The Pharmaco-Industrial Complex's New Corporate Shamanism. What could go wrong?
Twitter was apparently abuzz yesterday with news of the FDA's approval of a Phase I clinical trial for research into the treatment of drug-resistant depression with psilocybin, to be conducted by life sciences corporation Compass Pathways, a UK startup backed by Billionaire Peter Thiel.
Comments over this latest news throughout Twitter were bursting with cheers of 'wooo hooo' and 'sign me up!'.
Apparently no one is bothering to ask the most vital of questions. What exactly is Compass Pathway's business model? How do they plan to recoup the more than $30M invested from backers and turn a profit off of a fungus you or I could grow in our backyards?
It sounds to me, as Maude Lebowski once so rightly discerned, that "this whole thing stinks to high heaven" and we're all being taken for the proverbial ride.
Compass Pathway's stated mission is to, "accelerate patient access to innovation in mental health", i.e. psilocybin, the active component in magic mushrooms.
If their intended purpose was truly to accelerate patient access to nature, they could start by ignoring the FDA, as well as the DEA, and other alphabet agencies who after all are the ones limiting psilocybin's access in the first place. It is only by virtue of the FDA's classification of mushrooms and other hallucinogens as 'Schedule I' (controlled/dangerous) substances, that the access is limited. Rather, Compass Pathways has sought the approval of the very agency that stands in the way of it's stated aims. Is not something amiss?
As this article from PsilocybinTechnology.com points out, it is in fact a synthetic form of psilocybin which the company aims to test (and no doubt patent). That is, an artificial compound synthesized in a laboratory, not what is provided by mother nature.
The corporate shamans' attempts' to substitute their designer-imposter chemicals in lieu of what already comes to us freely and abundantly by way of nature does not always end well, as has been seen quite recently with a fair share of horror stories, some including death, resulting from the use of synthetic marijuana.
But it appears to fit a familiar pattern, one of downplaying if not limiting man's relationship to the natural world and in it's stead charging admission to the pharmacopeian funhouse (tm) as the only show in town. It's one of the oldest tricks in the book really; take away something the people already get on their own for free, and force them to buy it back. The real trick is getting them to believe they're getting it at a discount! It reminds me of how those in government can strip the individual of a natural god-given right and repackage it back to us as a 'privilege'. Shouldn't we all be so grateful!!
Concerning the news about Compass Pathways, this only scratches the surface of the issues at play, but such news of an FDA sponsored, billionaire-backed corporation developing synthetic hallucinogens ought, at the very least, to be looked at askance, rather than mindlessly cheered. I sincerely doubt this is the kind of victory some would have it be.
It is worth mentioning too, that Compass Pathway's largest investor, Peter Thiel, is evidently an outspoken transhumanist who has no qualms about merging man with machine and leaving nature behind. Perhaps synthetic psilocybin will one day be used to awaken nascent AI into it's first glimmer of sentience, if such a thing were possible. And perhaps the trip will be administered through an Apple device, signifying AI's first byte from the proverbial Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. One wonders how many nanoseconds it will take for such an intelligence to comprehend the First Noble Truth, that all life is suffering. But needn't it worry, there will no doubt be an iPill App for that, corporate shamans willing.