72 subscribers! How did that happen? I promise I’ll talk less about this once we hit 100.

Special thanks goes out to the growing number of people supporting my via buy me a coffee cacti. You’re awesome, but present me with a problem. I’m aware of who at least some of you are, and being some of the smartest people I know, I feel anything I paywall exclusively for you has to be especially good. All I can say right now is that I’m working on it.

In this issue:

• More details on the PAT rollout in Australia and what they might mean for the US

• How to stop worrying about being in a simulation

• Operational security for group chats

For all this, plus new research on an overlooked toxidrome and an excitingly positive community initiative, read on!

Table of Contents

1. Industry Insights:

   1. Clinical Psychedelics in Australia and implication …

   2. New Research: Wood Lover Paralysis

2. Philosophical Brief: Ultimate Reality is Overrated

3. Consultancy Corner: Group chat OPSEC

4. EPIC Inspire Community Recognition Initiative

Industry Insights:

Clinical Psychedelics in Australia and implications for the US

Psychedelic Alpha did some much-appreciated heavy lifting earlier in the month and reported the results of it’s freedom of information request to to the TGA for figures on how many prescriptions had been issued for Psilocybin and MDMA under our Special Access Scheme. The round figure: 100.

Combined with previous reports that there are no more than 30 (and probably closer to 15) approved prescribers, we can start to put together a more complete picture of the emerging sector here.

The most obvious one is that, on average at least, prescribers seem to be going slow and not churning through large numbers of patients. Simple arithmetic shows that each prescriber is only dosing between 4 and 7 patients per year. Is this a refection of the psychological intensity of such work, the burden of compliance paperwork, or clinical caution? Time will tell.

Either way, these numbers are especially bad news for companies like Optimi Health Corp, as it limps along with less than 6 months worth of cash left at its current burn rate. This is doubly true when you consider that its recent(ish) announcement of shipping 1000 doses of GMP MDMA to Australia could represent up to 20 years worth of supply at current prescription rates. Shares were already diluted in January when the corporation settled CAD$98,126.25 of debt for “marketing and investor relations services” in an equity swap. I’d expect whatever fundraising that comes next for them to be pretty punishing for existing investors.

(Sorry $OPTHF ( ▲ 5.45% ) shareholders, I did try to warn you.)

The irony that 1000 doses of MDMA could easily be consumed in a day at any decent sized music festival, yet is somehow worth a press release should not be lost on anyone. Someone should tell former Optimi CEO, Bill Ciprick, that the hippies in yurts are still winning.

How this is playing out also allows us to make some more educated speculations about legal/clinical psychedelics in the US. The big psychedelic corporations and non-profits will have watched developments in Australia. If they genuinely want to make money from selling psychedelic pharmaceuticals (rather than just as a meme-stocks for temporarily embarrassed techbro millionaires who still live with their parents), they will not want to see bigger markets go down the same road that we have.

Right now, Australia has fewer than 1% of psychiatrists approved to prescribe, and those that are do not churn through huge numbers of clients. Imagine scaling this up to the US. Even if people like self-professed chaos agent, Matt Zorn, can help PAT clear the FDA’s hurdles, if the resulting regime is too restrictive, we’ll basically see a bigger and even more expensive version of what’s happening here.

People pumping billions of dollars into $ATAI ( ▼ 3.21% ) or Lykos aren’t dong this so a measly 1% of US psychiatrists can collectively prescribe 4000 doses of largely unpatentable medicines with minimal insurance coverage. Their long game will involve patented formulations, dispensed by a wider range of practitioners, with vastly less patient supervision. So, no matter what lobbyists and mouthpieces say, the big money will be aiming for a future that involves less ‘tripping while supervised by two psychologists in a comfortably furnished yurt’ and more ‘take one of these and get back to work.’

Maybe keep this in mind next time certain organisations come to your community asking for donations, or when you allow them to borrow your legitimacy and street cred by attending their events. Just sayin’.

Of course, this all assumes that the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t an oncoming train of environmental or political collapse. There are no dividends on a dead planet, and you’ll only get healthcare under fascism if you’re the kind of person the government wants to exist.

Perspective is everything.

New Research: Wood Lover Paralysis

A new paper featuring community-driven research on Wood Lover Paralysis (WLP) is out: “Wood-lover paralysis”: Describing a toxidrome with symptoms of weakness caused by some lignicolous “wood-loving” Psilocybe mushrooms. Carried out by researchers who are respected by the community because they’re part of it and in conjunction with the Australian Psychedelic Society, this paper is an important step in discovering patterns of how and when WLP impacts people. It also includes one of the clearest discussions of a hypothetical pharmacological mechanism I’ve read so far.