more female, and less white than the veteran population, and psychedelic attitudes track heavily with all three. So the RAND team did the honest thing and compared veterans with nonveterans who matched them on age, sex, race, and ethnicity. Line them up like that, and veterans pull ahead: more likely to support legal psilocybin, more likely to support legal LSD, than their demographic twins in civilian life.

The Acid Generation, Still Here

LSD is where the veteran signature shows up most sharply. Almost 20 percent of veterans said they had used it in their lifetime, a rate that stays elevated even after you strip out the demographic differences. Mescaline, too, ran high. It is worth remembering who these older veterans are: men who came of age when acid was moving through barracks and college campuses alike, and who carried that history forward into a survey taken more than half a century later.

Then there are the substances almost nobody has touched but a surprising number are eyeing. Fewer than one in three hundred veterans has ever tried ibogaine, the West African shrub extract that has become a kind of last-resort pilgrimage drug for PTSD, with veterans flying to clinics in Mexico because they cannot get it at home. Yet about 5 percent of veterans who had never tried it said they would. The same gap shows up for DMT: barely more than 1 percent have used it, but eight times that many are curious. Curiosity, it turns out, runs well ahead of experience.

All of which sits on top of a policy landscape that has been shifting fast, and in contradictory directions. In April 2026 President Trump signed an executive order to expedite and fund psychedelic research for mental health, with veteran advocates standing in the room as he did it. Three states now allow supervised psilocybin use. The VA is funding its own clinical trials. And yet on 1 October 2025 the military added psilocin, the compound your body makes after eating magic mushrooms, to its standard drug-testing panel. The messages a veteran receives about these drugs are, to put it gently, mixed.

The Question Nobody Can Answer

Which brings us to the most human finding in the whole report, and the one that should trouble anyone who cares about how vets get care. The researchers asked a simple thing: if a veteran told their VA doctor they had used psilocybin, or MDMA, could they lose their benefits? Nearly half had no idea. Forty-eight percent were unsure about psilocybin, 46 percent about MDMA. Only a small minority felt confident the answer was no.

Hundreds of thousands of people who might benefit from talking to their doctor about a substance they have taken, staying silent because they cannot tell whether honesty carries a penalty. The VA itself has hardly cleared the fog. A press release from the agency in May 2026 warned that “VA strongly discourages self-medicating or attempting to replace other mental health treatment options with psychedelics or any other unprescribed substances.” True enough, and cautious, but it is not the same as telling a veteran their pension is safe.

The authors point to an uncomfortable precedent. When states began legalizing medical cannabis, it took the VA nearly two decades to issue clear guidance that veterans would not be denied benefits for discussing their use with a doctor. Twenty years of silence, during which people presumably kept things from the very clinicians meant to help them. If the same clock is now ticking on psychedelics, the report argues, the time to reset it is now, not in 2045.

Veterans themselves seem ready for something more coherent. Given a hypothetical world where the FDA has approved psilocybin-assisted therapy, about 54 percent wanted the VA to provide or pay for it; for MDMA-assisted therapy, roughly 45 percent. And what they favored was not rigid institutional control but flexibility; the VA covering costs while letting either its own clinicians or community providers do the work. In other words, they want psychedelic therapy treated like any other medicine that works: available, funded, and not something you have to whisper about.

The RAND team is careful about what its numbers can bear. Veterans are not one thing; a Vietnam-era draftee and a recent Afghanistan returnee share a category but little else, and this survey can’t yet separate them. Past-year use of most of these drugs is so rare that the error bars swallow any firm conclusion. But the broad shape is clear enough. A large and largely invisible group of veterans has a history with these substances, growing curiosity about them, and almost no idea where they stand with the institution that holds their benefits.

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