Shroom Boom Offers New Possibilities for Medicine and Functional Foods - Seite 3

Ferriss isn't the only high-profile investor to have taken an interest in the tasty fungi. Bruce Linton and Kevin O'Leary are seed investors in MindMed, while Peter Thiel has invested in Compass Pathways. Wild as it might seem to outsiders, Champignon is working in a field with growing scientific and financial credibility.

The market available to companies such as Champignon has long been limited by laws restricting the use and sale of psilocybin mushrooms and their derivatives. Now those laws are starting to change.

Denver, Oakland, and most recently Santa Cruz are among the places that have already decriminalized psilocybin. Some of the same people who championed those changes are now involved in wider efforts, with campaigns for decriminalization in areas such as Oregon and Iowa. In November 2019, Decriminalize California teamed up with the Beckley Foundation to replicate the success of decriminalization in Oakland throughout the state of California. Vermont, Michigan and Washington have also commenced movements toward legalization.

The case for legalizing shrooms isn't the same as for cannabis. While some of the same arguments about health benefits and personal choice are fielded, psilocybin legalization doesn't involve the huge potential tax benefits or the massive implications for the criminal justice system. Companies such as Champignon aren't looking to tap into the same huge painkilling market as THC and CBD products.  Instead, these companies occupy a smaller but still significant niche focusing on supporting mental health, where it is believed that psilocybin could create new treatments and potentially radically improve the lives of sufferers.

Support for legalization isn't clearly divided along party lines. Peter Thiel is a Trump ally while a recent attempt to make research easier was pushed by radical Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Like hemp farming, this is an industry with potential to reach across the political divide.

Building a Strategy Around Medicine

As psilocybin legalization grows, so has R&D, with studies into how to refine and synthesize the chemical taking place alongside product development. This research element is a critical part of Champignon's strategy.

Any company developing products within the health and wellness sector needs a medicinal IP strategy in order to provide the unique products and medical advances that make a medical company stand out — both to customers and investors. Champignon's plan is to use laboratory experiments to develop a way of biosynthesizing psilocybin, with the aim of reaching this milestone marker within the first three months of experiments. This would allow optimized and scaled production of pharmaceutical grade psilocybin.