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Comment by basseq | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting article for HN. It's spun as a negative, using terms like "threatening", "monopoly", "controversial", and "retribution".

You could write it the other way, where an immigrant-founded[1] startup is disrupting the mental health industry.

Frankly, most of this seems like par for the course. Of course the company is seeking to push their product to market and commercial viability--and the potential downsides to that rush. And it's (unfortunately) not surprising that the legal term pursued by the company are more onerous than standard--that seems to be a common over-step, and I'm glad attention is drawn to it. A good portion of this seems to be (and excuse my ad hominems) hand-wringing by crunchy-granola "psychedelic experts" worried about the "community".

([1] I'm assuming Ekaterina Malievskaia is Russian based on her medical degree from St Petersburg Medical Academy, and bring it up here because of similar discussions.)

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did you read the article completely? there are 9 critics that worked with them, 6 ceased doing so. the company formed and closed it's non-profit venture and they are using typical pharma tactics, creating patents around it. spin is one thing but those facts do tell a story on it's own.

> These experts are further troubled by the company’s business structure: Having first registered as a charity, Goldsmith and Malievskaia set up a for-profit corporation working towards the same ends just one year later, and closed their non-profit less than two years after that. And all 9 of these critics charge that Compass Pathways has relied on conventional pharmaceutical-industry tactics that could help them dominate the field, including blocking potential rivals’ ability to purchase drugs, filing an application for a manufacturing patent, and requiring contracts that give Compass power over academics’ research and are restrictive even by pharmaceutical-industry standards.

Yes, I did.

To me, there's an undercurrent here that some of the psychedelic experts have specific, subjective viewpoints (à la Richard Stallman). That these people have concerns is interesting, but the case that they're material or even right wasn't proven.

Again, no surprise that they shuttered the nonprofit: it's a corporate structure that precludes you from raising traditional VC, among other limitations. And since they are now a competitive pharmaceutical company, is it any surprise that they're using... competitive pharmaceutical tactics? And, again, is that material? Or is it just tsk-tsk'ing "the way things ought to be"?

These things do tell a very interesting story about pharma practices, research, start-up risks, a subculture going mainstream, etc. I think that story can be told more clearly.

I think you're purposefully ignoring the other issues that the writer has illustrated quite well in the article.

I was going to spend time citing points but you should be well aware of them by this point and I'd rather get back to work.

unfortunately, that's precisely how mainstream culture works: it allows any of your objections to be recast in terms of "sanctioned" procedures.

That's why we need to protect our culture from the "dominion" ideology where abject utilization (some would say exploitation) is a _protected_ activity or process. but we currently allow stepping on ppl or traditional entheogen culture because it's part of a "business process." "the law allows it." "it will help ppl so i deserve money for it."

ironically, i would like to see how these perspectives change after a generation of psilocybin "consumers."

They contracted a bunch of academic "psychedelic experts", and later on didn't tell them about changes to their business organization. Without more information, I don't know if that's bad or not. Should they have? Were they required to? From the article it sounds like in at least one case the researcher already hadn't been working together for several months when the change happened.

They definitely burned some bridges, but worse things happen all the time. The text you quoted even calls it "conventional pharmaceutical-industry tactics". Sounds like sour grapes to me.

You can spin it any way you want, but to me, expropriating the intellectual property of the non-profit (obtained under the pretense of being a non-profit) and exploiting it for private gain is the issue here. Even though that part is apparently legal. (Unless challenged in court somehow. We'll see.)

Isn't exploiting the intellectual property of a non-profit for financial gain the business model for essentially every single tech company in existence?

That is, at least every tech company that has open source software somewhere in their stack - which is presumably all of them.

Touché, and you could argue that every big success story from the last couple centuries was based on exploiting some kind of freebie. (I'm thinking of the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Vanderbilts of the world.) Although there are some OSS licenses that address this by restricting commercial uses more heavily. I dunno... if everyone goes into it with eyes open, that seems fine to me. It's when they pull the ol' bait-and-switch that makes me go hmmmm...

> every tech company that has open source software

Can you name one that piled patents on top of the open source IP?

But this isn't just an accusation of using the IP of a non-profit, it's an accusation of making a 'fake' non-profit to get things under false pretenses.

I'm so tired of comments like "startup is disrupting the [xyz] industry." No they don't disrupting anything. They didn't invent anything. They are just planning to grow and sell mushrooms. Growing mushrooms is well know process.

They aren't planning on growing anything ... they have to synthesize the compound as the 'grown' versions are not pure enough for the FDA.

That sounds dumb. Any citation on why it's so?

I don't have a citation for you, but the mechanism here is that it's difficult to extract just the alkaloid you want when a plant has a number of chemically similar alkaloids. So when you do an extraction, you get a number of different compounds, often mixed in slightly different proportions.

Even though that's the case, what they're doing isn't novel. There are a number of syntheses for psilocybin that are well known in the literature that are potentially suitable for industrial production. In fact, there are a few available in Shulgin's famous TiHKAL. It seems quite unlikely to me that the synthesis they will be doing is novel or "disruptive" in any way.

When will there be an ANN to remove spin and motivated reasoning?

It's becoming so tiresome to filter it. Maybe people should try hard to write a factual and forthright account of what they're talking about and then have a note at the end saying "I'm a granola-faith healer, and I think the above is a good idea" or "I'm an old-school conservative lung surgeon, and I hope that you too conclude that this is bullshit".

The ANN will have bias because it won’t have sprung into existence de novo, but will have been programmed and deployed by humans.

I agree for the most part, however there are legitimate concerns about their inability to handle criticism and the training of the therapists

I agree wholeheartedly. I'll note, however, that the topic ("A prickly response to criticism") isn't raised until 70% of the way into the 7,200-word article.

Is it a good or bad thing that it is immigrant-founded?

You'll be hard pressed to find people in the US who think that someone (legally) immigrating to the US and starting a business is a bad thing.

You'd think, especially with U.S. population growth and fertility rates being so low.

In reality, the current administration is actively working to reduce legal immigration as well.[1][2] Although the policies are opposed by most, it's not difficult to find people who support reducing legal immigration as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_policy_of_Donald_T...

[2] https://www.cato.org/blog/house-gop-bill-cuts-legal-immigrat...

> In reality, the current administration is actively working to reduce legal immigration as well.

the chart in that second link shows the family based, diversity and asylee immigration being cut, but all of the employment/skill-based immigration being boosted.

that strikes me as at least trying to reflect approval of business-starting immigrants, though with a preference for younger ones.

The proposals last year included massive cutbacks on H1 and L1 visa programs, among other things. As I recall, their purported replacements for the work visa track were much more constrained, so the result was a reduction in skilled immigration.

But we know that's what that crowd wants, anyway. They haven't exactly held back in op-eds. CIS, for example, is explicitly arguing for pre-1992 annual levels specifically for the skilled category, which would imply massive cuts.

> You'll be hard pressed to find people in the US who think that someone (legally) immigrating to the US and starting a business is a bad thing.

Then why do we keep hearing about Republicans introducing measures to reduce permitted legal immigration, especially outside of the employer-need-driven categories? Those politicians, or at least the audience they are catering to, certainly seems to think that people coming to the US for purposes other than to reduce existing firms labor costs are a bad thing.

Not the OC, but I'm guessing they mentioned it as a likely contributor to the "hand-wringing".

I'll leave that argument to others. I only raised the point because of the related discussion on HN. I'm specifically thinking of discussion ~6 months ago about how half of US startups had immigrant founders:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11309080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13858597

Crying when confronted with critical questions, as an apparent strategy to dodge genuine concerns? Stalking social media profiles and tattling on MAPS employees who "liked" critical posts? Showering lavish attention and then suddenly and coldly ending it when they get what they need? It certainly feels underhanded. This may be par for the course in big business, but it's all the more dissonant when the compound in question is meant to make users more compassionate and open.

There has to be a profit motive to get something to market. There have been 18 years of small studies on Ketamine for TRD with little progress.

Unless you look at the other psychedelic with breakthrough status - MDMA, which Rick Doblin has brought through clinical trials as a non-profit.

Doblin has no profit motive and is stoked with his $70k a year salary. His goal is changing culture, that is his motive.

MAPS’ MDMA is also commercialised by a for profit company.

As far as I know, the company is independent and not the Mozilla approach (Mozilla Foundstion owns Mozilla corporation).

A for profit company that is wholly owned by the MAPS non-profit.

I know Rick Doblin and have donated a good amount of money to MAPS.

There is no comparison between maps and compass.

Believe it or not, some people just want to make the world a better place.

Profit motive _can_ help to motivate people if there is a lack of motivation. However, it is not true that there _must_ be profit motive.

Right now, there is no lack of motivation to get this stuff out there. It is the questionable government prohibition that is holding things back.

The experts/critics seem to be questioning that motivation. They're implying that profit-motive (regardless of any other motive) is inherently bad.

Can you cite an instance of this?

The "crunchy-granola" dog whistle in another thread is telling. Psychedelics and FOSS histories are intertwined. If that doesn't register, you're in for a bummer of a trip. The article seemed to do a pretty good job of exposing C.O.M.P.A.S.S./Compass for the exploitive carpetbaggers they appear to be.

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