Last month, a RAND study found that 4.8 million American veterans have already used psychedelics. A few weeks later, the VA and HHS signed a formal agreement to start figuring out whether that was a good idea.

The Memorandum of Understanding signed July 14 between the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services is a genuine institutional step, and also worth reading carefully for what it doesn’t cover. It commits both agencies to coordinating on clinical trials, training therapists and nurses to administer psychedelic medications, and sharing data with the FDA. VA Secretary Doug Collins confirmed the department is already involved in more than 20 psychedelic research trials.

The question is what it doesn’t commit to.

So what’s actually in the MOU?

The agreement covers coordination: joint clinical trial participation, therapist training, data collection, and FDA collaboration. It follows the April executive order directing the FDA to accelerate review of psychedelic treatments, and it formalizes the relationship between two departments that hadn’t previously been working together on this.

What it doesn’t cover

There’s no commitment to fund patient access, no timeline for when an approved treatment might reach a VA facility, and no answer to what happens if a drug clears the FDA before the VA has trained staff to administer it. The current VA guidance to veterans remains unchanged: don’t self-medicate with these substances. Wait for the research.

The April EO was framed as urgency; this MOU is a research coordination agreement, and the distance between those two things is measured in the years it will take for a trial to produce results, get peer-reviewed, and reach a VA clinic somewhere in Nebraska.

For veterans who can’t wait for that process, the answer right now is the same as it’s always been: fly to Mexico and pay out of pocket, without any of the infrastructure this agreement is promising to build.

The MOU is a real step and the start of a very long process that’s already being talked about as though the hard part is over.