Roam the wide-open halls and cavernous showrooms of the Colorado Convention Center during Psychedelic Science, the world’s largest psychedelics conference, and you’ll see exhibitors hawking everything from mushroom jewelry, to chewable gummies containing extracts of the psychoactive succulent plant kanna, to broad flat-brim baseball caps emblazoned with “MDMA” and “IBOGA.” Booths publicize organizations such as the Ketamine Taskforce and the Psychedelic Parenthood Community, and even The Faerie Rings, a live-action feature film looking to attract investors.
It’s a motley, multifarious symposium where indigenous-plant-medicine healers mingle with lanyard-clad pharma-bros, legendary underground LSD chemists, and workaday stoners tottering around in massive red and white toadstool hats that make them look like that cute little mushroom guy from Mario. And yet, oddest among such oddities may be the sight of enormously burly NFL tough guys talking candidly about their feelings.
Among Psychedelic Science 2025’s keynote talks was “Healing Behind the Highlights.” Hosted by the podcaster and nutritional supplement salesman Aubrey Marcus, the panel gathered three NFL stars—Buffalo Bills safety Jordan Poyer, retired Raiders guard Robert Gallery, and San Francisco 49ers guard Jon Feliciano—to discuss how psychedelic drugs have benefited their lives off the turf. They talked about their journeys to retreat centers where they imbibed the heady hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca, and how these drug experiences allowed them to reconcile their gladiatorial ideals of on-field toughness with the fact that they are, at the end of the day, mere mortals.
The effects of psychedelics like ayahuasca (and its primary psychoactive chemical, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT) are fairly well documented. It’s believed that such powerful hallucinogens can bring significant shifts in self-understanding, via a psychological mechanism sometimes labeled by researchers as the “mystical experience.” But Poyer and other athletes are pushing this idea even further. It’s not only that psychedelics can stimulate a psychological—or mystical, or spiritual, or otherwise metaphysical—change in a person’s mind, but that these drugs can offer physical, neurological benefits to a damaged brain. It’s an idea that is especially appealing to athletes competing in high-contact arenas, like professional football, hockey, and combat sports, where players are routinely exposed to concussions.
Poyer says he “absolutely” buys into the idea that psychedelics can help heal the effects of repeated head trauma. “I’ve had many concussions,” he admits, with a shrug, speaking with WIRED after the panel. “But I’d like to think I overcame some of those brain injuries.”
On January 22, 2023, the Buffalo Bills squared off against the rival Cincinnati Bengals in the AFC Divisional matchup of the NFL playoffs. With about 12:54 remaining in the fourth quarter, and the Bills lagging by two scores, Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow dropped back and fired a deep pass to wide receiver Tee Higgins. Attempting to stop Higgins, Poyer and Buffalo cornerback Tre’Davious White collided on the edge of the end zone. It was a case of “friendly fire” that produced the loud crack of head-to-head, helmet-to-helmet contact familiar to any football fan. “You could hear that hit up here,” play-by-play announcer Tony Romo said from the broadcast booth, as Buffalo’s medical staff shuffled onto the snow-covered field. “That was as wicked a sound as I’ve heard.”
Poyer was knocked to the ground, rising to his knees before sinking back down into the turf, and after a head injury evaluation, he was forced to exit the game. But his issues with concussion predate that especially brutal hit. Before that game, he recalls bouts of extreme anger and irritability, and cluster headaches: all symptoms of repeated trauma to the head. While improved safety equipment and key rule changes have decreased the incidence of concussion in the NFL, neurotrauma remains an unavoidable fact—or, for fans, players, owners, and league executives, more of an inconvenient truth—of such a fast, crunchy, extremely physical sport. NFL injury records reported some 692 concussions over a five-season period between 2019 and 2023.
Concussions are a form of traumatic brain injury—the broad medical term for damage caused to the brain by an external force—that can result in the loss of neurons in the brain as well as other neurological disorders and cognitive deficits. Concussions have been linked to both short- and long-term impairment, the most severe of which is chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease believed to be caused by repeated head trauma. CTE affects memory, judgment, and executive function, and it occurs at an alarmingly high rate among former NFL players.
Severe CTE was identified in the case of Aaron Hernandez, the 27-year-old former New England Patriots tight end who hanged himself in prison where he was serving a life sentence for first-degree murder. CTE can only be reliably diagnosed postmortem by looking inside a person’s brain, and so it is difficult to identify definitively in living players. However, the idea of certain former NFL players suffering from disease has become something of a meme—such as in the case of the notoriously erratic, Trump-endorsing wide receiver Antonio Brown, who reportedly fled the United States when a warrant for attempted murder was issued for his arrest. And after armed gunman Shane Tamura infiltrated the NFL’s midtown Manhattan headquarters this summer, killing four people and himself, reports circulated that he had self-diagnosed with CTE, with a note recovered on his body asking that his brain be studied for signs.
The promise of a drug mitigating, and even curing, the effects of repeated head trauma would be of significant interest. Not only to athletes, but to the league itself. If players, coaches, owners, and commissioners can point to a “cure” for repeated concussions, then the perceived harm of those concussions is minimized in turn. It’s not only potentially beneficial (or revolutionary) from a player wellness standpoint—it makes great PR, especially for a league where the risk of injury proves an inextricable part of the thrill.
Of the three athletes featured on the Psychedelic Science panel, it is Poyer whose psychedelic use has been most extensive. Like the Super Bowl–winning, four-time league MVP Aaron Rodgers—who attributed his best play as a Green Bay Packer to taking ayahuasca at Machu Picchu—Poyer has become something of a poster boy for a new breed of psychedelically retuned professional athlete.
Like a lot of players in his league, Poyer’s curiosity about mind expansion was initially piqued by Rodgers. The current Steelers quarterback has credited ayahuasca with his performance during his 2020 season, which saw him passing for a career-best 48 touchdowns and earning the league’s MVP honors. At first, Poyer thought the experience would unlock his athletic potential, like the plant-medicine equivalent of a performance-enhancing drug. “He won MVP after taking ayahuasca," Poyer says. “I knew he knew something that I didn’t.”
Following the 2022 NFL season, Poyer headed south to Resonance, a pricey Costa Rican retreat where Rodgers had reportedly upped his game. (He later joined Rodgers for a ceremony filmed for the Netflix documentary Aaron Rodgers: Enigma, released later in 2024.) In a 2023 profile in The Athletic, Poyer opened up about how his ayahuasca trips helped him treat his alcoholism. “It took me to the next level,” he says. “When I committed to the medicine it made me a better person, in all aspects of my life.”
Since journeying to Costa Rica, Poyer has taken ayahuasca 10 more times, seeking not just its broader, more holistic benefits, but the potential healing of repeated concussions too. He’s also experimented with yopo, a hallucinogenic plant used in a variety of Caribbean rituals, and kambo, a psychoactive amphibian secretion that is applied transdermally. “Now I look back and think: Damn. Imagine how fucked up my head could be?” Though he hasn’t done it, he says he’d be interested in undergoing an MRI, in order to produce neuro-imaged evidence of his brain being chemically altered and, maybe, repaired.
Serious clinical research on a range of psychedelic compounds multiplies daily. Most, though, is focused on treating mental health conditions—depression, anxiety, PTSD—rather than traumatic brain injury. And even within this world of research, Poyer’s psychedelic of choice, ayahuasca, remains something of an outlier.
The drug is typically “served” in a ceremonial environment, drawing from a range of Amazonian, pre-Columbian indigenous traditions. These sessions can last upwards of 8 to 12 hours. Retreats usually offer several sessions (or “ceremonies”) over an extended period. This ceremonial element—and the perceived effects of it—prove difficult to replicate with any reasonable faithfulness in a clinical setting. (That the ayahuasca brew is known to trigger purgative vomiting also introduces an even more basic element of rank unpleasantness.)
Moreover, the ritual context is part of the psychedelic experience’s “set and setting”: the expectations and mental state of the person taking part, as well as the physical and social environment surrounding their trip. The influences of these are difficult to disentangle from the drug’s effects themselves. “When you go to Peru or the Amazon and take ayahuasca, you’re going down there for a particular reason,” says Rick Strassman, a researcher at the University of New Mexico who has been studying the effects of DMT, ayahuasca’s main hallucinogenic compound, for more than three decades. “The setting itself amplifies, and solidifies, and makes those expectations more meaningful.”
Outside of such settings, some research is emerging connecting certain psychedelics to neurogenesis—the proliferation, or growth, of new neurons in the brain—a phenomenon that could be highly beneficial after a damaging blow to the head. But according to Josh Allen, a postdoctoral fellow at Vancouver Island University and the University of Victoria who has published an analysis on the molecular and therapeutic potential of psychedelics like DMT and LSD for acquired brain injury (and who is not be confused with Josh Allen, quarterback with Poyer’s Buffalo Bills), the very idea of psychedelics spurring neurogenesis is the subject of considerable debate. “It definitely happens in animals,” he says. “But the functional significance is still pretty unknown.”
Allen also notes that testing the hypothesis of neurogenesis in human patients is tricky, as it can only be confirmed in the extracted and analyzed brains of dead subjects. More promising is the idea of neuroplasticity: not the regrowth of dead neuronal cells, but a stimulation of new connections between neurons. Allen compares psychedelics to “brain fertilizer” for their ability to stimulate these new electric avenues of neuronal connection. This may specifically benefit people suffering from concussions and other traumatic brain injuries that have disrupted connections in their brains. The drugs’ anti-inflammatory properties may also help, given that concussions typically stimulate a sustained inflammatory response in the brain. Strassman notes that ayahuasca may be especially promising in this respect. In addition to the psychedelic DMT, the traditional brew contains the compounds harmine and harmaline, which may further affect neuroplasticity and neuro-inflammation.
Manesh Girn, a postdoctoral neuroscientist working at University of California San Francisco, has spoken with a number of ex-NHL players and mixed-martial artists who have spoken openly about “self-medicating” with psychedelics. Girn works with athletes to “optimize brain health” through personalized assessments and treatment protocols, which may or may not involve psychedelics. He notes that some research has been conducted on rats subjected to “repeat exposure to concussive hits,” which found psilocybin to be “a promising therapeutic agent for repetitive mild head injury and its neurodegenerative consequences.” The research is, however, still awaiting peer review.
Girn is currently designing a rodent study investigating the use of analogues of another psychedelic compound, 5-MeO-DMT, for treating cognitive impairment and traumatic brain injury. He stresses that the area of the brain that psychedelics most impact in rodents in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), which affects emotional regulation, decision making, and basic cognitive function. “A lot of [psychedelic-induced] neuroplasticity research has shown regeneration in those areas,” he says, though the current evidence is much stronger in animals than in humans. The prefrontal cortex is part of the brain’s frontal lobe where, recent research shows, the neurodegenerative effects of CTE may originate.
That said, even this sort of optimism may seem a little premature, given the relative infancy of the research. Gregory Carter, chief medical officer of Providence St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Medical Center in Spokane, Washington, has extensively reviewed the available literature on psychedelics and brain injury. He, too, believes there is promise, if only in theory right now. “Most of this is still a hypothetical situation,” Carter says. “I do not think the current database in humans is anywhere near adequate to support the use in human subjects with brain injury.”
Carter also cautions against the inherent risks of athletes—or anyone—taking part in self-guided psychedelic regimens. “Speaking as a physician, I think self-medicating always poses a higher risk,” he says. “I do think psychedelics do hold tremendous therapeutic value for many conditions, including brain injury. However they need to be used in a monitored, controlled situation. There is still much we do not know about all psychedelic drugs, including dosing paradigms and interactions with other drugs.”
Brandon Weiss, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, says that psychedelics pose no known harms “that are unique to brains with tissue damage or cognitive symptoms.” He also echoes Carter’s sentiments about more research being needed that directly studies how these compounds can treat traumatic brain injury and other neurological disorders. (The Hopkins Center is currently conducting a study of the potential of psilocybin in treating Alzheimer’s disease.) “We have not yet found actual structural, neuroimaging evidence of these sorts of repairs, post-psychedelic intervention,” he notes. “There really isn’t clear evidence that the reparative neuroplasticity that we’ve found in animals has translated to humans.”
Weiss, though, is working towards testing the premise. He’s part of a research team currently recruiting military veterans to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of a number of interventions—including the psychedelic compounds ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT—in the treatment of cognitive functioning symptoms associated with traumatic brain injury. If indeed such treatments prove effective in treating the military’s so-called “wounded warriors,” then it stands to reason they’d be similarly beneficial to the banged, bruised, and even brain-injured gladiators of professional contact sports.
The NFL and NFLPA (the labor union representing NFL players) do not currently list ayahuasca, or other classical psychedelics like psilocybin, in any of their policies prohibiting performance-enhancing drugs or substances of abuse. (The joint drug policy does screen for MDMA, better known as ecstasy, another psychedelic-like drug being investigated as a mental health treatment.) NFLPA representatives confirm that they are aware of players experimenting with compounds like ayahuasca or magic mushrooms. The union aims to serve as a resource for its player members to help inform their usage of substances as it relates to the drug policy.
Nevertheless, Jordan Poyer maintains that league officials monitor players’ social media accounts. He says that every time he has returned from an ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica or the Amazon jungle, he has been subjected to a drug test.
Beyond the potential in treating traumatic brain injury, Poyer’s own psychedelic excursions have proved much more, as they say, “holistic.” It improved his relationships with his wife and young daughter. He no longer abuses alcohol. And crucially, it disentangled his identity from that of his on-field role—something he found especially valuable as he entered NFL Free Agency, no longer rostered on a professional squad.
When we met in June, Poyer was holding out hope that he’d be re-signed with the Bills, if only to retire with the team that made him a superstar. “I don’t need to go out there and play 17 games. I can go out there and be on the practice squad, to be around the guys. Teach them about breathwork. Teach them about plant medicine. Teach them about the world,” he told me.
Days before the NFL season kicked off, Poyer got his wish. He’s returned to Buffalo, earning a spot on the practice squad for the 2025 season. It’s a chance to train up the team’s younger safeties: in reading offenses, ball-tracking, tackling, and, it would seem, in other, higher concerns, as a new breed of hyper-versatile, two-way NFL player—part All-Pro, part healer.
