Psilocybin was designated a “Breakthrough Therapy” in 2019 by the FDA, “an action that is meant to accelerate the typically sluggish process of drug development and review.”
Over 4 years later, nothing has changed in regards to psilocybin being medically available to people in the United States through officially approved and designated routes of administration.
What has changed, however, is the widespread demand for and availability of psilocybin mushrooms globally thanks to impressive clinical data and widespread media coverage legitimizing the long misunderstood psychoactive properties of certain types of fungi.
While companies trying to capitalize on the medical potential of psilocybin have seen unilateral nosedives across the board in share value, worldwide consumption of psilocybin mushrooms has skyrocketed in an inverse fashion. Please take a moment to appreciate the 5 year stock performance charts of the two most notable psilocybin investment vehicles.
In case you don’t want to squint your eyes, one of these stocks is down 79 % while the other is down 94 %.
We don’t have such clear cut chart documentation of the rate of psilocybin mushroom consumption in the U.S., but we do have a full page ad in the New Yorker this week advertising psilocybin mushroom microdose products.
And we also have guerrilla ads with QR codes on them literally all over the world.
In fact, I’ve seen ads like the one shown immediately above plastered onto street corners, on the walls of pubs, at pop up markets, and many other random surfaces in at least 10 countries on 4 continents this year alone.
The ‘psychedelic sector’ has been an absolute disaster from an investment standpoint, yet many brands and platforms stubbornly continue to pursue and publish non-news about the glacial-paced clinical trials and medicalization use cases while ignoring the GIANT FUCKING ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM.
It’s so hugely ironic how blindly the medical establishment and profit-driven psychedelic startups just write off failure after failure, including 100 million dollar implosions, and expect anyone with half a brain to keep listening to them.
In 36 years and with over $140 million raised so far, MAPS has administered MDMA-assisted therapy to approximately 1700 people. This week across the world, citizen mycologists have conservatively provided over 1 million people with psilocybin mushrooms for little to no money at all.
Link to article: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4054255-magic-mushroom-use-by-young-adults-has-nearly-doubled-in-three-years/
This 2023 article published on The Hill cites that 6.6 percent of adults in the United States have used psilocybin mushrooms in the last year. There are somewhere between 40-50 million people aged 19-30 in the U.S. according to 2022 Census data. 6 % of this number is ~2.5 million and that’s not including 19 or 30 year olds. This is in the U.S. only, and only referencing people in their 20’s. When you consider that psilocybin mushroom use and demand is worldwide, and certainly not limited to people in their 20’s, especially factoring in microdosing – then the estimate of 1 million people consuming mushrooms this week alone becomes not only plausible, but an extremely conservative estimate.
Pounds of psilocybin mushrooms are down to $175 in some places in the United States. That’s 416 grams of psilocybin mushrooms, more than ten lifetime’s supply for most people. It’s a multiple year supply for even seasoned psychonauts.
I personally believe that the medical model, the Decrim model, and Religious Use access models for psychedelics all need to co-exist and support each other. But the unwillingness of ‘the psychedelic sector’ to recognize that the underground market is absolutely dominating the government-sanctioned medicalized route is a bad look for the stakeholders prioritizing so much time and money to their preferred route of administration.
Then again, with the financial returns and circus like antics the psychedelic sector has experienced since it’s rise in 2018, the psychedelic corporatocracy doesn’t need any more help making itself look bad in the eyes of the world.
