What makes you conclude that there’s a lot of money to be made in it? My prior is the opposite. MDMA and psilocybin themselves aren’t patentable at this point. Yes, delivery mechanisms could be and new or related unpatented compounds could be. But any for profit company will likely be competing against at least a non profit or two. And my research on pricing is that having a single competitor massively reduces margins and profitability. Also dosing will be highly infrequent which should also reduce the profits for any psychedelic pharma companies.
Given the risk in pharma r&d, potential profits presumably need to be very large to justify investment. My sense is that the expected rate of return may be lower than other similarly risky projects and therefore it won’t be particularly suited to for profits. But maybe it’ll be somewhat profitable and the reward of positive impact will make up the difference. Or maybe thanks to many years of use, these compounds have much lower risk and therefore make sense from a risk reward perspective to be pursued by pharma investors/companies.
But I’m skeptical of that and I expect that we’ll need altruistically motivated people to make progress, and if it’s left to for profits the industry would stagnate. (One piece of evidence is that the for profit pharma world has seemingly made no progress in the psychedelic field since about the 1970s with the exception of compass pathways a few years ago)
This is an excellent post. I agree that status is a ridiculously powerful driver of human behavior. Based on your section of how EA can help increase status, what do you think is the single most promising strategy that EA could implement to make joining EA higher status? (Also a side note I’d add is that status *from who* is important. People outside EA don’t care about within-EA status currency, yet, they care about status currency from their existing peers and people they respect. So they’d need to believe that joining EA makes them higher status outside of EA.)
Also, has anyone looked at whether EA is at the right time for scaling? In startups there’s the framework that you want to solve your value hypothesis first, and then once you’ve done that, and only then, you should focus on your growth hypothesis. Basically get it working just how you like it with a small number of customers/users and then focus on scaling up. Is EA at the point where people want to focus on scaling? I think it probably is, but I still wanted to ask the obvious question.