Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) spent nearly $19,000 in campaign funds last year on a psychiatrist who specialised in controversial ketamine therapy, according to Federal Election Commission records.The lawmaker hired Boston-based Dr Brian Boyle, the chief psychiatric officer at Stella, a chain of mental health clinics focusing on “novel” therapies popular with Hollywood and Wall Street. Her campaign paid Boyle $11,550 in March 2025, another $2,800 in May, and $4,375 in October, for a total of $18,725, according to The New York Post citing the records.The expenses were marked as “leadership training and consulting.”
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Boyle, a Harvard-trained doctor, called himself an “interventional psychiatrist” and specialised in unorthodox methods for treatment-resistant depression, PTSD and anxiety. He was considered a “leading authority” on ketamine, described as a controversial horse tranquilliser given to “Friends” star Matthew Perry in the month leading up to his tragic death.“I just saw the incredible power of what these treatments could do,” Boyle said during a podcast appearance last year about getting into the mind-blowing biz. “It’s a ton of fun helping patients get better.”Boyle’s clinic also offered other treatments popular with the 1 Percent, including stellate ganglion block, an anaesthetic injected into a nerve cluster in the neck to calm the body’s fight-or-flight response. Billionaires such as Bob Parsons, who battled PTSD since returning from the Vietnam War, raved about the treatment.“Celebrities tend to be more inclined to be on the hunt for highly effective solutions across beauty, health, mental health, nutrition and so on,” Boyle said in an interview last year about the treatment.Ocasio-Cortez previously promoted the benefits of hallucinogenic drugs for therapy. The “Squad” representative, who campaigned to end the federal prohibition of marijuana in 2018, proposed legislation three times to make it easier to study magic mushrooms and other psychedelics.As a freshman congresswoman in 2019, she introduced an amendment to allow the federal government to spend taxpayer money on studying the medical potential of psilocybin, ecstasy and other drugs to treat mental illnesses, calling the early research “promising.”“It’s well past time we take drug use out of criminal consideration and into medical consideration,” she tweeted at the time.The amendment was overwhelmingly rejected then, including by her Democratic colleagues, and failed again when she tried a second time in 2021. It passed on her third attempt, when she co-sponsored a similar bill that was signed into law in 2023.
