THE PSYCHEDELIC RENAI$$ANCE: Now on-the-road to Creating Billion$$$$$$$$$ to Treat Trauma and Depression

First some background provided by a Forbes reporter:

"Humans, of course, have used psychedelics in cultural and religious rituals for thousands of years.

Then in the 1950s, the U.S. government spent millions of dollars to fund studies on drugs such as LSD, which was legal at the time. The psychedelic compound was discovered in 1943 by Sandoz chemist Albert Hofmann while he was studying ergot, a fungus that grows on rye.

A few years later and through 1966, Sandoz provided LSD and psilocybin to psychiatrists and researchers to study their effects and potential as a treatment for alcoholism, opioid use disorder, depression, and anxiety associated with terminal cancer in conjunction with therapy.

> By 1968, LSD had become synonymous with the counterculture revolution, and two years later, President Richard Nixon launched a war on drugs, banning psychedelic substances and funding for research dried up.

It wasn’t until the early 2000s when academic interest in psychedelics started to pick up again. >> Today, the psychedelic renaissance is underway as promising studies out of Johns Hopkins, Imperial College London, New York University, Yale and other institutions suggest that drugs such as psilocybin and MDMA possess therapeutic potential for various conditions, including depression, PTSD and addiction.

A cottage industry has blossomed from the research, with publicly traded biotech companies racing to get FDA-approved psychedelic-assisted therapy to market, disrupt mental healthcare, and rake in billions of dollars.

 

GoDaddy Billionaire Bob Parsons Believes Psychedelics Can Heal Trauma—And He’s Putting His Money (And Brain) On The Line

Will YakowiczForbes Staff

Forbes | 2022-04-17

The Marine infantryman still suffers from PTSD from his tour in Vietnam but credits LSD and MDMA with helping him “come home.” Now he’s on a mission to help other veterans

 

Will Yakowicz

Forbes Staff

Apr 17, 2022,06:30am EDT

Let's flash forward (after the long and detailed opening paragraphs): "...By the 1980s, he was a brash, motorcycling-riding businessman with a pierced ear and the founder of Parsons Technology, an accounting software company he sold in the 1990s for $64 million to Intuit.

In 1997, Parsons started a web design company that would eventually become his most famous venture—domain name reseller GoDaddy, which would become notorious for its raunchy Super Bowl commercials.

He became a billionaire in 2011 when he sold the majority of GoDaddy to private equity investors, earning $900 million in cash and shares in the publicly traded company.

He is now worth some $3.4 billion.

[.  ]

But like many Vietnam veterans, Parsons was still haunted by the war. He didn’t know what to call it, but he realized his personality was completely different from the young kid from Baltimore who grew up poor. Thanks to post-traumatic stress disorder, Parsons had a hair-trigger temper and didn’t want to be around people. “It most certainly cost me two marriages,” he says.

He tried therapy to ease the PTSD, but it wasn’t until 2018, when he read Michael Pollan’s book about psychedelic-assisted therapy, How to Change Your Mind, that he thought about using mind-altering drugs. Parsons mentioned to his third wife, Renee, that he wanted to try therapy with psychedelics and within two months she had set up a trip down in Hawaii, where they own a home. Under the supervision of a trained therapist with vast experience helping people through a psychedelic journey, Parsons underwent multi-day therapy sessions.

The treatment involved a series of Schedule I drugs—including psilocybin (the hallucinogen in “magic mushrooms”), DMT (the active ingredient in ayahuasca) and LSD—meaning they are banned by the federal government and believed to have a high potential for abuse and no medical value. "For four days I was at it: the first day it was ayahuasca, the second day mushrooms,” Parsons says.

"The third day, I just played golf. I'd never putted so good in my whole life, before or since."

I mean it was like the green was saying ‘Hit it is here, Bobby’ and it would go right in.”

. . .On the fourth day, Parsons took “good, old-fashioned LSD.”

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Prescription sales for depression medication is estimated to be $50 billion a year globally, while the total mental health market is worth about $100 billion in annual sales.

Pharmaceutical analysts say that FDA-approved psychedelic-assisted therapy could seize $10 billion in annual sales by targeting the treatment-resistant depression subcategory alone.

There is still a lot of work to be done to prove the efficacy of these drugs, but Parsons needs no convincing. Nor do medical researchers in the space who see dramatic results with patients, although nothing has been proven, says Rachel Yehuda, director of Mount Sinai’s Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research. . .

Parsons is among those leading the charge, but he is not interested in starting a business in the field. Even though he sees tremendous economic potential, he has embraced the role of the billionaire donor. . .

And Parsons is not the only billionaire putting his money into psychedelics. Paypal founder Peter Thiel (net worth: $5.2 billion) invested in Nasdaq-traded German biotech Atai Life Sciences, which owns a suite of companies conducting clinical trials on various psychedelic molecules, including Compass Pathways, which is developing a patented form of psilocybin to be used in conjunction with therapy to treat depression. Atai has produced its own billionaire, Christian Angermayer ($1.3 billion). Hedge fund billionaire Steven Cohen ($17.4 billion), author of the Four-Hour Workweek Tim Ferriss, co-founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg, and Toms Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie donated $17 million to build the Johns Hopkins Center on Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. . .

Despite having positive results with psychedelics, Parsons—who also founded PXG, a successful golf equipment company, owns several motorcycle dealerships, the Scottsdale National Golf Club, and manages his own hedge fund and real estate portfolio—admits he is not completely cured. . ."

You are invited to read more go here >> https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2022/04/17/godaddy-billionaire-bob-parsons-believes-psychedelics-can-heal-trauma-and-hes-putting-his-money-and-brain-on-the-line/