(The Center Square) – Texas set aside $50 million for the psychoactive drug ibogaine trials on the condition that someone else match it. No drug company submitted a qualifying proposal. The federal government has offered to match state investments instead.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows said March 31 that the Texas Health and Human Services Commission had announced the day before that no drug company submitted a proposal meeting the law's requirements. Texas would proceed with its own research program, they said, and intended to fully fund it. They did not say what that would cost. President Donald Trump signed an executive order April 18 directing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to allocate at least $50 million toward partnering with states on psychedelic research.
Katharine Harris, a drug policy fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy, said replacing private money with federal money changes who carries the program.
"A state-federal partnership essentially puts all of the risk on public funds, i.e., taxpayer dollars," she told The Center Square.
Ibogaine is a psychoactive compound derived from the roots of the iboga shrub, native to Central Africa, and a Schedule I controlled substance in the United States. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says published reports suggest it may help treat substance use disorders, mood disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. The agency also says the drug carries known risks, including cardiac effects associated with life-threatening arrhythmias and death, and animal studies showing dose-dependent brain injury.
Three days after the order, HHS announced the money would flow through an initiative called EVIDENT, run by its Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H. EVIDENT will fund up to $139.4 million for behavioral health research. At least $50 million of that, HHS said, would "match state government investments in psychedelic research for populations with serious mental illness." ARPA-H confirmed it is the same $50 million the executive order directed it to allocate.
Senate Bill 2308 bars Texas from spending its own money until someone else puts up a match. Section 491.055(d) of the Texas Health and Safety Code says the commission "may not disburse funds" until matching funds are received "from sources other than the state." A separate section requires any consortium's proposal to include financial disclosures verifying its "capacity to fully match state funding with funds received from non-state sources." The commission selected UTHealth Houston in December 2025 to lead a consortium called IMPACT, which includes the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, or UTMB, and a dozen other Texas institutions.
Harris said the statute's wording leaves the door open to Washington.
"Yes, I think federal money could satisfy the requirement, because the legislature did not specify that the funds had to be private, only that they could not be state funds," she said. "But that may stray a little from the legislative intent, which seemed aimed at creating a public-private partnership that would have private entities assume some of the risk."
The state's claim to at least 20% of revenue attributable to intellectual property and other commercial rights arising from the trials would survive, Harris said, unless lawmakers change it.
Whether anyone has asked Washington for that money is not clear. The commission did not answer questions Monday or Thursday, referring The Center Square to a webpage that says contract development began but that recent plans from the consortium "do not meet the requirements of Chapter 491, Health and Safety Code, including those related to matching state funds and allocation of revenue attributable to intellectual property and other rights."
Asked whether a contract had been executed and whether any money had been disbursed, a commission press officer replied, "Please refer to my prior response."
Patrick's and Burrows' offices did not respond. State Sen. Tan Parker, who authored the bill, did not respond. UTHealth Houston and UTMB did not respond.
State Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Waxahachie, one of two House members who voted against the bill, said the state should never have been in the business of paying for the trials.
Harrison, who was chief of staff at HHS and worked on loosening federal restrictions on Schedule I research during Trump's first term, said he supports studying ibogaine and opposes making Texans pay for it.
"You can support the research, but also believe it's not the role of the Texas state government to force taxpayers to fund it," Harrison told The Center Square. "We're effectively taxing Texans out of their homes and then forcing them to fund psychedelic research."
Federal dollars would not change that, he said. "It's still taxpayer money. My constituents pay federal taxes and state taxes."
ARPA-H has not spent any of the $50 million. The money "will be distributed to performers selected for future awards," the agency told The Center Square in response to questions, and the psychedelic research awards it has already made are not drawn from it. The agency said it has contacted every state about the matching funds, Texas included.
FDA published a request for information Tuesday describing the trial design it is considering for early-phase ibogaine studies, with comments due Nov. 20. The notice says HHS, through ARPA-H, is funding a program to collect safety and efficacy data through early-phase trials.
That program is a solicitation, not a trial. ARPA-H said the research FDA described refers to an effort called ASCENT-IBO, which is open for proposals and has not selected any awardees. The agency's own description of the program says no clinical trials of ibogaine with the required federal authorization currently exist in the United States.
ARPA-H also said it "contributed to the development" of the FDA notice. FDA did not answer when The Center Square asked which parts of the department helped shape the proposed trial design.
The notice describes an inpatient unit equipped to manage a life-threatening arrhythmia, with continuous cardiac rhythm monitoring, a physician-led team trained in advanced cardiac life support, a defibrillator at the bedside, emergency cardiac pacing and ventilator support. Participants would stay at least 36 hours after a single dose, with at least two staff monitoring each one during the drug's acute effects and cognitive testing repeated for 12 months.
Thomas Knuijver, a Dutch addiction medicine physician whose studies the FDA cites twice in the notice, ran something considerably lighter. His patients got half-hourly rhythm monitoring on a psychiatry unit, with a resuscitation team on call and one nurse assigned to each patient who could also handle other work. Asked what a single ibogaine treatment costs, Knuijver told The Center Square it would run roughly the equivalent of three days in intensive care plus two weeks of follow-up on a general ward.
FDA's notice says the central question has not changed since the agency's advisory committee took up ibogaine in 1993: whether a dose exists high enough to help patients and low enough to avoid brain injury. That question, the agency wrote, "remains unresolved."
Commented