Are Psychedelic Medicines the Next Big Thing?

Author/Interviewer Preface: Charles Bogenberger is a 39-year-old entrepreneur with a BS degree in mechanical engineering, an MBA, and a former colleague. After college, he worked for a few years then returned to school to obtain his MBA. Post MBA he bounced around several marketing and sales roles before landing the job where I would meet him, business unit manager at a large company (which will remain unnamed). They felt his background was a perfect fit and had recruited him to run one of their testing laboratories in Battle Creek, Michigan. At that lab Charles oversaw a staff of 20 plus employees, doing primarily microbiological analysis of pathogens and other microorganisms of concern in foods and the environment. The last time I had seen him was almost two years ago there, only about two weeks before his departure from the company. He left on good terms, burnt out after almost two years at what is a very demanding job, both mentally and physically. When he informed me he was leaving I asked him about his plans for the future. He talked about "taking some time off", travel, and after that he wasn't sure. He had managed to save up a good chunk of money during his time in Battle Creek. There is not much to spend money on there in the best of times and this was particularly true during the time when Charles lived there during the COVID pandemic. Michigan had some of the strictest and harshest lockdown protocols of any state. The lack of ability to build a new network of friends in the area was another reason Charles chose to leave Battle Creek. I said my goodbyes at our last meeting, wished him luck, asked him to keep in touch, and that was that. We exchanged a couple messages during the two years since that time. That changed recently when I reconnected with him by text once again and asked him what he had been up to and what he was doing now. He told me he was doing well and that he had moved back to his hometown of Denver, Colorado. When I inquired as to what he was doing for work, how he planned to make money, he texted something I absolutely did not expect, "I'm growing psychedelic mushrooms." I was instantly intrigued, curious to learn how and why this formerly successful engineer/businessman had chosen to grow what is/was an illegal substance and how he hoped to make money (legally) by doing so. I found his story compelling and fascinating, and, after much additional discussion, together we hit upon the idea of an interview to share this unusual story with a wider audience. Below is a (lightly) edited version of that discussion which took place on February 14, 2023.

Important disclaimer: Neither myself nor Charles are licensed therapists or medical doctors. Therefore, parts of the discussion that touch on those topics should be understood in that context. Certified therapists’ or accredited medical doctors’ opinions may differ from our own. That said we are both highly educated and very knowledgeable in many related scientific disciplines. Moreover, I spent many hours in research preparing for the interview and in fact- checking post interview. In the interview itself I strove to maintain a neutral position with respect to the controversial issues discussed and have provided links to the primary scientific and legal literature where appropriate to either provide needed background/context and/or to support or refute specific assertions.

DD: Let's start at the beginning. Where did you spend your formative years growing up?

CB: I was born in leave Laramie, WY, but my family moved to Denver when I was about two years old, and that was the first of five times in my life that I moved to Denver, Co.

DD: You attended high school, and all that stuff, all in Denver?

CB: Yeah. Fairview High School and then I did my undergrad degree in mechanical engineering at University of Colorado.

DD: And then you followed it with graduate work and an MBA?

CB: Yeah, that came later. I did my Master’s in Business at Ohio State.

DD: Was there a gap between your undergraduate and MBA?

CB: I've spent most of my career at the intersection of science and technology. After my undergrad degree, I went to work for Honda’s R&D (research and development) department in Ohio. I was designing exhaust systems for production vehicles, mainly around acoustics and vibration. That was most of my area of expertise, and, then, after earning my MBA from Ohio State, I went to work in marketing, so more of the business side of things.

DD: Why did you go back to school?

CB: It was largely driven by the recession. Honda was incredibly loyal to their employees. They didn't lay anybody off. Their cost saving measure was to cancel our activities but retain employees. For about 8 months I sat around waiting for more work to do and what you started to see was that the guy who was sitting next to you who has been there longer, he also was doing the same thing. At that point, you realized that when the next project started, you're like three people deep waiting for work to do. Who’s going to be given the opportunity to work first? That was the point when I realized I needed to go do something else.

DD: You left Honda and went to get your MBA. You graduate, you get your Master’s, and then what?

CB: There's this funny thing that happens when you go to college. You learn from professors at a very high level. In MBA school, they teach you how to run a business and then for about the next 10 years of your career, you spend your time making documents for people who are running a business. You don't actually get to do any of the management yourself, which is what took me into the laboratory business. After working in various sales and marketing functions for different companies, I was offered an opportunity to manage a food safety laboratory in Michigan, where I was responsible for a team of scientists doing some very important work. What they really needed was somebody who had my experience of actually growing a business, identifying new clients, prospecting, managing events to develop interest in a company that they've never heard of. That was all stuff that I was really excited to do—that I had gone to school to have the opportunity to do. What ended up happening was the company needed a lot of operational management support that consumed most of my time. It was a laboratory that had been acquired rather than developed for the company from the ground up, so they needed a lot of integration work, some IT project management, and then a lot of operational excellence to really achieve the levels of efficiency that the new company expected.

DD: Why did you leave?

CB: Typically, a lot of people reach their level of burnout at the end of two years because it is an incredibly demanding job. I think I was probably a little on the shorter end of that simply because the nature of the pandemic happening while I was there. Most people don't know this, but if you're unfamiliar with Battle Creek, it's kind of a sleepy town in Michigan. It was hard to get people out and about before the pandemic set in, but when the pandemic hit, the lockdowns in Michigan were long and fairly severe. It made it almost impossible to develop a new network to make new friends, partake in recreational activities to recharge outside of work and that was pretty draining over those two years there.

DD: The departure was friendly on both sides?

CB: It's a company that I would consider going back to work for in the future, probably in a different role than a business unit manager, but yeah, I think there's a lot of good things about that company.

DD: You mean you are not going retire on this on this (psychedelic mushroom) business?

CB: We'll see, we'll get into that a little bit later, but the opportunity is somewhat modest.

DD: When you decide you're going to leave, did you have a plan in your head at all, or were you just like, I'll figure it out?

CB: One of the perks of living in a low-cost part of the country and the pandemic. The things that I spend my money on are things like concerts and vacations, and for the two years that I was there, I wasn't really spending any of my paycheck.

DD: Now we come to the big question. You've left this big company, great job, you are business unit manager. It’s a high-profile job a lot of people would love to have, and you have a good reputation. You could probably take any job, but then you have this mushroom business idea. Where did this come from?

CB: Well, it did a little bit come out of the blue. I had this laboratory experience. I wasn't necessarily sure that I wanted to stay working in laboratories, but I wanted to continue my role as a scientist in the world, and then also Colorado had their legalization. (Author's note: Charles is referring to legalization of psychedelic medicines under Colorado’s proposition 122 which is linked here).

DD: There's lots of things you can do in the science area. What made you decide to go this route specifically?

CB: This is a great opportunity to help people. When you look at Colorado's path to legalization of psychedelic medicine, it really is focused around healing people and helping with complex trauma such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and others that have been unresponsive to conventional therapies for a long time. It's also a brand new space. This is something that's been illegal federally for 50 years now, and it really has a lot of opportunity for growth. When you enter an immature market like this there's a huge explosion of creativity around the business processes, the personnel management, all stuff that I'm really interested in. I find it very engaging, it's all brand new. When you work for a mature company it's so much focused around operational excellence and cost cutting and things like that to drive profitability. Whereas when you start off in a new sector, it's a lot more about helping the customer and developing new ways of doing things. I find that's a lot more interesting place to play as an entrepreneur than somewhere that's already very sophisticated.

DD: It sounds compelling from that perspective. Let’s go back a little bit. Do you have any background or experience level with psychedelic mushrooms or any illicit drugs?

CB: I grew up in Boulder, Co and was fairly strait-laced amongst my peers. I knew people who are using all kinds of psychedelics in high school, but it just wasn't something that I was particularly interested in, and my family was somewhat conservative. I didn't pursue it until much later. I was introduced after moving back to Colorado from Michigan on my 38th birthday, when a friend from high school said he wanted to take me on a mushroom trip for my birthday. That was my first ever psychedelic experience.

DD: You had not even experimented with any other drugs before?

CB: I had some involvement in the cannabis industry that led me to try cannabis a while back, but yeah, fairly limited. You know how it is working for big companies. You have to drug test. You don't want to take any chances.

DD: I guess the experience was a good one from your perspective? Tell me about that.

CB: Yeah, it was beautiful. You unlock all kinds of creativity. When I would close my eyes, my brain started producing images of vast structures and lots of colors. That part was very, very interesting. But it also allows you to see the world in a way that you haven't before. The best description that I have is that if you take a completed puzzle, this is like throwing all the pieces back in the box. You form all kinds of new connections and new pictures. Maybe you haven't seen things that way before, so it allows you to change your perspective and for a certain percentage of people it does give you this kind of compelling mission. It tells you that you're supposed to grow fungi.

DD: You said there is a name for this right?

CB: I don't know the name, but it's common enough that people after a psychedelic trip feel compelled to grow fungi, and that was certainly something that happened for me.

DD: To do it yourself for the first time at that age, I think it's interesting. You have so much more experience. Most people the first time they do psychedelics don't have the same maturity level.

CB: There's always trade-offs. One of the things that I did that was a rookie mistake. My friend should have let me know about this, but we started our trip at 10:00 PM which is not a good time to start a mushroom trip because one of the reactions that most people have is this huge rush of energy. You are wide awake throughout the entire night. I didn't sleep that night.

DD: What exactly are we talking about here for therapeutic use of mushrooms? People going on mushroom trips? Not microdosing? [Author’s note: for context a full-blown mushroom trip may last 4-6 hours and is characterized by, amongst other things, experiencing hallucinations (percepts without corresponding stimuli). In contrast, with microdosing the amount of mushrooms or other psychedelics ingested is below the level necessary to cause hallucinations and the effects are typically experienced for much shorter time periods.]

CB: Microdosing is not currently part of the Colorado legalization framework. What they're talking about is people going through guided trips that last about four to six hours. That's the therapy people are envisioning.

DD: Who will be the people (therapists) guiding the people through these experiences?

CB: That's one of the things that I've been doing over the last 6 to 8 months. Trying to identify people who are going to be the guides. I'm hoping that activities like this interview, letting people know what I'm about and what I'm trying to grow gets me introduced to more of those folks, but a lot of the folks that I've met are conventional therapists. These are people that have been working with patients for a long time and they usually have some personal experience with psychedelics, and they know the power that they have. They have seen how much faster things could progress, and how much more healing these people could get if they were able to unlock their ways of thinking and their patterns of thinking. (Author's note: See link here for a recent review article from the peer reviewed scientific literature on therapeutic potential of psychedelic mushrooms)

DD: The idea is they would do these as supervised experience as opposed to on their own or a mix, or is that not known?

CB: Proposition 122, which is Colorado’s Natural Medicine Health Act was all about was setting up a licensing framework for these kinds of guided experiences. You would go in for an evaluation several weeks before you have your psychedelic medicine session, and they would evaluate you, ask about your goals, what you're looking to achieve. Then, once you set those intentions, you go in later for your actual session. It would probably last about four to six hours and somebody's in the room with you. You're walking through what you're feeling, what you're thinking. They're mostly there to make sure that nothing goes wrong, but then also to guide you to the point where you come out with a much better outlook.

DD: If something goes wrong, someone has a bad experience, is there anything analogous to Narcan that you can give that immediately stops the trip right away? (Author’s note: Narcan is a medication that is given to opiate users who are overdosing. It is highly effective and immediately inactivates the drug saving many lives in the process.)

CB: Not that I'm aware of, but psychedelic mushrooms are fundamentally different than something like an opiate in the sense that to my knowledge there is no known lethal dose of psychedelic mushrooms (see author’s note below) and it's also the case that most people's bodies have a built-in rev limiter. Once you've taken enough mushrooms taking more doesn't have much effect. Your body kind of limits how much you can experience the medicine. The need for something like a Narcan for interrupting the trip midway through isn’t as high. However, I do think there would be interest in that because for most of my experiences, there is a moment where you think, I don't want to be doing this right now. You're very stressed and you want to eject at some point, but you always get to the other side and you move on. [Author’s note: A lethal dose (LD50) of psilocybin in mice was established in a 2015 study linked here. Purified psilocin was used in the study, but effects should be similar. The LD50 number basically describes the amount of toxin that must be ingested in order to cause death in about half of the test subjects, in this case mice, that are exposed. Generally, the LD50 in mice will roughly correlate with that in people, though that is not always the case. In the study, the LD50 of the most potent compound tested was 293.07mg/kg. That translates to 0.133g/lb. In other words, a 140-pound person would need to consume 18g of purified psilocin to reach the lethal dose, half the time. It is important to emphasize that does not mean 18g of mushrooms. Psychedelic mushrooms contain at most 0.2% psyilocybin or 0.2g/100g of mushrooms. Therefore, one would need to ingest close to 1000g of mushrooms in a single sitting to reach that level. A “typical” dose for a mushroom trip might be 3-5g at most. Death from mushroom overdose is not something that is a real concern. However, like all drugs, legal or illicit, there will be a certain small percentage of people who may be allergic, and for those people death can occur with exposure to even tiny amounts. Moreover, this study only examined the lethal dose for psilocybin. There are other active psychedelic compounds in various varieties of mushrooms, some of which may have a lower lethal dose, though it seems unlikely given the long history of mushroom use and the lack of documented cases of death by overdose.]

DD: You're being guided and in a presumably comfortable environment. Is the thinking that there will be props and things for people to play with, or is it just going to be patient sitting in a chair, therapist sitting in a chair, like traditional therapy setup? Or is all that unknown, to be decided?

CB: I guess it is to be decided. I certainly think that within the licensed space it will be expected that you operate within a specific treatment center. But in the unlicensed space, which will still be somewhat decriminalized under Prop 122, there will still be the option for people that want to take people on a spiritual hike or something like that, where you're in an outdoor setting. I don't want to speculate too much on that side because I'm a scientist, not a therapist. (Author’s note: see disclaimer at beginning of interview for more on this)

DD:. I want to talk more about the decision to grow mushrooms. When you made that decision did you also decide right away to tell everybody? How did your family and friends react to this news?

CB: I’ve been very open, and they've mostly been supportive. It was already getting a ton of attention in the news here in the Denver area so obviously people were interested in it. I had a whole bunch of friends that once I started talking about it, they were excited to be my Guinea pigs and test subjects for the mushrooms I was growing.

DD: You said earlier that your family was conservative. But they're OK with this?

CB: They have some concerns. Anytime you're doing something that's in this grey area of legality, I mean with Colorado's Natural Medicine Act you have this situation where it's still a schedule one substance. It's still federally illegal, but Colorado is not advocating or allocating any resources to prosecution or law enforcement around people that are abiding by the guidelines. There are guidelines laid out for personal cultivation that I am adhering to, but it is still a grey area. If the feds wanted to come after me, they absolutely could.

DD: Good segue. You said some of this already, but what is the current status of the laws regarding decriminalization or legalization?

CB: The leader in this space is Oregon. Oregon passed Measure 109 back in November 2020 and they gave themselves two years to figure out the regulatory framework for providing licenses to service centers and service providers. Those facilities started operating last year and from my cursory research last night, it looks like there's about 200 licensed therapists already in in Oregon.

DD: Are they selling those licenses? How does that work?

CB: Yeah, there's a fee, but, at least in Colorado, the intent is to make it somewhat nominal.

DD: OK, so not a huge money maker for the state, at least on the licensing side

CB: Yeah, the intent, especially for therapists, is just to cover the cost of administration. California is still working to decriminalize cultivation and transportation of mushrooms the way Colorado has statewide it's still federally illegal, but there are several cities like Oakland that decriminalized use of the substance and also possibly looking to decriminalize small scale cultivation. One of the fundamental differences between Colorado and Oregon that's interesting to highlight is that Oregon is expected to operate within the licensed framework, so personal cultivation is still a criminal offense. Transportation and possession with intent to distribute is still something that is a is a criminal offense within Oregon, whereas in Colorado, while we're developing the new regulatory framework for licensed use, personal cultivation and sharing amongst friends and family, if it's not part of a commercial activity is completely decriminalized here. That is a fundamental difference that Oregon is not pursuing a personal use approach to psychedelic medicine, whereas in Colorado they're allowing for both options.

DD: Is there going to be a taxation scheme for these medicines? What's the financial structure of all this look like?

CB: Yes. When you talk about the taxation, as of today, they don't even have a framework for how you transact between a cultivator and a treatment center. They are still working on that piece. I would assume that there is some sort of taxation implied, but given that this is a medicinal intent, I don't expect it to be anything like what we see in cannabis. The interesting thing from a taxation perspective and you see this in the cannabis space is there's a federal law called 280E. 280E says that if you're transacting in a business that is federally illegal, you pay your income tax on your top line, not your bottom line. The normal deductions that a business would take against their revenue before determining what they have to pay tax on for things like rent, personnel cost, utilities, insurance. All of those expenses are not deductible, according to the IRS under 280E, therefore, as long as psychedelic mushrooms remain a schedule one substance, it's likely that any business as a cultivator would have to pay tax on that top line, which is rather substantial.

DD: That's a big tax hit. That's a huge windfall for the feds right there. They'll know who you are and what your business does, obviously, because you are licensed.

CB: One of the things that we're trying to do with the regulations in Colorado is to make sure that only the cultivators are subject to 280E and that the treatment centers and the therapists are not subject to it.

DD: What's your business plan to the extent you are willing to discuss it? What is the structure, where’s the money going to come from, the profit?

CB: One of the interesting things about the business is that it's fairly small at this point. I don't anticipate the market for psychedelic mushrooms in Colorado being much larger than a million dollars in 2025, so statewide the market opportunity is fairly modest. I've heard estimates as low as five hundred pounds of dried mushroom biomass being required to meet the demand for psychedelic therapy. For context, a conventional mushroom farm growing culinary mushrooms might produce that quantity in a month. Most of the revenue for treatment is going to go to the facilitators and the treatment facility rather than the cultivators. One of the things that I'm considering as part of my business plan, although I haven't gone down this avenue yet, is actually becoming a treatment center where I can rent out space to facilitators. What I've been learning from the people who are interested in becoming facilitators is that they have a conventional practice where they're seeing patients, but they don't necessarily want to go to all the trouble of getting a license for their existing business to become as psychedelic medicine treatment center. They want to have a place that they can go to rent out for a specific session where they can take their patient and administer the medicine. It would almost look like what a salon does, where they rent out space to their stylists.

DD: That's an interesting business model. It would be a per session kind of charge, like every session you pay a certain amount to have the space, and then you'd also be growing the mushrooms for the medicine for them as well?

CB: It's possible that I would look into becoming a treatment center where I'm handling the responsibility of getting a license and making sure that the people that are practicing psychedelic medicine underneath me are licensed facilitators. But I would not be a facilitator myself, I would just be providing them with space.

DD: What about costs? How expensive is it to grow psychedelic mushrooms?

CB: the expensive part of growing psychedelic medicine, in my opinion, is all around the quality control. Obviously, hobbyists have been growing in their basements for quite a long time, and foragers are actively hunting for mushrooms in the forests and finding them but that's very different than what a facilitator's going to be looking for. Psychedelic medicines require a high level of quality control because there's just so many different variables that impact potency. If you're looking for a repeatable experience that you're going to give to each of your patients, you're going to need to control for a lot of different variables in the growth process, and in the harvesting process. In the processing that happens after the fact, things like temperature, and how the mushroom is dried and stored will also have an impact on potency. I saw a study recently on how the size of the mushroom has an impact, generally smaller mushrooms are going to have a greater potency than larger mushrooms would. Being able to control for all of that and anticipate what the potency of your medicine is, cause what you're trying to get to is a dosage of psilocybin. Most articles that you'll read about dosing magic mushrooms talk about grams of biomass, but genetics and size of the mushroom and growth conditions, those all play a factor in the potency. In a recent study they did here in Colorado, we saw mushroom samples that were in the 0.2% to 0.4% range all the way up to some of the extreme cases, getting up above 2% psilocybin

DD: Do these laws only apply to mushrooms or do they apply to any psychedelic drug like MDMA (ectasy), LSD (acid), mescaline and DMT?

CB: In Colorado, we're talking specifically about natural medicines.

DD: Would MDMA or LSD which are synthetically manufactured be considered natural medicines?

CB: Mushrooms are going first, so at the end of 2024, we'll have a framework for how psychedelic mushrooms will be used for natural medicine. The expectation is that a year or two later, they will look to add mescaline and a few others.

DD: Mescaline is derived from peyote I believe so I guess that would be considered natural? But things like DMT, MDMA, LSD, I would not consider natural, but I don't know how they define natural.

CB: The natural Medicine Health Act will include Ibogaine, DMT and mescaline, about one to two years down the road.

DD: Is the only identified active ingredient psilocybin?

CB: That’s the one that people are focused on. There's about 5 compounds that are involved, but this is all brand new. It's been hard to research this for many years now, so we'll find out more as we go about what the impacts are of these other active compounds. (Author’s note: There are two main psychedelic compounds, psilocybin and psilocin in the most popular pyschedelic mushroom varieties, both of which are schedule 1 drugs in the United States. See reference here for a good collection of scientific and other references covering many different aspects of Psilocybin.)

DD: What do you anticipate or what are you seeing as the main drug delivery mechanisms for mushrooms?

CB: What I would like to see and what exists today or two different things. Personally, from a quality control standpoint, I think your ability to precisely control the potency and the dosage is greatest with a homogenized powder of ground mushrooms. I can take an entire batch, put it all in a grinder, get a well-mixed sample. Then I can take a sample of that, send it off to a test lab and have high confidence that all the packages that come out of there will have roughly the same potency.

DD: You say package. It could be a tablet, capsule, or a dissolvable pouch, or something else right?

CB: Yes, for example I put two grams of dried fruit in small bags because based on the known potency that's roughly the amount I expect would be an appropriate dose to give somebody a hallucinatory effect, but not so much that it would put them into what we would call a ‘heroic dose’ for a several hour trip. Alternatively, in a similar package I could give them something which is just ground biomass. The advantage of that format is that it allows for much greater control of dosage and resulting potency. One is the pure dried fruit and the other is just a ground up version of that.

DD: What's your feeling on the use of foods as delivery mechanisms?

CB: I personally am not a fan. In my experience running a food safety testing laboratory what I have observed in the food production that exists today within psychedelics is fundamentally different than what I saw while touring the bakeries of Southwest Michigan. There is a very high level of food safety out there and what is being practiced today by the mushroom industry is not at the same level. There was a study done by the Natural Environmental Health Agency looking at cannabis edibles. What they found is that in the absence of any sort of federal food safety oversight like what we have in other industries it really is a patchwork of state and local regulations and individual states are not experienced in going after food safety cases. It is really tricky to do any sort of food safety around edibles without federal oversight or any state uniformity in requirements.

DD: I'm coming out of food safety background myself and to me the risk is high. You already have potential routes of contamination from many parts of the process, and obviously outbreaks that have occurred and then you combine that with the unknowledgeable. Not that people have ill intent but they're not as knowledgeable about food safety and HACCP, and all those things that go into making foods safely. But the other thing I also see is and maybe you can comment on this. Let’s say somebody gets sick from taking a food containing mushrooms and they tell the doctor I'm sick and the Doctor asks, did you take anything and they say, yes, I took mushrooms. The doctor is going to say, well, you're sick because you took mushrooms, and that's probably the end of it. Are they really going to go any further?

CB: I completely agree with you and this is something that's fundamentally different between cannabis edibles and mushroom edibles. The mushroom edibles are likely to cause gastrointestinal distress. About 10% to 25% of people experience some sort of GI discomfort during a mushroom trip. So it's the sort of thing that I think people that were suffering from that, they might have salmonella and they dismiss that and say that's an impact that the psilocybin. It would only be one to two days down the road when you were still sick with food poisoning that you realized that you had something more severe because generally the GI symptoms go away after about six hours.

DD: I can see a nightmare scenario for the mushroom industry where somebody dies after taking mushrooms, but it wasn't from the mushrooms. It was because it was contaminated with something. Still horrible, but then the mushrooms take the blame for it and the whole industry suffers because it. If I'm part of the industry I’ve got to make sure that doesn't happen, because if it does, especially now where it's early, the effects could be catastrophic.

CB: Yep. Even things like the USDA protocols around organic certification would be incredibly valuable.

The USDA does provide guidelines on how to package culinary mushrooms in a way that's food safe. They talk about some things that are very simple that would add a lot of value like packaging in a positive pressure environment. If you could get organic certification for your psychedelic mushrooms, that would go a long way in protecting the supply. There are number of things that I do personally. For example, I have a dedicated space that I use for packaging in my laboratory, and it is a positive pressure environment. I also package everything in a flow hood which helps control any contamination risk that I personally might introduce.

DD: Your cultivation environment is a laboratory, not a farm field or even your closet or whatever?

CB: Correct, because all the things you have to do to maintain a laboratory environment are really important for mushroom cultivation. Documenting your temperatures, making sure that you are practicing careful climate control and tracking temperature and humidity levels matters a lot. Also keeping your lighting on a schedule that's predictable can influence the growth of the mushrooms as well.

DD: How advanced are the testing methodologies for mushrooms and for psilocybin specifically?

CB: It's similar to any other analyte. They're doing it with chromatography and spectrometry. Quantification obviously is much more important when you're testing for potency than just presence absence. The DEA was using an analysis method for presence absence. Now they're moving more towards a more precise measurement for actual quantification of the active analyte.

DD: And how expensive is that testing?

CB: Testing for potency is about $100 per sample. The real expensive testing associated with natural medicine is going to come in the form of pesticide residue, residual solvents and heavy metals.

Those are in the $200 per sample range.

DD: For human therapeutics, with FDA, you have this framework where you have clinical trials, you go through all these hoops. Are they anticipating clinical trials with psychedelic mushrooms, or are there some ongoing right now?

CB: There's a lot of research being done around psychedelic therapy for different use cases that is happening at a medical level, both in terms of efficacy and safety. Remember human beings have been taking psychedelic mushrooms for thousands of years, so on the safety side, it's not like some new compound that comes out of the laboratory that requires more rigorous testing because we don’t know what the toxicity looks like. Not being a therapist myself I can’t really speak to the current state of efficacy testing and am not as familiar with the literature in that area. I also am not sure what, if any, involvement FDA may or may not have or may or may not be planning. With mushrooms being a schedule I substance still at the federal level I would imagine it would be very limited, if any.

DD: What is microdosing?

CB: With microdosing you're consuming a level of psychedelic medicine at a low enough dosage to prevent any sort of hallucinatory effects. The goal is to take a dose that would enhance your creative thought and give other mental benefits, but without hallucinations. For example, in my experience, one of the effects of taking psychedelic mushrooms is that you get this greater level of empathy and understanding and also a mental toughness. You are much more able to see the big picture, and I think that has a lot of value for anybody in a creative profession. There are also benefits for the analytically minded such as enhanced concentration and focus among others.

There are a variety of microdosing protocols. They typically involve taking a small dose several days a week and having several recovery days where you take no mushrooms. The days off are not about a tolerance to the medicine but your body, as a part of taking psilocybin releases extra neurotransmitters, and over time your body runs out of those neurotransmitters. You're not creating a dependency the way you would with addictive drug, but you do develop a fatigue that you need to take a day or two off to recover. I've seen some protocols where you take 100 milligrams of biomass five days a week and then take the weekend off. Others may have you take a dose one day, then skip a day, then take it two days in a row and then take the weekend off. There's a variety of different protocols, but it really comes down to individual experimentation, making sure that you're taking time off, that you get the benefits but not taking so much that you cause yourself to hallucinate or over fatigue yourself.

DD: Let’s talk about mushroom farming. How does one go about growing mushrooms? Where do you start?

CB: There's a lot of different ways of doing it, but my method involves 3 steps. I start by growing the mushroom on agar plates.

Then, once you have a fully colonized plate you transfer it into a jar of sterile grain. I transfer the entire agar plate into there as aseptically as possible and after a couple weeks the grain jar becomes fully colonized.

DD: The incubation steps happen at what temperature?

CB: A little bit lower than room temperature, about 65 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Mushroom mycelia need oxygen to breathe. Mushrooms are not plants, they generate CO2 as opposed to capturing CO2. Once you get a fully colonized jar, you just dump it into a bag of what’s called substrate. The substrate is made up of sawdust and soy as a supplement. In the mushroom community, it's referred to as master mix, and this bag is also sterile. At each step in the process, you're trying to give the mushrooms as much of a head start over any contamination that's introduced. Environmental molds are ubiquitous in the atmosphere, and even under the most sterile conditions you're likely to introduce spores that can outcompete the mushrooms. You're trying to give your mushrooms a head-start at each step in the process. If everything goes well you'll start to see the mushroom fruit growing out of the top and that's what I harvest for the natural medicine. (Author’s note: Fungi are actually much more closely related to animals than plants. Genetically they are much more like us than they are any plant.)

DD: Your business right now is 100% self-funded, correct? You don't have any venture capital funding or anything like that?

CB: Correct

DD: We are out of time. Thank you so much Charles. I hope you're successful because I do think that there's a future in this business and I think it's going to help a lot of people. Let's just hope they get the food safety thing fixed because that's one of the highest risk areas right now.

CB: Yeah, it's all about making sure it's done right.