Cannabis has been good to us here at equity.guru. There are 1,283 pages of cannabis-related content on our site and it’s still growing.
That said, there’s a correction going on at the moment and if you’re ‘a-long’ for the ride, you’re probably hurting (see what I did there?).
So where is the money going? Ask 10 different people and you’ll get as many answers. Chris Parry says it’ll be resources, while a director of ours says technology has the biggest upside historically.
“Weed is so 2018. Next year, cutting-edge investors are going psychedelic.”
–Bloomberg News
I think it’s psychedelics–medicinal, not recreational–and I’m in good company with Bloomberg and Cambridge House International.
Anxiety, depression, addiction and isolation are all-too-familiar buzzwords we see coming across our Facebook feeds. Basically, the kids are not all right.
Writing prescriptions for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are a bog-standard response from general practitioners, but experts I’ve spoken to typically agree that anti-depressants have around a 20% efficacy rate. And that’s not counting the people whose conditions it exacerbates.
Look, there’s a reason why every millennial’s Instagram feed is stacked with influencers peddling ‘wellness’ brands of antioxidant tea or whatever. People feel like shit all the time.
But instead of taking a pill that works 20% of the time and makes your palms perpetually slick, there are literal plants growing in the dirt which could be key to everything from boosting energy to helping fight depression. At the very least, it’s got to be way better than anything brought to you by the makers of ZoloftTM.
Read: Reclaiming pharma: behind the fight to modernize medicine in the age of Oxycontin
Well xoxo Gossip Girl concludes that Equity Gurus predictions may have been right again. Things are moving quickly, and in a space we have been watching for the last year, we’ve had our eyeballs on them for a while.
Equity Guru is thrilled to be presenting at extraordinary futures who is also hip to and on the forefront of the new space with cutting edge speakers and presenters discussing the controversy and opportunity. And so when we heard that Cambridge House International’s XFuture event was going to highlight companies offering psychedelic-derived medicinal solutions, we knew this wasn’t another dead end lead.
Here’s what we wrote about the potential for a mushroom market:
But the Overton Window for what constitutes acceptable medical treatment is shifting. Ayahuasca and ketamine are being used in clinical trials to establish their efficacy in treating mental illness, as is MDMA, the once maligned ‘rave-drug.’
Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, is another compound working its way back into the mainstream after years on the fringe, and the markets are paying attention.
Within a year, the above passage could be seen as quaint and outdated, or eerily prescient.
You can likely guess which we’re betting on. Why would we be spinning out a sister site (see: www.shroomstocks.ca this Saturday) if we didn’t?
We’re going to be writing about all players in this new space, highlighting most of all who we think investors should be keeping their eye on and where they got their start: everyone from Field Trip Ventures and Patrick Kroupa’s Universal Ibogaine to Peter Thiel’s Compass Pathways.
I’m talking taking it all the way back to the scientific studies and brain banks of the ’60s CIA. Forget the jet streams.
Who’s going to be at XFuture? Companies like…
ThinkMyco
ThinkMyco is a vertically integrated mycology technology company focused on three core verticals: mushroom production technologies for edible and culinary functions, nutraceuticals and fungal-based neurogenic drug development.
At present, they’re working on developing technology that will lower costs and increase access to edible and medicinal mushrooms.
Mindmed
Mindmed is a leading neuro-pharmaceutical company which discovers, develops and deploys psychedelic inspired medicines. What makes these guys interesting is how they are removing the psychedelic component from the drug.
Bruce Linton, the founder of Canopy Growth (WEED.T) has also come on as a director. Right now they’re establishing an R&D division focusing on psychedelic inspired medicines. They will be sharing their vision for a decriminalized psychedelic industry in a panel on Monday.
Dr. Matthew W. Johnson is associate professor at Johns Hopkins, and an expert on psychedelics, other drugs, and addiction. He’s been working with psychedelics for over 15 years, and has published 119 papers, including 47 on psychedelics.
Johnson helped revive psychedelic research through his published psychedelic safety guidelines in 2008, and published the first research on treatment of tobacco addiction using psychedelics in 2014. Also, he took part in the study regarding the use of psilocybin in treating cancer distress in 2016.
Dr. Dennis McKenna’s research has focused on the interdisciplinary study of Amazonian ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. He has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon.
The opportunity
The global market for antidepressant drugs was valued at $13.7 million in 2016, and projections have it growing to$15.9 billion by 2023. That’s a compound annual growth rate of %2.1 in a six year period. These figures include treatments for such maladies as major depressive disorder (MDD), obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety.
One hundred million of the people diagnosed with MDD will suffer from treatment-resistant depression (TRD), which is approximately 33% of cases. An individual is diagnosed with TRD after they are observed to have failed to sufficiently respond to a course of antidepressants within a specified period.
Psilocybin has demonstrated therapeutic benefit in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which often expresses comorbidity with various depression-related disorders, including MDD. At present, no OCD-specific drug class exists to combat the symptoms of the condition. Clinicians instead rely on antidepressants as their pharmacological weapon. OCD has a lifetime prevalence of 2.3% in adults in the US.
That’s enough for the average science-literate investor to take a closer look at mushrooms as a potential bulwark in the war against mental illness. That’s enough for me to think this sector has legs.
Only one question: you in?
–Ethan Reyes