💸 The Tape

In a signing ceremony that would have raised eyebrows in any prior administration, President Donald Trump on Saturday inked an executive order designed to accelerate federal research and patient access to psychedelic drugs — flanked in the Oval Office by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, and, in a tableau that captures the political moment as well as anything could, podcaster Joe Rogan.

The order itself is meaningful. The aside about cannabis may be even more so.

What the Order Actually Does

The executive order directs the FDA to issue Commissioner's National Priority Vouchers to qualifying psychedelic drugs that hold Breakthrough Therapy designations for serious mental illness. According to FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, three priority review vouchers will be issued next week to three serotonin 2A agonists, with agency decisions expected later this summer. Statnews Those vouchers can compress review timelines from months to weeks — a meaningful acceleration for a class of drugs that has been navigating regulatory purgatory for the better part of a decade.

The order also instructs the FDA and DEA to establish an expanded access pathway for eligible patients to receive investigational psychedelics — including ibogaine — under the framework of the 2018 Right to Try Act. The federal government is also committing $50 million for further research into ibogaine specifically CNN, the West African plant-derived compound that has become a cause célèbre for combat veterans seeking treatment for PTSD and traumatic brain injury.

Other provisions instruct agencies to improve data sharing between the FDA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, and facilitate fast rescheduling of any psychedelic drugs that become FDA approved Fox News. The DEA and DOJ will begin rescheduling reviews after successful Phase 3 trials, and Trump indicated rescheduling of approved drugs would move "very quickly." Statnews

The compounds in scope read like a 1960s Berkeley reading list: psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, and ibogaine. The framing, however, is decidedly 2026: veterans, treatment-resistant depression, and a national mental health crisis the order pegs at 14 million American adults with serious mental illness, roughly 8 million of whom are on prescription medication NPR.

Where the VA Already Stands

The order doesn't drop into a vacuum. The Department of Veterans Affairs has been quietly building a psychedelics program for over a year. The VA is now participating in at least five psychedelic trials across New York, California, and Oregon. NPR The agency's first MDMA-assisted therapy study — funded in late 2024 and run through researchers affiliated with Brown and Yale at VA medical centers in Providence and West Haven — represented the VA's first investment in psychedelic research in more than 50 years.

That work, paired with parallel psilocybin studies, has given the VA a running start that the new executive order will only amplify. The data-sharing mandate between FDA and VA is the operationally significant piece here: it stitches together two parallel research streams that, until now, have been largely talking past each other.

HHS, RFK Jr., and the Politics of Permission

On the HHS side, the directional signal has been clear for some time. Secretary Kennedy has floated support for expanding access to psychedelics, and the Trump administration installed a doctor specializing in psychedelic-assisted therapy in a high-level position at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). drugfree Saturday's order operationalizes what had previously been rhetorical posture.

It's worth noting what the order does not do. It does not reschedule any psychedelic. It does not compel the DEA to do so. As legal scholars have pointed out, presidents cannot compel the rescheduling of a controlled substance — they can only request scientific and medical review by the DEA and HHS Petrie-Flom Center. The actual reclassification mechanics still require an agency process that, as cannabis operators well know, can stretch indefinitely.

Compass Pathways: The Furthest Along

Among the publicly traded names tracking this development, Compass Pathways (Nasdaq: CMPS) is the one with the most immediate skin in the game. The company's lead asset, COMP360 — a synthetic, proprietary formulation of psilocybin — is the furthest-developed classic psychedelic in the regulatory pipeline.

The Phase 3 program has now delivered two consecutive wins:

• In June 2025, the COMP005 trial met its primary endpoint, with a single 25 mg dose of COMP360 producing a significant reduction in depression severity at six weeks on the MADRS scale HCP Live in patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD).

• On February 17, 2026, Compass announced that COMP006 also met its primary endpoint, with two 25 mg doses administered three weeks apart producing a statistically significant MADRS reduction at week 6 versus a 1 mg control. HCP Live

Compass has requested an FDA meeting and anticipates submitting a New Drug Application in Q4. HCP Live Twenty-six-week Part B data from COMP006 is expected in early Q3 2026. Compasspathways Translation: COMP360 is the compound most likely to be sitting on Commissioner Makary's desk when those priority vouchers start moving — and the most likely first candidate for a near-term FDA approval that would, per Trump's order, trigger expedited DEA rescheduling.

And Then There Was Cannabis

Which brings us to the moment that should make every cannabis operator sit up straight.

During the same Oval Office signing ceremony, Trump turned to what appeared to be a DOJ or White House official and, in remarks captured on video, said: "You're going to get the rescheduling done, right, please? Will you get the rescheduling done, please? You know, they're slow-walking me on rescheduling." Marijuana Moment

The president did not specifically name cannabis, but the timing matters: it has been four months since Trump directed the attorney general to complete the process of moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III "in the most expeditious manner." Marijuana Moment That hasn't happened.

The juxtaposition is hard to miss. In a single ceremony, Trump used the word "psychedelics" to describe a category that includes LSD, MDMA, and an obscure West African shrub root, and pledged to "dramatically accelerate" their availability — while in essentially the same breath complaining that his own administration is dragging its feet on rescheduling a substance that is already legal for adult use in 24 states and medically legal in nearly 40.

For an industry that has spent years watching the DEA find new ways to take its time, the optics are uncomfortable. Psilocybin — a Schedule I drug with no commercial market and no state-legal infrastructure — is being handed FDA priority vouchers within a week. Cannabis, a Schedule I drug with roughly $30 billion in legal annual sales, remains in the regulatory queue the president himself directed to be cleared.

The Bigger Picture

Step back from the Joe Rogan optics and the "Can I have some, please?" jokes (yes, Trump made one), and Saturday's order is genuinely consequential. It validates a research direction that has been institutionally suspect since 1970. It hands the VA a federal mandate to do at scale what it has been doing in pilot form. It creates a regulatory glide path for the first generation of psychedelic medicines — Compass's COMP360 chief among them — that could be commercially available within 18 to 24 months.

But the cannabis aside is the tell. The administration has now publicly demonstrated two speeds: priority-vouchers-by-next-week for compounds with podcaster constituencies, and four-months-and-counting for a sector with actual revenue, actual employment, and actual state-level regulatory frameworks already built out.

The federal hemp ban looming on the horizon adds another layer to the asymmetry. The same federal apparatus that will soon be expediting access to ibogaine — a compound the NIH previously discontinued research on due to cardiovascular toxicity — is simultaneously preparing to wipe out a multi-billion-dollar consumer hemp market on safety grounds.

Welcome to drug policy in 2026, where the speed of reform appears to correlate less with risk profile or market readiness than with who's standing behind the Resolute Desk on signing day.

📈 Dog Walkers

$CMND ( ▼ 13.77% ) Reports Topline Data

Clearmind Medicine just cleared a meaningful hurdle in the race to develop psychedelic-derived treatments that don't actually require a psychedelic experience.

The clinical-stage biotech announced that CMND-100, its proprietary non-hallucinogenic oral drug candidate for treating Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), has met the primary endpoint in its FDA-approved Phase I/IIa clinical trial. Results from the study's third cohort confirmed a high safety profile even at the highest dosage administered to date, with no serious adverse events reported and continued favorable tolerability consistent with earlier cohorts.

The trial is a multinational, multicenter study evaluating the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics, and preliminary efficacy of CMND-100 in patients with moderate to severe AUD. Meeting the primary safety and tolerability endpoint across escalating doses is exactly what you want to see at this stage — it keeps the program on track for continued advancement and gives regulators confidence that the compound can be pushed further.

What makes CMND-100 particularly interesting is its positioning as a second-generation psychedelic neuroplastogen — a compound designed to deliver the therapeutic benefits associated with psychedelic mechanisms without the hallucinogenic effects. For AUD, a condition affecting millions worldwide with limited effective treatment options, a well-tolerated oral therapy that doesn't require supervised psychedelic sessions could represent a significant practical advantage.

It's still early days — Phase I/IIa is about safety, not efficacy proof — but for Clearmind, hitting the primary endpoint cleanly is the green light the pipeline needed.

🗞️ The News

📺 YouTube

Senator Rand Paul Hemp Plan Sparks Debate | TTB Weekly Recap

What we will cover:

✅ The tone is shifting again across the cannabis industry—and this week’s developments made that clear.

In the latest Trade To Black Weekly Recap presented by FRE Pouch, host Shadd Dales breaks down three key themes: growing policy fragmentation in Washington, continued delays at the state level, and a widening gap between operators on the business side.

On the policy front, Senator Rand Paul introduced a bipartisan hemp bill that would allow states to opt out of a federal crackdown on hemp-derived THC products. While it’s being framed as flexibility, the bigger issue is what it creates—a patchwork system that adds complexity for operators and investors.

At the state level, Virginia’s adult-use rollout continues to move slowly, with a new delay pushing potential retail sales further into 2027.