Frank Biden Says He’s Talked to Older Brother Joe Biden about Legalizing Psychedelics for Medical Treatment

Frank Biden said in a recent interview that he has talked about the benefits of psychedelics to older brother President Joe Biden, amid a push by the industry to legalize them for medical treatment.

“[T]he psychedelic can be considered a medicine, whether it’s ketamine, LSD, or the way I like to refer it to is ayahuasca, the godfather of them all,” Biden said Wednesday on SiriusXM’s The Michael Smerconish Program. Biden also called it a “problem” that they are illegal.

Smerconish, who said he “embraced” everything Biden said, asked him if he had ever “shared with your brother” his views.

“I won’t push it too far, but I will ask you, have you ever shared with your brother what you’ve just shared with my audience? Does he know your view of the world on this issue?” Smerconish asked.

Biden responded affirmatively, adding that he was just talking to Joe Biden “brother-to-brother”:

Yes. He is very open-minded. Put it that way. I don’t want to speak, I’m talking brother-to-brother. Brother-to-brother. The question is, is the world, is the US ready for this? My opinion is that we are on the cusp of a consciousness that needs to be brought about to solve a lot of the problems in and around addiction, but as importantly, to make us aware of the fact that we’re all one people and we’ve got to come together.”

After the interview, Smerconish and a cohost noted that Biden had his voice “in the [president’s] ear.”

“There you go. President’s brother,” Smerconish said. His cohost responded, “I mean with his — that voice in his ear. He says that to the president.”

Smerconish added, “Joe — I don’t want to push too hard because it’s not appropriate for me to say what is, you know, what is Joe — but he said that Joe is a sympathetic ear.”

The host — who is based in Philadelphia and appeared to know Frank Biden personally — later tweeted that he hoped the president would say “on the record” that he was open to psychedelics.

A press release emailed to reporters from SiriusXM on Wednesday suggested that Frank Biden had “called into” the show to respond to an interview he had “just heard” that day between Smerconish and a Wall Street Journal journalist who had just published a piece about the benefits of psychedelics and its growing use among business executives and Silicon Valley.

According to SiriusXM, Smerconish asked Biden what caused him to “reach out” to the show. Biden claimed psychedelics help treat trauma that can lead to addiction, although it was not clear whether he actually used psychedelics himself. Biden said:

I have done a great deal of research about, because I’m a recovering alcoholic for many, many years. I have looked into, as a result of doing lots of research into early AA, it turns out that Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, although he was sober for many, many, many years, still suffered from major depression, which is, of course, a mental illness, just like having leukemia or any other physical ailment. And he had no solution. He was introduced in the very early years of lysergic acid and he did acid, and the psychedelic experience ameliorated, if not eliminated his depressive symptoms.

…In the 1950s and early 50s, the federal government looked deeply into the application of psychedelics for the treatment of addiction. They had magnificent success. …Now, it’s my personal belief, there’s lots of empirical evidence around it, that trauma is the root cause of all addiction.

Frank Biden is not the only Biden family member who has endorsed psychedelics.

Hunter Biden wrote about using psychedelics in his memoir Beautiful Things, which published in 2021. He discussed how he traveled to a Mexico clinic allegedly to seek “get his life back on track” in 2014 and given ibogaine, a plant-based psychedelic and then did 5-MeO-DMT therapy, “which employs the gland secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad.” He wrote that the experience helped him stay sober for a year. The substance is illegal in the U.S.

He also wrote in his book about trying ketamine, another psychedelic, in 2018 and 2019 with “disastrous” results, but said it was not the treatment, but his continuing to do crack while on ketamine. Photos of him undergoing the therapy — of him sitting in a pool of water inside a sensory deprivation tank at a wellness center in Massachusetts while he was receiving ketamine therapy — from his abandoned laptop have surfaced on the internet. Meanwhile, Biden’s former psychiatrist has claimed that the treatments were a success.

Frank Biden’s promotion of psychedelics as medical treatment come just one week after a major conference in Colorado — Psychedelic Science 2023. The conference, now in its 13th year, is hosted by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a non-profit dedicated to  “changing the way people think of, talk about, and consume psychedelics through research, education, and advocacy. MAPS also has a for-profit subsidiary, which is working to develop a therapy that works in conjunction with MDMA, or ecstasy, according to the Wall Street Journal article.

According to an Intercept report in July 2022, the Biden administration already “anticipates” that federal regulators will approve MDMA and psilocybin by 2024 for designated breakthrough therapies for PTSD and depression and was exploring creating a federal task force to guide the “emerging psychedelic treatment ecosystem.”

It is not clear what relationships Frank Biden may have with companies involved in psychedelics treatment, but according to a January 2023 investigative article by CNN, he has spoken at several recent health care conferences where he has promised attendees that he would help them lobby the federal government.

According to the article, in October 2022, Frank Biden was the keynote speaker at a global health care conference in Venice cosponsored by heath technology company BioSig Technologies, where he talked about his family and President Biden’s cancer initiative. (The Wall Street Journal article noted how ketamine, a psychedelic, is surging in popularity for medical use, and can also be used for cancer-related neuropathic pain).

According to the article, at the conference, Biden agreed to help a trade group lobby the federal government on Medicare reimbursement rules. “He and his team were quite enthusiastic about this,” Dr. Andrew Krahn, the trade group leader, said in a video posted after the conference. “They will do what they can to try to ensure that our message is heard by the right people.”

At another BioSig-associated event in Boston in 2021, Frank Biden told health professionals that he had “the bully pulpit that I have as a result of the privilege of being associated with my brother Joey,” and said he would “do everything in my power to support you to get the job done, to get federal dollars to your research.” CNN noted that Biden was not registered as a federal lobbyist.

Biden later gave shifting responses on how paid for his trip to Venice and whether he worked for BioSig.

Biden first said BioSig’s CEO had paid for his trip. BioSig then told CNN that the firm had hired the law firm where Biden worked because it wanted to learn about a federal research program pushed by President Biden, but that they did not pay for his trip. The firm later said they never hired Biden’s law firm.

Frank Biden also at first told CNN he consulted for BioSig for about a year, then said he never worked as a consultant for the company, and then later said he provided services to BioSig as an “informal sales assistant.” He also stressed there had been “zero interaction” between his private business and Joe Biden.

“I don’t deny that Joe Biden is my brother. I’m proud of him,” he said. “But do I engage in any way in quid pro quo on any level? Absolutely not.”

Kathleen Clark, Washington University law professor who specializes in government ethics, told CNN that “the changing story” on who paid for Biden’s trip to Venice and his relationship with BioSig “actually merits an investigation.”

Frank Biden, like Hunter Biden, has a long history of evoking his relationship to Joe Biden for personal financial gain.

In 2011, he registered as a lobbyist for a charter school startup in Florida called Mavericks in Education after his brother became vice president in 2009, according to the CNN article. The company identified Biden as the “brother of Vice President Joe Biden” in press releases. He would tell a school board, “I give you my word of honor on my family name that this system is sustainable.” He told city officials in 2015 they should trust the start-up “not because of Frank, but because of the honor of being the brother of a guy I think we all know and love.”

He also touted his relationship to the vice president while sitting on the board of advisers for an online tutoring venture called Everly, according to CNN. When Joe Biden became president, the law firm where Frank Biden now works, Berman Law Group, put an ad in a local Florida newspaper that referenced the president and mentioned the shared values between the “two Biden brothers.” The law firm told CNN there was no communication between the firm and the Biden administration.

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