Robert Gallery isn’t your typical psychedelics user.
The 6-foot-7-inch retired NFL lineman isn’t your typical anything, for that matter. But as the founder of Athletes for Care — a nonprofit dedicated to research and developing pathways for athletes to use psychedelics to heal physical and emotional trauma — the former Raider and Seahawk wants more people to experience the power of psychedelic plant medicine.
“I was not experienced in the plant medicine space and psychedelics,” Gallery said. “I knew nothing about them until I retired and started having issues post-retirement from football, whether it was the mood swings, rage, suicidal ideation, suicidal nightmares. I got to a point where I was having all these things happen, and at that point, I didn’t know what was causing them.”
Gallery ended up getting a 3D brain scan and discovered that he had suffered brain damage during his years playing ball.
“With the amount of damage I have, the way I was living my life, coping with alcohol and doing nothing to help recover, they said, ‘If you do nothing, you’re probably going to be a statistic.’ … At that point, I began to do everything I could to try and help alleviate, to help heal,” he said. “I was doing the hyperbaric chamber, I was doing IVs and all these different things that supposedly help fix or help heal the brain. I did that for a year and a half or two years and didn’t really have much success.”
The ongoing impact on his brain got so bad that he would suffer fits of rage, extreme social anxiety and memory loss. Then, suicidal nightmares began, causing sleep loss and mental paralysis.
“The depression was bad,” he said. “I was trying to cope using alcohol. I wasn’t an everyday drinker, but when I drank, I drank till I could function.”
It got to the point where he would drink a bottle of tequila to be able to go to a public function. It pushed right up to the breaking point with his family. Gallery wasn’t sure what to do.
Then, while listening to an interview with Marcus and Amber Capone — leaders of the psychedelic therapy nonprofit Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions — on Marcus Luttrell’s “Team Never Quit” podcast, Gallery discovered something that would reverse his downward trajectory.
“Marcus was a college football player and Navy SEAL, and he went through his story of what happened to him,” Gallery said, describing how Capone’s trauma damage mirrored his own. “He had one of his old SEAL Team teammates take him to Mexico and do ibogaine.”
After hearing the episode, Gallery reached out to Marcus Capone to learn more about the treatment. Hearing Capone describe the therapeutic results with the powerful psychedelic plant compound motivated Gallery to make a similar southward journey with one of Capone’s groups to seek his own sanative success.
Gallery went through a two-step process over the course of a weekend. The first step was ibogaine treatment, which Gallery describes as “defragging” (or defragmenting) his mind, with all of his memories and traumas separated and laid bare, one by one. The ibogaine treatment was so intense that the following day, Gallery lost all motor function.
“It shut my brain and my body down, and it was trying to reboot to get things working again,” he said.
If ibogaine was the defrag-and-shut-down segment of the system reboot, then 5-MeO-DMT was the on switch. He experienced a full ego death, where he visited his mind’s version of the afterlife.
“I died,” he said, speaking figuratively about his mental state. “I literally felt my ego leave. I wake up from that, and the lights were back on. I was bright-eyed, like I had just drank 10 cups of coffee. I came out back into the room where everybody else was, and first thing I said was, ‘I’m back, bitches.’”
He instantly felt a weight lifted. Everything was crisp. Clear. He could see, taste and feel again.
Not only that, but he loved himself. What’s more, he had regained love for something he hadn’t enjoyed in years: football.
“(Before the treatment), I would get super irritated with my kids for turning on football,” he said. “I wanted nothing to do with football. I fucking hated it. I thought it was a failure. I thought all these things. And I remember coming out of treatment being proud of myself for what I had accomplished over my career.”
It was a complete and total change.
“Going through ibogaine (and DMT), it was just a 180,” Gallery said. “I literally came back with no anxiety, no suicidal thoughts. Full of life, none of the ringing in my ears. The brain fog was gone. Everything was turned back on again. Not only emotionally, but the cognitive stuff, the stuff that I could physically see and feel, had changed literally over the weekend. It changed my life. I came back a different human being.”
Since his experience, Gallery launched Athletes for Care, a nonprofit dedicated to conducting research and providing resources for current and former athletes like himself who have suffered debilitating trauma in their careers. He recently spoke at the Psychedelic Conference in Denver, and he has joined the Texas Ibogaine Initiative to assist in research into the potential for positive impact on people who have suffered mental and emotional trauma. He hopes other athletes will be able to find similar relief and rehabilitation using ibogaine and other psychedelic compounds.
“We got to play a sport we love,” Gallery said. “Wouldn’t change it for the world. But it comes at a price. We just didn’t get to play games on Sundays and go sit by the pool all week. It was all week long. We’re just beating our bodies and our brains. … I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, but if you feel intrigued to look into it more, help and donate so we can be a part of these research projects to keep us as healthy as possible for us and our kids and their kids.”
athletesforcare.org | @athletes4care | @officialrobertgallery
