Latest / Financial Survival Network / Exploring Psychedelics: Filament Health's Insights with Ben Lightburn #6002

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Exploring Psychedelics: Filament Health's Insights with Ben Lightburn #6002 · Financial Survival Network

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You know, the cannabis market is perhaps ten percent, maybe five percent therapeutic,
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ninety five percent recreational. I would say more psychedotics are the other way
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around, right, It's going to be ninety percent therapeutic and probably ten percent
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recreational. You're listening to Carrie Leutz's Financial Survival Network, where you get valuable
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information you just can't find anywhere else to thrive in today's trying times. You
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need the Financial Survival Network now more than ever. Go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot
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com and get your free newsletter and gift. Financial Survival Network now more than
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ever, And welcome you are listening to and watching the Financial Survival Network.
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I'm yours Garry Lutz. Hey, you know there's all sorts of new novel
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treatments coming out for many things. There's a mental health crisis in North America
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probably across the planet, and we have done very little at addressing this concern.
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And just look at the number of homeless people in urban areas throughout not
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just the United States, but North America around the world, and imagine if
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there was some inexpensive and like widely tested drones that that could help solve this
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mental crisis. This mental health crisis. How much? How much would society
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benefit from that? Well, Benjamin Lightburn is with us now and he is
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the CEO of Filament Health. That's fi LA m nt dot hell. It's
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traded publicly traded company FH. It's on the CBOE of Canada. Ben,
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it's great to have you on the show. So psychedelics treating these widespread mental
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health issues relatively new approach which seems to be seems to be effective in many
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cases, doesn't it. It does seem to be effective, But I actually
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want to correct you, it's not very big do right. So when you
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think about humans using psychedelics for various purposes, there's documented evidence of this going
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back for thousands of years, right, be it spiritual, cultural, you
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know, shamanistic things. You can see mushroom statues in meso America, you
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can see paintings of magic mushrooms, things like that. And in fact,
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even in the modern era, we did actually have psychedelics in relatively wide use
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in the beginning in the thirties, forties and fifties and sixties, until of
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course that was all shut down once the kind of genie got out of the
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bottle and the psychedelic movement became associated with the counterculture and the anti war movement,
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and then of course we had the War on drug and basically the criminalization
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of all drug related activity. But you are definitely right in posing the question,
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you know, what kind of harm to the society might have been avoided
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if we had had broader access to these substances for the last five or so
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decades. But in any event, in the last few years, maybe in
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the last decade or so, we have seen a very strong resurgence in the
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amount of research and the amount of studies being done with these substances. And
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in some cases you're even seeing certain jurisdictions allow people to be medically treated with
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these substances in a kind of like pre approval, early access or early access
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basis. So it is definitely a very exciting time for the psychedelics industry and
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hopefully a very exciting time for society as certain of these psychedelic substances look to
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be approved as drugs over the next couple of years. So interesting, So
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tell us the results treating mental health issues, How effective psychedelics have been and
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how effective are they compared to other approaches? Great question, So so far
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the the indication the disease areas that are most advanced in clinical development would be
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the PTSD and depression MPMA in the case of PTSD, and and psilocybin for
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depression in the first case. We're seeing, you know, roughly like a
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sixty percent remission rate for people with PTSD. It's just very very high considering
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there really are slim to know approved therapies for people currently suffering from PTSD.
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So it's very very very promising. And you know, it's important to remember
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that these drugs are always given in conjunction with some form of therapy or psychological
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support. Like it's not as if, you know, very sick people are
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being given powerful hallucinogenic substances and just told to go on their merry way and
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hope we're the best, right. There's always you know, strict procedures and
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protocols in place to ensure the safety of everybody. Really in the area of
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depression, you're seeing big reduction of depression scores after after three weeks or twelve
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weeks, whatever the case, may be very very promising, you know,
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higher typically than what you would see for the predominant depression treatment, which is
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of course SSRIs. Many people aren't familiar with the SSRIs because something like fifteen
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percent of North Americans actually take them. These are drugs that you tink every
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single day. They're drugs that often come with side effects like weight gain or
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sexual dysfunction, or just general foggy headedness. And the other interesting thing about
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SSRIs is that they only have a one third chance of working any given time
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around, and they only have a sixty five percent chance of working even after
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attempting multiple different courses of SSRIs. And it takes a couple of months sometimes
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to become stable. So someone's journey to go through different SSRIs can actually last
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years, whereas what we're talking about for psilocybin therapy is the single dose and
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with therapy and these can have effects that last for for several months. In
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the area of substance serious disorders, which is where Billman is focused, we're
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seeing very exciting research coming out. There was a big study that came from
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NYU where in alcohol use disorder where they showed it eighty three percent reduction in
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heavy drip drinking days amongst people who are regularly abused alcohol. You have early
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data in smoking cessation. You also have preliminary data in cocaine use disorder,
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all of which are showing really just amazing results. And so again it's a
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very very exciting time for psychedelics and maybe hopefully even for society as some of
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these drugs get approved over the next few years. Interesting the substance abuse that
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can really reduce you know, these SSRIs after you take them for like ten
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years, that cause many people to become bipolar as a result too, right,
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well, and they have there's withdrawal symptoms, right, so if you
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try to get off or you try to switch, it's not necessarily straightforward.
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So it's as tsurized our big issue for sure, for sure. And as
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far as other forms of therapy talk therapy and all that, those have really
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low success rates. Right. We know that they work, but that their
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success can be limited. Right, So really what we're talking about is a
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whole new treatment paradigm. Right. It's it's a it's a it's it's a
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new thing, right. It's it's not you know, like you said,
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you know, one hour a week of talking to a therapist. It's a
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kind of like intensive therapy of high dose psiocybin where you are you know,
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typically lying on a couch and someone incapacitated and left, you know, to
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deal with your own thoughts. But people report that psychedelics have a way of
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showing you, you know, things about yourself that you probably already knew deep
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down inside somewhere. But it's kind of like a tool which like shows shows
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you the way internally right and and allows you to have, you know,
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certain insights and discoveries about yourself that you may not otherwise have had. Do
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we have any idea how these things actually work from a metabolic standpoint or we
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just know from the results. The short answer is no. The long answer
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is that there are many different things currently being hypothesized. The predominant theory is
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that they are serotonin receptor agonists, so they mimbic serotonin in the brain and
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activate the serotonin receptors, and that is kind of what it is thought to
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cause the flooding feeling, the hallucinogenic you know, the response, the the
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different visuals and auditory hallucinations. But there is research that shows that, you
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know, maybe not research, but reports of certain people that have you know,
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not had these kinds of hallucinogen responses and yet still had a therapeutic treatment.
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Outcome. Or there was a study that came out the other day in
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mice where they had mice that were genetically modified to not have five HTQWOA receptors,
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and yet they still exhibited antidepressed effects from psychedelics. So, like I
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said, the short answers, we don't actually really know why or how it
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works, but we do. What we do know is that people that have
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these experiences, they regularly as cided as like the top one or two most
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impactful experiences of their entire life. Right, they say, doing this was
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similar to witnessing the birth of my child, or getting Mira, or watching
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a cross close friend die or something like that. Right, these these experiences
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rank among the most important people's lives. They're just going to share something with
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my personal experience. Not with a loose engens but weight loss drug a zempic.
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I took that. You know, I was like twelve thirteen pounds from
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my goal weight. I just couldn't get rid of it, and I said,
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okay, I'm going to take it for two three months. Hopefully too
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bad side effects, but some of the unintended side effects. Number one,
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I'm not a big drinker, but you know, a moderate drinker two three
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times a week, one or two drinks. I found that it like cut
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that in half. And then for coffee, I am a I was a
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pretty substantial coffee drinker, to three cups a day. I'm down to one
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cup a day. And it's the weirdest thing then, because it's just like
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I had no desire to cut my alcohol consumption or my caffeine consumption, and
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yet it just made me not want it really strange here, and now they're
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saying it works for cocaine in certain people as well, so maybe some multi
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fascinating type approach. I just think it's interesting that all these drugs are here,
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and you know, they're being prescribed and used, and yet we don't
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really know what they what they do. You know, it's a kind of
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like a theoretical question, you know, how much do we need to know
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about how something works rather than if it works now and just having the results.
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And this gets back to your question that the beginning was about, well,
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how do you even do a FLA see what control study with psychedelics.
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So the water is further muddied by the fact that you could claim that that
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that psychedelics don't in fact work and that it's all just expectancy bias from the
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participants. And so that is one further complication to the argument. Well,
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if it were who cares how or why? Yeah, if it's placebo,
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it's good placebo, right, But it's unethical to prescribe people placebo, even
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if you know it's going to make them better. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
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you know there's a limit to double blind studies, Like, you know,
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they never did double blind studies on parachutes. You know, you really
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want to prove that parachutes save lives, then you should do a double blind
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study. But nobody's jumping out of a plane without a parachute, right.
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So well, just like it's impossible to do research on what is the safe
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amount of alcohol for a pregnant woman to consume, right, right, you
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can just prescribe one group to take tons of alcohol at another one to take
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no alcohol and figure out what's the safe limit. And so we assume that
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we just take the most safest case, which is that no alcohol is safe.
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Right. And in this case, as long as we know that drugs
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are safe, right, I mean band trips and things like that, you
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know, we don't so much see that with non uh, synthetic hallucinogens do
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it well. A lot of people actually would push back on the idea of
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bad trip, right because many people would say that it's actually the sort of
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like negative experiences and past traumatic experiences and all these kinds of things coming to
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the surface and having a challenging experience that this may actually be the intended consequence
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of doing psilocybin therapy. Right. So it's it's kind of like a no
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pain, no gain situation, right, Like if you have a lot of
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you know, baggage or you know, emotional trauma or things that are holding
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you back and causing you blockages, it does stand to reason that you know,
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to work through all this will be difficult and will be like like people,
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aren't you don't really do like these high dose psychedelics. It's not really
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like fun. It's not really like recreation doll. It's not really like,
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hey, let's like eat some mushrooms and go into the woods and watch the
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northern lights. It's you know, we're this is this is definitely not that
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right. This is like a tool that kind of forces you to confront your
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demon's head on and and and and there's no escape and so it can be
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very challenging and overwhelming, but many people would say that that's actually the very
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point of the whole action. Do people have the psychotic breaks on these hallucinogens?
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Has that ever happened it? I think there have been one or two
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things that have been reported like that, But often you will see that this
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person may have had a predisposition to those occurrences, and so it may have
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actually just kind of like reawakened something that was dormant. You also have something
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called persistent hallucination disorders, people that report like even a year year after their
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psychedelic experience that they may have like little flashes of hallucination. So this is
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something that persists in a small fraction of people that undergo psychedelic therapy as well.
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Wow, all right, well I think we should cover this topic.
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As far as the company goes, at what point does it become profitable and
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you know, start putting out sizeable returns? What's the milestone for that?
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The catalyst? So currently our drugs we are in phase two, and so
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we need to complete phase two and then complete phase three, and then after
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that we would be submitting a new drug application to begin marketing the drugs.
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So I would say probably a fair estimate would be four or five years away
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for us to finish all of that, but we've already been through all the
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pre clinical and phase one, so we're we're marching right along. Another unique
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thing about our company is that because we manufacture our drugs naturally, and we
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were the first to do so, we've been able to claim a lot of
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very valuable IP We have over twenty five issued patents now, and what's what
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that's been able to do is allow us to enter into revenue generating licensing agreements.
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So unlike most kind of junior biotech companies, we actually are already revenue
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positive, revenue generating. We're not profitable yet, but there would be a
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path for us to generate significant revenues before actually getting our own drugs approved,
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which is which is quite a unique aspect of our Yes, very much so,
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Hey, one final question for you, and that covers the topic of
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microadocing, which I know isn't related to what you're doing here, but I'm
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curious if there's been studies on microdocing, if it helps anymore, whether you
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need the large dose to get the maximum benefit. That is another one of
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the big unanswered questions in psychedelics whether or not microdosing works. A lot of
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people swear by it right, A lot of people say it really helps them.
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A lot of people say it saved their life. There hasn't been much
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good quality research done on microdosing, especially in people who are sick right where
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you can actually measure outcomes. We actually have a couple of microdosing studies where
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we're supplying drugs to which will hope to overcome this deficiency in the microdosing research.
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So I would say the jury is still out there. Most people would
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probably say most like scientific researchers, would probably say there's not really any evidence
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to support it. But you know, people on the street, a a
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lot of people out there swear by it. And if it does work,
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it would be huge because it's much easier for people to take once a day
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small dose that they barely feel, than it is for them to take like
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the very high dose that require supervision that needs to be kind of like a
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semi medical setting. Sure, I find the whole thing fascinating. It's a
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shame that all the research into psychedelics was basically aulted in the sixties due to
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the widespread I guess distribution of LSD and other hallucinogens, and now it's kind
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of being rediscovered. I knew there were studies that took place and have been
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taking place throughout the past fifty or sixty years, but nowhere near what's going
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on right now. And the fact that you know it's going back quite a
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while now. When they finally loosened up on the research and we see these
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things are beneficial, I guess it creates a whole host of problems to the
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regulators there letting the genie out of the bottle. The one thing I will
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say, where like drug legalization, is many many health benefits have been espoused
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for cannabis, and really the research what I've seen, other than perhaps some
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pain relief aspects and seizure reduction, I just haven't seen the research prove it
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out. Hallucinogens. On the other hand, you know, most of these
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studies and that haven't been extensive, have shown great benefits with some risk,
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but moderate risk. Agreed. I think people often try to draw parallels between
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cannabis and psychedelics, and there certainly are many, but there are many differences
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as well. My opinion is that in psychedelics, you actually kind of have
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the medical efficacy, which is kind of dragging psychedelotics skicking and screaming into the
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mainstream. Whereas for cannabis, the medical efficacy was like, maye be a
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tool to kind of legitimize recreational use, Whereas you know, we should have
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just said people should be free to use cannabis recreationally, and we don't need
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any pretend fake ghoma prescriptions or anything like that, right, we should just
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let people smoke weed if they want to smoke weed, right, Like,
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this is the mand of the free supposedly, right. So I would agree
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with you that many of the claimed medical benefits of cannabis definitely did not come
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to pass, although it is important remember that there are very important and highly
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efficacious cannabinoid based drugs that are out on the market. Right, But I
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would like I would say that, you know, the cannabis market is perhaps
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ten percent, maybe five percent therapeutic, ninety five percent recreational. I would
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say for psychedelics the other way around, Right, it's going to be ninety
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percent therapeutic and probably ten percent recreational. And it's interesting because you look in
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the in the drug books cannabis is classified as a llucin egen, but I
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don't know exactly what that means. In the case of cannabis. All the
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scheduling system is so ridiculously out of date, right, Like, all these
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substances are Schedule one controlled substances, saying that they have a high potential for
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abuse and no accepted medical benefit, and both of those things are just completely
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untrue, right you. You even have the FDA that designated psilocybin to breakthrough
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therapy, right So it's it's ridiculous, honestly, and it's it's it's it's
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kind of embarrassing for sure. And before microdosing, there really were no long
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term leucin engen abusers out there. You know. It's generally a thing that
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goes on a cycle. Whatever they take it. It's not a long term
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abuse drug. So all of that's really fascinating. They just tell us the
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best place to find you connect with you on the web, Ben head to
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our website Filament dot health. Side up for our mailing list comes out usually
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every Thursday or every other Thursday, and obviously look us up on all of
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the normal social media channels. Filament and dot health all right. Excellent,
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And there's a link in the show notes to your website on Financial Survival Network
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dot com and when you go there sign up for your free newsletter. BET
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been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for coming by, Thanks so
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much, thanks for listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network, your solution to
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today's trying times. For the latest, go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com.
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Financial Survival Network now more than ever,