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Comment by xor99 | Hacker News Reader

One of the major impediments to widespread use of psychedelics is actually difficulty in finding or envisioning profit models. For this reason, I'm not really looking forward to psychedlic startups. In this sense decriminalisation may be a good resting point for this whole debate.

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From an NYT op-ed by Michael Pollan[1] published earlier this month:

> As for other Americans who want to use psychedelics in a more secular setting, it’s easy to imagine spa-like retreat centers popping up across the country. Indeed, a prototype already exists: Field Trip Health has opened a half dozen lavishly appointed clinics (with more on the way) offering ketamine-assisted therapy for depression, which is already legal, in anticipation of Food and Drug Administration approval of MDMA and psilocybin.

Here's their website: https://www.fieldtriphealth.com/. To my eyes it looks no different than the website of a well-funded mattress seller, or travel startup.

I am nervous about applying a capitalist model to legalized psychedelics, but I have no doubt that many companies will try to make money once these substances are legalized.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/opinion/sunday/drug-legal...

Which is what I don't get, isn't there a profit motive in monopolizing or branding the PTSD/Depression sector of care, or is that high liability?

It’s that it (currently) doesn't scale well, not like a SaaS company can, anyway. Treatment is a bit more involved than here's some shrooms in the mail, so there's profit to be made, and quite a lot of it, just not how VC investor have been operating. They won't get out of bed for a million dollar idea. Maybe for 10.

Can you monopolize a plant? There's multiple reason the BigPharma have figured out ways to synthesize equivalent things to naturally occurring plants, but one of the reasons is they can patent their process and ensure they can keep that strangle hold in place.

There's such a thing as a plant patent which gives you a legal monopoly on clones of a plant you bred. It's mostly only useful for plants like apples, where the ones grown from seed tend to be awful. They might treat a fungus like a plant legally, but again it would only cover clones.

You probably can’t monopolize a plant unless it’s GMO, patented, and much better than the competition. But it is possible to brand a plant. At the US chain grocery stores it can be hard to buy any strawberry that isn’t sold by Driscolls.

This reminds me of utopian idealists who envisioned everyone growing their own cannabis once it was legal.

What they didn't realize is that few people want to put in the effort to grow their own plants. It's so much quicker and easier just to go to a store and buy them.

Another thing this reminds me of is ketamine, on which the patent expired long ago. So some profit-seeking corporation created esketamine, which is pretty much the same thing but patentable, and they got that approved for treatment of depression while cheap, generic ketamine still has to be used off-label (meaning that insurance companies won't cover that off-label treatment, while esketamine treatment for depression is covered).

Something similar is being attempted with psilocybin, where some company's thought up a more efficient way of producing it and patented that, and made (or tried to make) that the only approved way of getting psilocybin.

In both cases consumers aren't going to be making their own ketamine or psilocybin. They're going to have to rely on companies to sell it to them.

Sure, they could theoretically grow or pick mushrooms but growing mushrooms is time and effort intensive, so it'll probably only ever be a hobby among a minority of users, and picking mushrooms can be dangerous and is also time consuming. So realistically most users will just be buying those too.

My hope is that people will form cooperatives and non-profit organizations to provide these sacred and healing substances for people who need them, while making little or no profit but still keeping the process viable.

It is illegal to grow most Apple's you buy from a grocery store. But I get what you mean. No one actually cares where their strawberries came from.

You cannot envision a profit model for selling psychedelics?

Some reasons: they're not addictive, one intense sitting can have fully transformative effects, people might return to them a couple of times in their life (e.g. the exact opposite of most of commercial drugs).

also, scalable profit needs repeat interactions and growth in consumption. Neither of these are healthy in regard to psychedelics. The outcome of that could just be a slightly funky prozac thats as watered down in its effects as predecessors.

Decriminalisation, e.g. freedom to self cultivate and in use in long term medical trials is the best option imo.

It's akin to envisioning profit models for open source software.

They're out there, just keep looking.

It's the ethics of involving the profit motive in substances which are sacred to many people that I have a problem with.

Unfortunately, capitalism eats everything, so it's probably going to happen whether we like it or not.

I just hope the people who really respect and understand the potential of these substances retain some control of what psychedelic use of the future looks like, instead of being controlled by clueless MBA's with dollar signs in their eyes.

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