{"id":210984,"date":"2022-05-09T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2022-05-09T11:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=210984"},"modified":"2025-01-10T15:06:42","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T15:06:42","slug":"the-legal-psychedelics-industry-capitalism-on-drugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/05\/the-legal-psychedelics-industry-capitalism-on-drugs\/","title":{"rendered":"The Legal Psychedelics Industry: Capitalism on Drugs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Capitalism is tripping over itself to get people tripping on legal psychedelics.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

5 May 2022 – <\/em>On April 19, the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel hosted the inaugural Benzinga Psychedelics Capital Conference, advertised as \u201cbringing together leaders of the BIGGEST publicly-traded Psychedelics companies with investors from across North America\u201d. General admission was $697, plus a $26.86 fee. Attendees were promised a \u201cchance to be in the room with the leaders who will take the Psychedelics industry to the next level\u201d.<\/p>\n

Indeed, capitalism is already tripping over itself to get people tripping on legal psychedelics. The estimated market opportunity of which is orbiting somewhere in the hundreds of billions of dollars, according to conference keynote speaker Kevin O\u2019Leary of \u201cShark Tank\u201d reality television fame. The industry comprises an array of products beyond LSD, including psilocybin \u2013 the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms \u2013 as well as mescaline, MDMA, and the hallucinogen DMT, found in Amazonian ayahuasca.<\/p>\n

Psychedelics are still illegal under United States federal law, in keeping with the longtime US \u201cwar on drugs\u201d that has so handily served elite corporate interests and militarisation schemes abroad and at home \u2013 and that has historically criminalised, inter alia, Black Americans and protesters against the Vietnam War. But just as criminalisation is profitable for the powers that be, legalisation can also bear fruit. And as venture capitalists, investors, Silicon Valley tech bros, and Big Pharma players currently race to pound down the doors of perception into the realm of decriminalised psychedelics, capitalism\u2019s latest hallucination is poised to become reality.<\/p>\n

To this end, the Visual Capitalist website offers a convenient \u201cVisual Guide to Investing in Psychedelics\u201d, charting such matters as psychedelics capital flows, the global psychedelics drug market forecast, and research and development and clinical trials by various companies aiming to use psychedelics to treat disorders like anxiety, depression, and addiction.<\/p>\n

Entrepreneurs are no doubt correct in detecting a gargantuan market in the US and elsewhere for effective mental health treatments, but it is no less than mind-bending to argue that the very capitalist system that is responsible for generating vast alienation and mental strife should now be in the business of rectifying the situation with the same profit-over-people approach.<\/p>\n

After all, the globalised US brand of capitalism is predicated on egregious socioeconomic inequality and the tyranny of the rich \u2013 hardly an arrangement that discourages depression and anxiety. Poverty and other societal ailments are cast as a failure of the individual rather than of the system of racist patriarchy, which only permits the \u201csuccess\u201d of a privileged minority.<\/p>\n

To be sure, this is not to rain on the whole psychedelics parade \u2013 which potentially promises significant relief for a lot of humans (or at least the ones that can afford treatment). A recent Washington Post dispatch by Maryland oncologist Manish Agrawal, for example, praises the evidence that psychedelics can \u201creduce death-anxiety that many cancer patients experience\u201d. Psychedelics are also nothing new; in her in-depth March 2022 report<\/a> for The Nation, titled \u201cThe Brave New World of Legalised Psychedelics Is Already Here\u201d, Zoe Cormier notes that, \u201cbefore we got our hands on them, Indigenous cultures used psychedelics for thousands of years as ritual sacraments\u201d.<\/p>\n

Now, however, the soulless rush to extract individual profit by distorting, commodifying, and patenting these \u201cancient compounds\u201d is depression-inducing enough in itself \u2013 before we even get into the details.<\/p>\n

Among the ground covered by Cormier: the bankrupt or nonoperational Canadian mining companies that have spontaneously converted themselves into psychedelic outfits, thanks to the fact that the companies\u2019 continued \u201cexist[ence] as a legal entity \u2026 allows for instant access to the stock market and the ability to raise abundant funds without the scrutiny that an IPO would bring\u201d.<\/p>\n

For instance, Vancouver psychedelics company Numinus Wellness Inc was spawned via a reverse takeover of Rojo Resources Ltd, a mineral exploration firm. In April, Numinus Wellness announced the acquisition of Novamind Inc \u2013 the world\u2019s first major psychedelics merger.<\/p>\n

And yet North American mining companies are not the only entities that have seemingly decided to branch out from toxic earthly operations to the conquest of, you know, consciousness itself. Right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir \u2013 the firm that helped the US National Security Agency to \u201cspy on the whole world\u201d, as The Intercept put it<\/a> \u2013 has invested heavily in ATAI Life Sciences, a self-defined \u201cclinical-stage biopharmaceutical company aiming to transform the treatment of mental health disorders\u201d.<\/p>\n

ATAI was co-founded by billionaire Christian Angermayer, who swears that tripping on mushrooms enabled him to \u201cfinally\u201d understand the super-sketchy cryptocurrency Bitcoin \u2013 a moment of enlightenment that apparently propelled his billions to the next level. In November 2021, ATAI increased<\/a> its shares in Compass Pathways, which markets itself as a pioneer in psilocybin therapy for mental illness and is also fiercely invested in by Thiel.<\/p>\n

This is the same Thiel, of course, who has prompted such headlines as \u201cPeter Thiel Wants To Inject Himself With Young People\u2019s Blood\u201d, a 2016 Vanity Fair report that also quoted the capital addict\u2019s views on death: \u201cYou can accept it, you can deny it, or you can fight it.\u201d Thiel himself has committed to being \u201cdeep-frozen\u201d in the event that he eventually perishes \u2013 a die-hard capitalist approach that sees death as the ultimate defeat.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, newly minted Twitter owner Elon Musk<\/a>, CEO of rocket company SpaceX and self-appointed \u201cTechnoking\u201d of electric vehicle firm Tesla, has also intermittently weighed in on the \u201cbenefits of psychedelics\u201d. Last year, he was asked by the chairman of Field Trip Health \u2013 a psychedelic therapy company created, as Cormier explains, through a lucrative reverse takeover of Newton Energy Corporation, a Canadian oil and gas company \u2013 to expound on the \u201crole\u201d of psychedelics in \u201caddressing some of the more destructive tendencies of humanity\u201d.<\/p>\n

This, obviously, is one hell of a question to pose to a megalomaniac intent on destroying<\/a> not only this planet but others, too \u2013 thereby effecting a perennial bad trip for humanity. And as human \u201ctendencies\u201d remain destructive, and the ruling class remains psyched, it is all pretty far from far out.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Belen Fernandez is a contributing editor at <\/em>Jacobin Magazine and has written for the<\/em> New York Times, London Review of Books, Current Affairs, and<\/em> Middle East Eye, among numerous other publications. She is the author of<\/em> Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021),<\/em> Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019),<\/em> Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon (Warscapes, 2016), and<\/em> The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011).<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – aljazeera.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Capitalism is tripping over itself to get people tripping on legal psychedelics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":210985,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[887,232,550,1665,135,555,562,2231,626,610,2198,2060,2718,1213],"class_list":["post-210984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-capitalism","tag-big-pharma","tag-capitalism","tag-corruption","tag-drug-dealers","tag-drugs","tag-elites","tag-finance","tag-fiscal-paradises","tag-greed","tag-inequality","tag-post-capitalism","tag-profits","tag-pyramid-schemes","tag-super-rich"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210984"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":284626,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210984\/revisions\/284626"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}