When the VA announced its first-ever MDMA-assisted therapy clinical trial for veterans with PTSD this spring, it was treated, reasonably, as a single, discrete story: one drug, one trial, one company’s compound moving through one arm of a massive federal health system.
What that framing misses is that the VA is not running just one psychedelic research program right now. It’s running several, involving different drugs, different sponsors and different points of entry into the same veteran population — and at least one of those programs is being built with direct help from a company that is also quietly preparing the VA’s formularies, distribution channels and clinical staff for a day when these drugs are actually approved.
A Different Drug, a Different Trial
The Providence (Rhode Island) VA Medical Center and VA Connecticut Healthcare Systems are running the MDMA trial that made headlines earlier this year, testing MDMA specifically in veterans with severe PTSD and co-occurring alcohol use disorder. It is a distinct program with its own sponsor, its own drug and its own design.
Separately, Compass Pathways, a biotechnology company developing a synthetic psilocybin treatment called COMP360, has been working directly with the VA on a different track. In an interview with Military.com, Steve Levine, M.D., Compass’s Chief Patient Officer, described the company’s role in a VA-affiliated study testing COMP360 for treatment-resistant depression — one that, notably, also allows enrollment of veterans who have PTSD alongside their depression.
“We’ve been supporting some studies within the VA. We’re both supplying the study drug for that study as well as training their initial cohort of trainers in the support model,” Levine said. “And although it’s a TRD study, it allows for enrollment of people who also have PTSD, and we actually expect about 50 percent of the enrollees in that study to have both TRD and PTSD.”
Read More: Veterans With PTSD Experience ‘Striking’ Improvements From Psilocybin Treatments
That detail is worth sitting with. It means Compass is not just a bystander submitting drug applications to the FDA — it is directly embedded in how a VA-affiliated study is actually run, supplying the compound itself and training the personnel who will guide participants through it.
And because the study’s eligibility criteria don’t screen out comorbid PTSD, the trial is likely to produce meaningful data on a dual-diagnosis population that reflects how PTSD and depression actually show up together in veterans, rather than in the cleaner, single-diagnosis populations that trials are often built around.
The Evidence That This Isn’t Just a Talking Point
This isn’t merely something a company representative said in an interview. Levine testified to the same effect before the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee at a field hearing in August 2025, describing Compass’s mission as centered on “individuals living with serious mental health conditions who do not benefit from current treatment options,” with COMP360 studied specifically in both treatment-resistant depression and PTSD.
Separately, published research on COMP360 in veterans with treatment-resistant depression has already documented exactly the overlap Levine described. In one such study, published in 2026, researchers found that 73 percent of the veteran participants receiving COMP360 for treatment-resistant depression had self-reported comorbid PTSD, including both combat-related and non-combat-related cases. That is not a footnote. It suggests that any veteran-focused trial built around a single diagnosis category is likely undercounting how many participants are actually carrying two conditions at once.
Beyond the Trials: Getting the System Ready
Levine also described a second layer of VA engagement that has nothing to do with any single clinical trial: preparing the health system itself for a future in which these drugs are approved.
“We’ve been working very closely with the VA’s integrated project team, which is VA central leadership focused on thinking about implementation and preparing for implementation of psychedelics into the system once approved,” Levine said.
Read More: New VA Trial of MDMA Psychedelic for PTSD: What Veterans Need to Know
Levine also said Compass has already begun building a commercial team specifically dedicated to government payer programs, including the VA, the Department of Defense, and Tricare, with the explicit goal of getting COMP360 onto those formularies and making sure ordering and distribution channels are ready to actually deliver the drug to veterans once, and if, it clears FDA review and DEA rescheduling.
Why the Distinction Matters for Veterans Following This
For veterans and families tracking psychedelic-assisted therapy as a potential option, the practical takeaway is that they have no single program to watch. The MDMA trial and the COMP360-related VA work are separate efforts, sponsored by separate companies, testing different compounds at different points in the regulatory process, and likely to reach any kind of approval or availability on different timelines. Conflating them risks either overstating how close either option is to being available, or missing entirely that a second, parallel track exists.
What connects them is the VA itself — and specifically its integrated project team working across multiple sponsors to figure out what implementation actually looks like if and when any of these treatments clear the remaining regulatory hurdles, FDA approval, DEA rescheduling, and, ultimately, formulary placement inside the VA, DoD and Tricare systems. Veterans watching this space are better served tracking that infrastructure work alongside the headline trial results, since access, not just approval, is what will ultimately determine whether any of this reaches the people who need it.
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