The Trip Report is Going Pro
Plus an article about China, Innovation and Psychedelics
Welcome to The Trip Report, a newsletter for the builders of the emerging psychedelic ecosystem on the business, policy, and impact of psychedelics.
For new readers, welcome to this quickly growing community of psychedelic stakeholders— if you have any questions, suggestions or feedback just hit respond or shoot an email to thetripreport@protonmail.com
Big Announcement: Subscriber-only Updates
The psychedelic landscape is changing rapidly.
Things are heating up.
The pace of news, events, announcements in the psychedelic arena is quickening.
New companies are announced weekly.
Patent applications, therapist training opportunities, the number of psychedelic retreats, and treatment opportunities are growing.
Legislative action and ballot initiatives are emerging across the country like fruiting bodies from the mycelial network.
And none of this comes without growing pains.
The advent of psychedelic medicine, therapy, and biotech is upon us and The Trip Report is here to support the builders of this ecosystem.
So starting on February 24th The Trip Report will be dispatched on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Wednesday’s updates will always be free.
Monday and Friday we’ll publish Member Updates, subscription-only dispatches for paid members of The Trip Report.
Publishing The Trip Report more frequently will allow for more extensive coverage, better insight, better analysis, and better jokes.
Writing The Trip Report has allowed me to connect to a community and people who share my enthusiasm, hope, and optimism.
Publishing on the news once a week has not been nearly enough to cover all the events, news, deals, and announcements, now that the pace is picking up it is time to follow suit. Writing more frequently will allow for greater detail, nuance and context.
How much will it cost?
If you sign up before March 1st it is $10/month for the first year.
If you sign up after March 1st it will be $20/month.
I anticipate there will be some questions and might take a few weeks for everyone to get comfortable with this new game plan so please don’t hesitate to reach out with any thoughts or questions.
Since going forward we’ll be analyzing the news, providing context and insight, this will be the last scheduled Sunday essay.
I hope you enjoy it.
China, Innovation, and Psychedelics
When China opened its doors for business in 1978 it marked the beginning of the fastest growing economy ever.
China has gone from one of the poorest countries in the world to one the richest and most politically powerful economic forces ever, wielding power far beyond its borders and citizens, even influencing American cultural icons—imagine Lebron James acquiescing to Donald Trump the way he did in the face of Chinese pressure.
Per the Federation of American Scientists’ Congressional Research Service:
“Since opening up to foreign trade and investment and implementing free-market reforms in 1979, China has been among the world’s fastest-growing economies, with real annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth averaging 9.5% through 2018, a pace described by the World Bank as “the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history.”
China’s opening of its doors to the global economy, not only raised the standard of living within the country but it created an opportunity for American companies to expand into new territory and grow the economy back home.
Within two weeks of opening to the world, the first deliveries of Coca-Cola arrived in Beijing. Others followed shortly after.
The economic opening up of China in 1978 came at just the right time for the American Economy.
The Great Stagnation
Tyler Cowen, the George Mason economist, and author asserts that by 1973 the modern economy had reached a plateau. All of the low hanging fruit of innovation that created modern life had been picked and the American economy struggled to find new value to create.
The socioeconomic perils we have faced since can be seen as a result of innovative stasis.
The Great Stagnation marked the end of the innovation economy that benefitted average households and the starting point of the decoupling of GDP growth from median income that would continue to this day.
Cowen’s thesis is that the current problems of society; inequality, joblessness, income stagnation, environmental degradation, etc. are not the result of our evil overlords plotting the demise of the 99% but rather a result of all the low hanging fruit of modern innovation having been picked.
That may seem like an odd concept, especially if you’re reading this on an internet-connected smartphone or laptop, innovations that have revolutionized our lives and economy.
But Cowen’s point is that aside from the internet, modern life doesn’t look that different from that of the 1960s.
“The Contemporary world has plenty of innovations, but most of them do not much benefit the average household… We still drive cars, use refrigerators, and turn on the light switch… Life is better and we have more stuff, but the pace of change has slowed down compared to what people saw two or three generations ago”
The innovations that got us here have not fundamentally changed much since their invention. Modern living still relies on electricity, automobiles, airplanes, household appliances, indoor plumbing, the telephone, pharmaceuticals, and mass production.
“Meaningful innovation has become harder, and so we must spend more money to accomplish real innovations, which means a lower and declining rate of return on technology… most modern innovations bring only slight additional benefits to the majority of the population.”
Aside from the internet, the innovation that we have seen has come in the form of financial products like credit default swaps, or marketing innovation that leverages exclusivity or status-related drives.
“A fundamental way to put the point is this: A lot of our recent innovations are “private goods” rather than “public goods”… goods that are exclusive or status-related rather than universal, private rather than public; think 25 seasons of new, fall season Gucci handbags”
China
Had China not opened its economic doors in 1978, the rest of the world could be living in very different circumstances.
One in which Asia had remained mired in poverty and North America and Europe had suffered more serious consequences of the economic slowdown.
However, the opening of China and other parts of Asia allowed for American and European firms to expand into new markets and institutionalize the low-hanging fruit that had become staples of modern living, thereby injecting much needed economic growth back home.
At the time China was perceived to be a backwater, a communist outpost with a strange and mysterious culture closed off to the rest of the world, much as we perceive North Korea today.
Upon announcing he would be visiting China in 1972, President Nixon received backlash from supporters for wanting to establish relationships with such a foreign, closed and communist society.
But since 1979 China has grown to be a world superpower, the second-largest economy and raised 800 million people out of poverty. Much of this resurgence has profited the U.S. and European consumers and businesses.
What does this have to do with psychedelics?
Psychedelics
Modern medicine has hit the same wall. All of the low hanging fruit has been picked.
There are specialties like orthopedics that have figured out how to do amazing things like mend broken bones, and ligaments with a consistent track record of great results.
But the conditions of the mind remain elusive to science and modern medicine.
It goes beyond the conditions of the mind. Conditions of lifestyle, behavior, and emotional regulation are those that peg the healthcare system back and yield shitty outcomes.
Obesity, chronic pain, metabolic disease, depression, trauma, anxiety.
The common feature of these conditions is that there is no single cause, invasion, mutation, excess or deficiency.
They are unique to the person.
Psychedelic medicine is poised to inject much-needed innovation into a depressingly failed mental, emotional and behavioral health paradigm and like China of the 1970s most people consider these plants, fungi, and substances to be strange, foreign and dangerous.
However, unlike the expansion of American businesses into China, psychedelic medicine can usher in an age of innovation in areas that have been stagnant for decades.
Whereas economic expansion into China was merely building more of the same in a strange and misunderstood land, psychedelic medicine is a strange and misunderstood solution in a broken system.
Furthermore, psychedelics, as conceived of by many people today, share some similarities to perceptions of China in the 1970s:
Foreign: For most people, psychedelics and China of the 1970s are strange lands and conjure fear and judgment without adequate experience.
Inexperience: People have heard about both but few have any real experience.
Old: Chinese culture has been around for a long time. Psychedelics have been around for a long time.
Misunderstood: most people have been fed propaganda that spreads a false narrative about the perils of psychedelics. Likewise, china has largely been viewed as a backwater country with little to offer the modern economy.
Most importantly,
Will Change Everything: Few could have predicted in the 1960s that China would become a world superpower, millions would be raised out of poverty; equally it is rare to understand that one can have life-changing, disease altering experiences at the hands of a plant or fungus and that this can lead to extraordinary progress in medicine, consciousness, and spirituality.
Turning Inward
Mental health, psychiatry, even society at large, has resisted the turn inward required to heal our deepest wounds of trauma, depression, shame, and loneliness.
Psychedelic assisted therapies to aim to undo this trajectory and offer codified, time tested methods of extinguishing the flames of mental and emotional dis-ease.
Psychedelic medicine should have been low hanging fruit but prohibition prevented it.
The opportunity to finally pick this forbidden fruit will allow the first real dent to be made on addiction, PTSD, depression, shame, loneliness and present the first counter to the effects of the attention economy.
There’s no telling how this could impact society, communities and the economy if the throngs of people sidelined by addiction, depression and social anxiety can take up the mantle of parents, siblings, employers, providers, creators, and entrepreneurs.
What could this world look like?
Hopefully, we will find out.