New Netflix Documentary Shows How Psychedelics Help Military Veterans Heal Trauma

Psychedelic therapy for veterans isn’t a fad—it’s a pressure valve for souls cooked too long in the heat of war and silence. Picture a bar at last call, the jukebox dead, the bartender polishing a glass he’s already polished twice. That’s where the conversation lands when you strip the euphemisms from post-traumatic stress disorder and talk about the work—deep, messy, honest work—of healing. A new Netflix documentary, In Waves and War, drags this into the light with the kind of intimacy that doesn’t look away. It follows three Navy SEALs who hauled the worst of Iraq and Afghanistan home with them, then found in psychedelic-assisted therapy something our systems rarely offer: not more numbing, but clarity. In a country where veteran mental health crises are too often measured in obituaries, the film reads like a dispatch from a frontier that finally makes sense.

The veterans—Marcus Capone, D.J. Shipley, and Matty Roberts—tried the standard menu: pills stacked like sandbags, talk therapy that often skims the surface, endless white-knuckle nights. None of it stuck. So they looked south. In clinics in Mexico, they took ibogaine and DMT, two compounds the United States still keeps in Schedule I, as if pretending they don’t exist could erase pain. The sessions were hard and unglamorous, the kind that leave you rinsed and shaky but lighter. Capone describes the difference with a mechanic’s bluntness: too many treatments slap on bandages; psychedelics open the hood. As one line in the film puts it through the fog: Too many treatments put a Band-Aid fix on it…but psychedelics get into your unconscious. The movie uses animation to map the internal terrain—memories, guilt, grief—like a night dive through the brain’s dark water, each revelation rising like air bubbles to the surface.

What happened next looks less like a miracle than a grind—one that still feels miraculous. Capone and his wife, Amber, started the nonprofit VETS, opening doors for others who can’t afford a plane ticket to a different legal reality. More than 1,200 people have received funded psychedelic treatments through the organization, and demand dwarfs supply. One in ten applicants gets a yes. Meanwhile, inside the big machine, the Department of Veterans Affairs finally cracked open a window. In late 2024, VA greenlit its first psychedelic-assisted therapy study since the 1960s, using MDMA for veterans with PTSD and alcohol use disorder. Additional VA research has expanded into MDMA and psilocybin for PTSD, treatment-resistant depression, and anxiety. Johns Hopkins—no stranger to pushing this field forward—stands as a reminder that the science has been whispering the same thing for years: this isn’t a dalliance; it’s a legitimate, testable path. If the documentary is the human face, the lab is the skeleton underneath.

And yet, zoom out to America’s drug policy, and the signals get scrambled. On one block, the research says move forward; on the next, the zoning cops tape the door shut. New York throws a parade for a maturing legal market—New York’s 500th dispensary and $2.3 billion in sales—while, in the South, access inches forward in fits and starts as Georgia adds another medical dispensary license to meet rising patient demand. Texas is its own bar fight, with GOP lawmakers split over recriminalizing hemp THC products, a schism that says more about cultural anxiety than chemistry. In Rhode Island, you’ve got senators defending a prohibitionist swing that could flatten small operators—read the cautionary tale in Rhode Island’s US Senators Defend Vote To Ban Hemp Despite Concerns It Will Kill A Growing State Industry. All of this runs parallel to the veteran story: systems wrestling with old narratives, new data, and the stubborn fact that people are hurting now. Policy drift matters. When doors close in one place, people fly elsewhere for help. When doors open, fewer people have to.

In Waves and War doesn’t promise redemption; it documents the work of it. The SEALs talk about trauma like you talk about the ocean: respect it, learn its currents, or it will own you. Psychedelic-assisted therapy isn’t a cure-all, but it can be a compass—especially when wrapped in medical oversight, community, and post-session integration. Here’s the clear takeaway for anyone listening over that last drink: evidence-based access saves lives, and veterans shouldn’t need a passport to find it. If you want to stay grounded in the evolving landscape—policy, research, and real-world outcomes—keep reading, keep asking hard questions, and when you’re ready to explore compliant hemp options while the regulators catch up, visit our shop at this link: https://thcaorder.com/shop/.