Healing Comes First - Money Comes Second

What happens when we try to enact change without giving full credence to the fact that psychedelic work requires a new paradigm?

It is not possible to fit psychedelics into the pre-existent paradigm of business and healthcare in the West. We are seeing our infrastructure crumbling - and I don't just mean in the broader society. Now, we are seeing a collapse of psychedelic infrastructure.

Companies are running into the ground, stock prices are plummeting, and feelings are being hurt. Why?

We have employed this paradigm of how we work and operate in the West. We come up with a business idea, get out investor slide deck together, ask people for money, raise it in series, launch our company publicly, and then try to convince the public to give us money with the promise that they'll get a return. For our initial investors and shareholders to obtain money, it is necessary to constantly grow. There is a necessity here to generate revenue. An indication that the business is not functioning well creates fear in the market, and investors will pull out, threatening the longevity of the business. Internal drama gets leaked, inadequacies are pushed to the forefront of consciousness, and, after enough of that, smaller companies (and bigger ones, too), reach the end of their financial runway.

So, what happens when we try to plug psychedelics into this model? Indeed, this same model applies to the broader way in which we care for people as well. Often, at scale, we see insurance companies paying for care, which is rife for problems for the same reason of needing to generate revenue.

Let's look at an example. I want to start a company using psychedelics to treat people. I see the scientific results, noticing that they are much larger and more robust than other currently available treatments. There is not a pre-existent psychedelic-treatment infrastructure in my locale, so I decide that I will start my own operation. I accept that, due to the lack of a broad array of evidence, I am taking a risk. Alas, risk is at the heart of business. The evidence has not yet been published for us to understand the right context for usage, however, we can see that using psychedelics as treatment is helpful.

I establish my business doing infusions, because the literature states that this is effective for multiple mental health conditions. I use a standard number for dosing, 0.5mg/kg intravenous. However, I fail to understand the proper context of use, or ask what factors play into the effective context of use. I do not spend my time studying how psychedelic medicine is effectively administered, or how indigenous cultures have used this medicine, because my main goal is to generate revenue. Therefore, I leave people alone in a room without any music. As a medical procedure, I bill patients $600 to be on their infusion for 40-minutes. I have them go through a $300 intake session with a prescriber, and then have that prescriber recommend 6 sessions. Six sessions times $600 is $3600, along with $300 for the intake. So, basically, each patient is $4k. Let's say I have $50k a month of operational expenses, including paying my providers and rent as well as paying back my investors, so I need a minimum of 13 patients per month to break even, and then each above that is profit.

Do you see the problem here? Each person is treated as a commodity. On top of that, we are not examining the right problem. Once this line of thinking starts, we take ourselves away from healing and toward money. Beyond that, this is not the proper way to effectively conduct psychedelic healing. There is no regard for set-and-setting, the therapeutic container, the music as a guide, integrating the experience, and more.

What we should be asking is how do we maximize healing, do it properly, safely, and effectively, and then how do we get the energetic return on the time and investment that we put in. How do we do it sustainably?

I think if we start asking these questions instead we will see a radical shift. We can start to build the healing model from a perspective of doing it properly, safely, and effectively first. Perhaps that, instead, requires thorough preparation, multiple facilitators per experience, and multiple integration sessions. Perhaps that requires music, and blankets, and pillows. Perhaps that requires access to nature. The questions we should then ask are: how much does that cost, how can we make it accessible, how can I deliver that in a way that is sustainable for me where I don't spend all my energy without being able to take care of my own self?

This is only the tip of the iceberg. I am trying to get the wheels to start turning as to how we approach this work. I am seeing the former (profit driven) model taking primacy over the latter (healing driven) model. I am not trying to tell everybody how this work should be done, but I am seeing where the profit driven model is breaking down and companies are shutting down as a result. I'd like to see us start to think about healing first, not scalability, shareholder profits, and quarterly earnings reports. I think that if we focus on maximizing the healing we will naturally see the financial aspect come together. The energetic balance will harmonize. But, if we focus on profit first and healing second, we may find ourselves without either.