Anyone who wants to get a feel for the frenetic movement of businesses to take advantage of the psychedelic renaissance can look to Delic Corp. The American company, which presents itself as the “leading corporation in psychedelic well-being”, closed for US$ 3.3 million (R$ 18 million) the purchase of the Ketamine Welness Centers (KWC) chain.
The KWC, as the name implies in English, brings together clinics that use ketamine (or ketamine) to treat depression and other mental problems. It is an anesthetic used for decades, but only more recently in the therapy of these disorders.
Ketamine does not belong to the class of classic psychedelics, which include mescaline, LSD, psilocybin and DMT (dimethyltryptamine, present in ayahuasca). It has the advantage of a quick and short effect over them, compatible with treatment within a medical appointment, in addition to not being a prohibited substance.
The application is done by injection and only by doctors. The drug also has a reputation for taking people out of severe depressed crises, with suicidal ideation, although its nasal spray version (Spravato) does not have this indication in the package insert because clinical tests by Janssen did not obtain statistical significance for this outcome.
KWC has ten ketamine clinics in nine states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, Nevada, Texas, Utah and Washington. In 2020, the network had revenues of US$ 3.5 million (R$ 19 million) and, this year, it is projected to reach US$ 4.5 million (R$ 25 million). In six years, he claims to have applied 60 thousand treatments.
The buyer, Delic, already operated two clinics under the name Ketamine Infusion Centers (KIC), in California and Arizona. The plan is to open another 15 of them in a year and a half, consolidating the industry’s leading position in the US and already preparing for the psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy market explosion expected from 2023, with the likely regulation of MDMA and psilocybin for these treatments.
In the crosshairs of investors are millions and millions of people who suffer from existing drug-resistant depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and chronic pain. As the psychedelic therapies under investigation will not be pills to be taken at home every day, like antidepressants, but as part of psychological or psychiatric treatment, patients will have to resort to doctors and clinical centers.
In Brazil, not even the discussion about medical marijuana has advanced as much as it could, which makes it possible to predict a lot of delay when it comes to the psychedelic stigmatized. And it won’t be for lack of people who suffer, after a deadly pandemic fueled by the Jair Bolsonaro government.
The movement of investors around here is timid, although the country has a long tradition of research on cannabis and psychedelics, especially ayahuasca. It was thanks to studies with tea, in fact, that Brazilian psychonaut researchers were ranked third in a survey of high-impact scientific studies, such as the one carried out on depression at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN).
For now, Brazil only has one psychedelic startup accelerator, the newly founded Scirama. Perhaps it is not so surprising the lack of vision, in a nation where the wealthy class supported, and to a large extent still supports, a president of Bolsonaro’s suit.
Read more about psychedelics in the book:
(Reproduction)
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