“Psychedelics are looking like the next cannabis.” You’ve likely come across that statement sometime over the past year and maybe at first you didn’t believe it, but these days
it’s getting hard to ignore.
Every day it seems like new investors are coming around to the
emerging field of medicinal psychedelic drugs, and by now a lot of big names have entered the field. These investing gurus and venture capital analysts are all in agreement that the work being done in psychedelics research for mental health applications, and the direction the market is headed, is
too good to pass up.
If you’re still on the fence about psychedelics, however, you need to know that there are some very big names in the business. Some, like cannabis guru
Bruce Linton, see the same early regulatory signs and support that medicinal cannabis received. Others, like Canadian businessman
Kevin O’Leary, are investing in psychedelics after passing on cannabis completely.
Both Linton and O’Leary
recently became heavy investors in
Mind Medicine Inc., a private Canadian neuro-pharmaceutical company aiming to develop drugs with the same mental health benefits but without the associated high. They’re joined by James Bailey, a partner at the private equity firm
Bail Capital that has invested heavily in the industry.
Another name that should be familiar to investors is
Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire that co-founded
PayPal and sits on the board for
Facebook Inc. (
NASDAQ:FB). Thiel is an investor in
Compass Pathways, which is making headways in the study of psychedelics to treat depression.
He’s joined in the venture by
Atai Life Sciences, a German biotech start-up with
a lot of venture capital support looking to fund more research on psilocybin, MDMA, and other psychedelic drugs.
A major driving force in the psychedelics wave isn’t a name, however, it’s a government organization. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been impressively receptive to psychedelics in recent years, starting in 2017 when it
granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation to MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Since then it has expanded the number of companies allowed to research the drugs, and in March of this year granted approval for a ketamine-related depression drug from
Johnson & Johnson (
NYSE:JNJ).
As the emerging sector sees more trials and investments, you can expect more big names to enter the psychedelics playing field. With cannabis acting as a roadmap and helping to shift public opinion towards previously illicit drugs, and with a pure medicinal focus helping propel the industry, it’s looking like psychedelics are definitely the real deal.