Puerto Rico Governor Jenniffer González Colón signed Executive Order 2026-037 on August 4, establishing a public policy framework to study whether the territory should build the scientific, regulatory, and institutional capacity to participate in clinical research on emerging therapies, a category that explicitly includes psychedelic compounds, ibogaine, psilocybin, and MDMA. The order creates a gubernatorially appointed scientific advisory committee, directs an evaluation of the feasibility of an eventual pilot research program, and names veterans specifically as a population the Health Department will help orient toward future participation. It does not authorize the clinical use of any of these compounds, a distinction the order itself states directly and one worth keeping in view before any shorter version of this story runs ahead of it.
What the order actually creates
The order directs the Secretary of Health, Víctor Ramos Otero, to lead a comprehensive strategy for developing the scientific, regulatory, and operational capacity Puerto Rico would need to expand its role in clinical research generally, with emerging therapies named as a specific priority given the territory’s documented burden of mental health disorders, neurodegenerative disease, and substance use disorders. Signed alongside the governor were Ramos Otero, Dr. Catherine Oliver Franco, director of Puerto Rico’s Administration of Mental Health and Anti-Addiction Services, and Agustín Montañez Allman, the territory’s Advocate for Veterans, alongside representatives from the private health sector.
At the center of the order is a new Scientific and Regulatory Advisory Committee, housed within the Department of Health, with members appointed directly by the governor. Its mandated composition spans clinical research, public health, bioethics, pharmacology, neurology, psychiatry, psychology, and regulatory affairs, a genuinely broad, multidisciplinary structure rather than a narrow clinical or advocacy body. The committee’s assigned tasks include evaluating the scientific evidence currently available on emerging therapies, analyzing the scientific, ethical, clinical, regulatory, and financial feasibility of an eventual pilot program, identifying what infrastructure, training, and personnel Puerto Rico would need to build, recommending priority research areas, and producing a strategic agenda alongside a final report of recommendations. That report goes to the Health Department first, and then to the governor, who will determine what administrative or policy action, if any, follows.
The federal coordination angle
The order explicitly authorizes the Health Department to coordinate with a named list of federal agencies in pursuing this capacity-building effort: the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, the FDA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the DEA. Naming the DEA specifically is notable, since any research involving Schedule I compounds would ultimately require federal scheduling and registration cooperation regardless of what Puerto Rico’s own institutional readiness looks like. The order also cites the April 2026 federal executive order on psychedelic therapies directly, positioning this territorial action as a deliberate follow-on to that federal policy shift rather than an independent initiative.
The veterans provision, specifically
The order directs the Health Department to coordinate with the Office of the Veteran’s Advocate on initiatives that would help orient veterans toward, and eventually facilitate their participation in, clinical research under this framework, conditioned explicitly on scientific evidence, eligibility criteria, and applicable regulatory authorization. Governor González Colón’s own statement accompanying the order named veterans specifically as one of the populations this effort is meant to eventually serve, alongside patients, researchers, and health professionals. That framing tracks closely with the veteran-advocacy coalition that shaped the federal executive order this desk covered in April, and it is consistent with how nearly every state-level psychedelic and ibogaine policy action this year has centered veterans as the leading political and moral case for expanded research access.
Where this fits the broader access-model landscape
This desk has tracked a genuine divergence in how different jurisdictions are building psychedelic access infrastructure where no FDA-approved product yet exists: Oregon and Colorado’s licensed-facilitator service model, operating entirely outside the FDA framework, West Virginia’s proposed trigger law that would stay dormant until federal approval occurs first, Massachusetts’s capped, clinic-based research pilot, and Canada’s Special Access Program, which fixed its own supply-chain problem at the cost of narrowing who actually gets through. Puerto Rico’s order adds a fifth, distinct model to that map: a pre-pilot advisory and feasibility-study structure, with no clinical access component built in at any stage. It most resembles the early phase of Maryland’s task force process, an evidence-and-capacity review preceding any specific access framework, rather than a program with a defined access mechanism already attached.
What the order explicitly does not do
This is worth stating as precisely as the order itself does. The text is direct that it does not authorize the generalized or routine clinical use of emerging therapies as part of clinical practice in Puerto Rico, and it names psychedelic therapies, ibogaine, psilocybin, and MDMA specifically as compounds this order does not authorize for that use, describing all of them as remaining under investigation. No pilot program currently exists; the order directs a study of whether one should. No patient, veteran or otherwise, gains any new legal pathway to any of these compounds because of this order. The entire structure is oriented toward institutional readiness and evidence-gathering, not access.
The caveats
The executive order’s full legal text is the authoritative source for its provisions, and specific details should be read against it as it is published. The order sets an initial term for the committee’s progress reports and an eventual final report, but does not fix specific public deadlines; this desk will update the timeline once those dates are set. And nothing about this order commits Puerto Rico to actually establishing a pilot program, funding one, or acting on the committee’s eventual recommendations at all.
The frame
An executive order that creates a committee to study the feasibility of someday studying a category of drugs is not, on its own, a dramatic development, and it should not be covered as if it were. What makes it worth this desk’s attention is the specificity of what it names, ibogaine, psilocybin, and MDMA explicitly, the breadth of federal agencies it invokes by name, including the DEA, and the fact that it adds a genuinely distinct fifth model to a state and territorial access-policy landscape that has been diversifying quickly all year. Puerto Rico has not opened any door to psychedelic therapy. It has formally started deciding whether, and how, it might eventually build one, and named the people, veterans specifically, it says that decision is ultimately meant to serve.