California Backs Psychedelic Research for Veterans

LOS ANGELES – When Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 113, he gave California the distinction of becoming the first state to fund psychedelic-assisted therapy research through an official budget appropriation. The legislation channels $4.7 million to the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine (CIAPM), an office within the California Health and Human Services Agency, earmarked for clinical research into psychedelic treatments for veterans whose PTSD has not responded to conventional care.

AB 113 absorbed language from Senate Bill 1224, the California Emerging Therapies Research Partnership Act. Under its terms, funding flows as grants to a University of California campus designated as the anchor institution for a federally registered clinical trial. Eligible substances include psilocybin, MDMA, ketamine, ibogaine, and DMT – but only within a federally registered trial, not through general clinical practice. The law also requires the state’s Department of Veterans Affairs to establish a California Veteran Emerging Therapies Research Advisory Council.

“California owes our veterans more than gratitude. We owe them action,” Newsom said after signing the bill. His words landed against a backdrop of roughly three years of advocacy by veterans who found conventional PTSD treatments insufficient.

The coalition behind the legislation was broad. Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions (VETS), which has supported more than 1,300 veterans and spouses since its founding in 2019, drove much of the long-term organizing. The Heroic Hearts Project, whose founder Jesse Gould worked alongside veterans, researchers, and bipartisan California leaders for more than five years to reach this outcome – called the appropriation a meaningful milestone. The American Legion, AMVETS, Healing Breakthrough, the Military Officers Association of America, and Vietnam Veterans of America also backed Sen. Brian W. Jones’s legislative push.

California has between 1.4 million and 1.8 million veterans – the largest total veteran population of any U.S. state. That fact adds both scale and political urgency to the bill.

AB 113 caps three consecutive years of California psychedelic research legislation. It follows AB 1103, signed in October 2025, which accelerated the state’s research approval process, and AB 2841, passed in 2024, which removed earlier barriers to psychedelic research altogether.

The state’s action arrives in a broader national context. Utah authorized a $1 million state-funded psychedelic research study for veterans earlier this year. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has launched a federal psilocybin trial for veterans with major depression, the FDA held public hearings this month on the therapeutic future of psychedelic compounds.

AB 113 doesn’t open psychedelic therapy to the public. It creates a tightly regulated research framework for those who have exhausted other options. For now, that’s precisely what its backers spent years asking for.

For anyone tracking the psychedelics sector, California’s appropriation carries a signal well beyond its dollar figure. State governments are no longer treating these substances as political liabilities. Instead, they are approaching them as scientific questions that deserve public funding. The clinical infrastructure being built at the state level today is the exact foundation that scalable, commercial access will require tomorrow. The more states invest in that groundwork now, the faster an evidence-based treatment framework takes shape for the broader market.