Who Owns What Happens Inside Your Head?
Two political stories crossed the wires this past week. At first glance they seem unrelated. One involves spy agencies and surveillance law. The other involves mushrooms and a shrub root from West Africa. Look closer and both ask the same question. Who owns what happens inside your head?
On April 17, the House and Senate passed a ten-day extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. President Trump signed it the next morning. The short-term deal moved the expiration date to April 30. Bigger five-year and eighteen-month proposals both failed in the House overnight. Hard-liners killed them. GOP leadership had to settle for a stopgap.
Section 702 lets intelligence officials collect the communications of non-Americans abroad without a warrant. That sounds narrow. It is not. Those foreigners talk to Americans, and the conversations get swept into the same pile. The FBI can then query that pile for records tied to U.S. persons. Reports from the FISA Court and the DOJ have documented years of abuse. The FBI ran more than three million such queries in 2021. Targets included peaceful protesters, lawmakers, campaign donors, journalists, and a judge. Intelligence agencies have ignored the reforms that followed.
One day later, on April 18, President Trump signed an executive order telling the FDA to fast-track review of psychedelic drugs. The order covers psilocybin and ibogaine. Ibogaine is a compound from the iboga shrub root, studied for traumatic brain injury and addiction. The White House committed $50 million in matching funds and directed the FDA and DEA to open a path for eligible patients to access these drugs through the Right to Try framework. Veterans advocates and Joe Rogan stood behind the president at the signing.
On the surface these two stories point in opposite directions. FISA expands state power over your private words. The psychedelics order narrows state power over your private chemistry. Look again and the same premise runs through both. Your inner life starts out in Washington’s custody. Any freedom you enjoy over it has to be given back to you, carefully, on the state’s schedule.
That premise is the problem.
The Feedback Loop Problem
Start with Section 702. Its defenders point to real terror plots the program helped break up. One recent example is a planned attack at a Taylor Swift concert in Austria. Those wins are genuine. They miss the structural issue. A program built to watch foreign targets has, in practice, become a back door into the inboxes and text threads of U.S. citizens. Every reform Congress has passed has been routed around. In March 2026 the FISA Court found that the FBI had used a querying tool that bypassed the new warrant-adjacent procedures from the 2024 reforms. The program gets renewed anyway.
This is the feedback loop problem at the heart of the Lovatarian view. A private company that broke trust on this scale would bleed customers within a quarter. Users would route around it. Competitors would eat its lunch. A federal surveillance program does not face that pressure. It gets reauthorized on a clock set by Congress, with reforms that sound strong in press releases and soften in the margin notes. Information about how it really works stays classified. Scrutiny leaks out in drips from inspector general reports years after the fact. No market forces punish the abuses. No customer choice exits the relationship.
Fifty-Six Years of the Wrong Answer
Now look at the psychedelics order. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 placed psilocybin and ibogaine in Schedule I. The label means “no currently accepted medical use.” That label was wrong the day it was written. It stayed wrong for fifty-six years. Tens of thousands of Americans suffering from PTSD, treatment-resistant depression, and opioid addiction traveled to clinics in Mexico and the Netherlands to access what their own government had outlawed. Many of them were veterans. The federal law did not stop the demand. It moved the market offshore, raised the price, and cut people off from follow-up care.
The order from last Saturday is good news. Real good news. People who need these treatments will get them faster. And the order does not change the central fact that Washington, in one branch or another, has spent half a century asserting ownership of a medical choice between a patient and a doctor. A pen stroke can give that ownership back. A later pen stroke can take it away. The power did not move. Only the permission did.
That is the hinge. The Lovatarian perspective does not cheer a president who loosens a rule and boo one who tightens it. The question is always the same. Who is the default owner of the choice? If the answer is Washington, the liberty on offer is a rental.
Culture Gets There First
Both stories show a limit of electoral politics. FISA reform has stalled for twenty years. Privacy hawks win a House vote, the Senate trims it, the intelligence agencies keep their tool. Psychedelic reform has stalled for fifty. A movement of veterans, clinicians, parents, and writers built the cultural case long before any president picked up a pen. The policy is catching up to the culture, not leading it.
The pattern points to a better approach. Build the thing first. In privacy, that looks like end-to-end encrypted tools that reduce the value of warrantless collection. Signal, ProtonMail, and the mainstream shift toward encryption on iMessage and WhatsApp have done more to protect ordinary Americans than any FISA reform on paper. In mental health, it looks like networks of clinicians, retreats, and harm reduction groups who have been training each other for years. They did not wait for Congress. They built trust, collected data, kept people alive, and created the evidence base now cited in the White House fact sheet.
This is the Lovatarian bet in miniature. Voluntary action moves faster than legislation. It self-corrects. Bad actors lose customers. Good actors grow. The state arrives late, takes credit, and complicates the next iteration.
What to Do This Week
A kinder liberty does not require cynicism about either of this week’s stories. The FISA short extension is a chance for serious reform. Use it. Write to your senator about warrant requirements for U.S. person queries. Donate to groups tracking the abuses. The psychedelics order will save lives. Celebrate it. Support the clinicians and families pushing the next mile. Both moves matter.
They point to the deeper work too. A culture that tolerates more ways of living, talking, healing, and believing leaves less room for the state to step in as referee. Tolerance is not soft. It is the foundation that makes any of this possible. Without it, we pass laws to protect our side from the other side, and the laws stack into a machine that watches everyone and trusts no one.
The week’s news is an invitation, not a verdict. Your mind and your voice started in your keeping. They still belong there. The job is to build a culture strong enough that Washington stops being the first question asked about either one.
Deepen Your Understanding of Liberty
Want to explore these ideas further? Pick up one of these books.
This guide maps the full landscape of libertarian thought. It covers the debates, the tribes, and the case for a freer, kinder world. It is a great starting point for anyone curious about liberty.
This book traces economic ideas from ancient times to the AI era. It shows how ideas about exchange, value, and freedom have shaped civilization. Understanding this history helps you think clearly about today’s debates.