Ibogaine in Mississippi

What HB 314 does

House Bill 314, the Ibogaine Drug Development Clinical Trial Act, was introduced by Representatives Creekmore IV, Arnold, Carpenter and Byrd, signed by Governor Tate Reeves in March 2026, and takes effect on 1 July 2026. It authorises the Mississippi State Department of Health to select and fund a consortium, made up of a drug developer, a state institution of higher learning and a hospital, to develop a clinical trial of ibogaine and pursue FDA approval.

The proposal a consortium must file is unusually specific for this kind of statute. Alongside the trial design and the recruitment plan, section 5 requires patient screening criteria and cardiac safety protocols, administration protocols, an aftercare plan and a data integrity plan. Mississippi is the only state to write cardiac screening into its enabling law rather than leaving it to the protocol, which matters because that is the mechanism by which ibogaine kills.

The indications named are opioid use disorder, substance use disorder more broadly, and neurological and mental health conditions. Mississippi therefore sits closer to the Texas and Kentucky programmes, which target addiction, than to Arizona’s, which targets traumatic brain injury.

The law carries no money. This is the fact most often lost, and we lost it ourselves in the first version of this page. The $5 million figure attached to Mississippi in every roundup is an expected future appropriation of opioid settlement funds, not something HB 314 does. Mississippi Today put it plainly: “No state funding is attached to the bill, although legislators have said they expect to soon appropriate the opioid settlement funds for the effort.” Mississippi joins Kentucky and Oklahoma as states whose ibogaine framework exists and whose ibogaine budget does not.

Any money that arrives is contingent on a match. Section 5(2)(j) requires the consortium to disclose its capacity to match state funding from non-state sources, and section 7(4) bars the department from disbursing anything until it has verified that the match was received. Arizona is often said to have attached a similar requirement; it did not, and that error is corrected on the Arizona page.

The consortium must work with another state. HB 314 requires collaboration with a state that has taken the same action on ibogaine. Kentucky wrote the same requirement into its own definition of an eligible drug developer, so the idea is spreading rather than originating here. Three states have now made coordination a condition of their own programmes, Mississippi with Kentucky and Oklahoma, and the federal position sets out what that coordination is for and what it risks.

The state takes a stake in the result. Section 12 allocates not less than twenty per cent of all revenue attributable to intellectual property and other commercial rights arising from the trial to the state, deposited into the State General Fund. That puts it alongside Texas, Kentucky and Oklahoma: the four states that have attached a revenue claim to their trial programmes. The other five that legislated attached none.

Set against the states it most resembles:

What it does not do

Nothing in HB 314 touches the legal status of ibogaine in Mississippi.

A state cannot reschedule a federally controlled substance. Possession remains an offence, no physician may prescribe it, and no provider may administer it outside an approved research protocol. The consortium exists to move a drug through the federal system, not around it.

Section 13 is written for a future that has not arrived. It applies only if the FDA approves ibogaine, and then requires a Mississippi physician who prescribes it to supervise its administration at a hospital or other licensed facility. It is the clearest statement in any state law of what these programmes are actually for, and it is conditional on an approval nobody has yet sought.

Mississippi in context

Mississippi belongs with Kentucky and Oklahoma: a framework built, a funding line left empty. What distinguishes it from those two is the cardiac screening requirement and the fact that its money, unlike Kentucky’s, was never voted and then removed. It has simply not been voted yet.

Read the pattern carefully. Nine states legislating on ibogaine in eighteen months looks like a wave. Six of them appropriated nothing. The federal position sets out which is which.

The federal position sets out what a state can and cannot do here.