🍄 The Psilocybin Episode

As we move further away from the puritanical nonsense that has characterized policy and attitudes over the last couple centuries in this country (🙂), we have opened our collective minds to the potential of natural medicines.

Cannabis - furiously demonized for decades - helps with chronic pain. Glaucoma. Anxiety. Depression.

Cannabis - heretofore relegated to illicit markets and denied rigorous scientific research - treats alcoholism. PTSD. ADHD. Seizures.

Cannabis helps people stay mindful and engaged with their kids. Cannabis helps couples connect.

Cannabis helps people.

We have denied lots of people the medical applications (and joy) of this plant, for a long time. What else are we denying people?

😎 Yes, I Read ‘How To Change Your Mind’

I have a natural proclivity to explore alternative medicines, because for-profit medicine always seemed odd to me, and people dying left and right from prescription (read: legal) drugs seemed a bit odd as well. It is also incumbent on me, I think, as a member of the cannabis community, to treat everything like I treat cannabis - innocent and valuable until proven otherwise.

In that vein, as I read Michael Pollan’s ‘How to Change Your Mind’, I became intrigued with the potential of psilocybin as a source of human well-being.

I was also blown away by how much positive scientific progress was suppressed. In the 50s and 60s, research on psychedelics (LSD, mushrooms, mescaline, yada yada) had serious merit, and serious energy. This was a decade before Timothy Leary was, more famously, giving mushrooms to students for scientific studies (he got fired). Studies in that time pointed to major benefits derived from psychedelics in the realm of substance abuse - but when LSD was made illegal in the late 60s, all of that research was defunded and the momentum kinda disappeared.

To level-set some of the positive claims around psilocybin, I found this:

📈 The biz of shrooms

I can hear you now. You are reading this on your phone, in the bathroom, saying to yourself “this is compelling, sure, but it’s certainly a departure from cannabis eCommerce!”

Well, yeah. But the business of psilocybin is too interesting not to comment on. Let’s get into how this promising fungi might be commercialized.

But first, a note on humanity…

Psilocybin is not CPG…yet

Cannabis is a consumer packaged good. It is a product that consumers use up and replace on a frequent basis. It is sold at specialty retail, to adults. There are thousands of brands. Etc.

Psilocybin is not.

So far, the business of psychedelics has been very much the business of medicine - meaning specialized pharmaceutical companies are hammering out intellectual property and clinical trials in the hope of perfecting a product or process and selling it. Nothing consumer facing yet.

Eventually, more companies will leverage those medicines and research to administer guided therapy sessions. This is consumer facing, but the consumer won’t be purchasing the product as a standalone; they will be purchasing a psilocybin-assisted therapy session. Insurance will probably be involved at some point.

No, psilocybin is not CPG…unless these companies can prove definitively that frequent microdoses are 1) safe and 2) effective to treat some of the more prolific human ailments (depression and anxiety). Then, consumers will look to be delighted in their psilocybin choices - marketing, form factor, packaging, price point, etc - and voila, you have a consumer packaged good, not dissimilar from an OTC vitamin.

Psilocybin is not cannabis, and will not behave like cannabis in a retail environment

I hear the comparison relatively often, but it’s wrong for two reasons:

Frequency: people use cannabis often, and replenish their products often. Psilocybin, even in CPG form, would likely be more heavily modulated, and less frequently used. Fewer shopping occasions, fewer purchases.

Usage Occasions: cannabis eCommerce is exploding because its products accommodate so many usage occasions: “for me, for now,” “being social,” “movie night,” “weightlifting,” etc. Psilocybin, on the other hand, has two gears: 1) low dose for under-the-threshold-of-intoxication wellness, and 2) explore the innards of my soul.

Psychedelics will be a major component to our collective wellness awakening - but their ascent will probably be unlike the rise of cannabis.

📚 tl;dr

• Psychedelics, including psilocybin, show major promise for various ailments (depression, anxiety, addiction)

• Businesses around psilocybin are research now, therapy near-term, and CPG long-term (like an OTC vitamin)

• Psilocybin is not cannabis - it has fewer usage occasions, and will be more modulated generally

• It is Wednesday