On April 19, the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel hosted the inaugural Benzinga Psychedelics Capital Conference, advertised as “bringing together leaders of the BIGGEST publicly-traded Psychedelics companies with investors from across North America”. General admission was $697, plus a $26.86 fee. Attendees were promised a “chance to be in the room with the leaders who will take the Psychedelics industry to the next level”.
Indeed, capitalism is already tripping over itself to get people tripping on legal psychedelics. The estimated market opportunity of which is orbiting somewhere in the hundreds of billions of dollars, according to conference keynote speaker Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” reality television fame. The industry comprises an array of products beyond LSD, including psilocybin – the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms – as well as mescaline, MDMA, and the hallucinogen DMT, found in Amazonian ayahuasca.
Psychedelics are still illegal under United States federal law, in keeping with the longtime US “war on drugs” that has so handily served elite corporate interests and militarisation schemes abroad and at home – and that has historically criminalised, inter alia, Black Americans and protesters against the Vietnam War. But just as criminalisation is profitable for the powers that be, legalisation can also bear fruit. And as venture capitalists, investors, Silicon Valley tech bros, and Big Pharma players currently race to pound down the doors of perception into the realm of decriminalised psychedelics, capitalism’s latest hallucination is poised to become reality. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.