Those are just some of the injuries Matthew Kahl took home from his second tour of duty in Afghanistan with the 101st Airborne Division.
Those were just his physical wounds. And they healed over time…
But like the 10-20% of U.S. veterans who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, Kahl developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
And he was taking more than 90 different drugs and medications – an average of 18 a day – to ward off the nightmares, intrusive thoughts, and wild fluctuations in anger and aggression PTSD brings.
This chemical cocktail kept the nightmares at bay. It also left Kahl zombified. He’d fall asleep mid-sentence. He’d spend hours slumped on the couch.
Then he turned to a new form of treatment thousands of other veterans are turning to for their PTSD… a “magic” medicine thousands of years old that’s experiencing a research renaissance.
As you’ll see today, this medicine is not only helping Kahl and other vets overcome their PTSD. It’s also a new investing megatrend I (Chris Lowe) want to make sure is on your radar.
The Daily Cut is the premium e-letter we created for all Legacy Research readers.
My mission is to bring you the latest big ideas from Teeka Tiwari, Jeff Brown, Dave Forest, Nick Giambruno, Dan Denning, Jason Bodner, and the rest of the Legacy Research team.
I’m talking about insights into how the world really works and where it’s headed, so you can profit over years… even decades.
That’s why the “magic” medicine Kahl and other veterans have turned to is so exciting for investors, too.
As readers of colleague Nick Giambruno will know already, it’s an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an industry that’s positively changing the world… and has massive growth potential.
It’s a hallucinogenic mix of plants indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin in South America have been taking for thousands of years.
It has a similar effect to psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in “magic mushrooms.”
So-called magic mushrooms contain the psychedelic compound psilocybin. Source: Scientific American
I know what you may be thinking… “Isn’t all that kind of stuff for hippies and dropout mystic types?”
That chimes with the mainstream take on psychedelics. And, frankly, I expect some pushback on this idea. But as regular readers know, we don’t do mainstream here at Legacy Research.
A big idea won’t make you money if it’s already mainstream.
Demand – and prices – will already be high. You want to get in before the mainstream notices… while prices are still cheap and companies still have most of their growth ahead.
There are roughly 2.7 million veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That means roughly 270,000 to 540,000 of them came back with PTSD.
Not all of them are still alive.
According to Military Times, from 2005 and 2017, more veterans killed themselves (nearly 79,000) than the total number of U.S. troops who died in 30 years of war in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined (about 65,000).
And early evidence suggests psychedelic-based medicine could stem that tide.
He says his experience with ayahuasca helped him face his trauma.
In a 2018 documentary about it, From Shock to Awe, he says ayahuasca made him feel “renewed.” He also said it freed from the profound sense of loss that had haunted him in the nine years since he returned home from war.
And there’s growing evidence that psychedelics can help treat depression, anxiety, and addiction.
Take hedge fund manager Steve Cohen.
His estimated personal net worth is about $14 billion. Earlier this month, he inked a deal to buy the New York Mets baseball team.
That deal was all over the financial press. What wasn’t all over is Cohen also donated $5 million to MAPS earlier this year.
MAPS stands for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. It’s a nonprofit research group focused on the medical potential of treatments based around psychedelics.
Bob Parsons is another prominent backer. The GoDaddy founder has donated $2 million to MAPS.
And Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel has backed several early-stage psychedelic companies.
Tim Ferriss, an early-stage investor in Uber, Twitter, Alibaba, and Facebook, summed it up best…
I view the next five years as an absolutely golden window. There’s an opportunity to use relatively small amounts of money to have billions of dollars of impact and to affect millions of lives. There just aren’t that many opportunities that are so dramatically obvious.
This not only shows that some of the world’s smartest investors are already backing this trend. It also shows how widespread the interest in the medical applications of psychedelics has become.
Cohen, Parsons, and Thiel are about as far from hippies as you can get. They’re all prominent President Trump donors and supporters.
A legalization trend… like the one we’ve seen with cannabis… is also underway.
You see, just like with cannabis, the feds have outlawed and demonized psychedelics for decades.
They classify psilocybin and DMT, the active ingredient in ayahuasca, as Schedule 1 drugs along with heroin, MDMA (“ecstasy”), and LSD (“acid”).
But momentum has picked up for legalization or decriminalization of psychedelics.
Last year, Denver, Colorado, became the first city in the U.S. to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms through a voter initiative.
And last week, lawmakers in Ann Arbor, Michigan, decriminalized a wide range of psychedelic compounds.
Meanwhile, folks in Washington, D.C., will get a shot at voting on a psychedelics decriminalization measure on Election Day in November. And Oregon will have a legalization measure for psilocybin mushrooms for therapeutic purposes on its 2020 ballot.
This isn’t just an American phenomenon.
Last month, the Canadian government legalized the use of psilocybin for end-of-life care for terminal cancer patients.
Psilocybin helps patients better accept death as a natural part of existence. This in turn helps these patients deal with the depression and anxiety of knowing they have little time left.
And this certainly isn’t a mainstream investment theme yet. But that’s a good thing…
When the overall public still viewed cannabis as being for just beatniks and stoners, Nick saw massive potential for his subscribers. His readers have since been able to book gains as high as 688% on cannabis-focused stocks.
And he sees the same writing on the wall for psychedelics-focused stocks.
On March 3, he recommended shares in a tiny company called Mind Medicine (MMEDF) to our Crisis Investing readers. It was the first publicly traded company developing psychedelic medicines.
When he recommended Mind Medicine, Nick told his readers it had “tremendous potential” as a way to profit from the overall psychedelics legalization trend.
Since then, its shares have soared 132%. It shot up 107% last week alone.
As he summed it up for his readers…
Today, investing in psilocybin is only on the savviest investors’ radars. The psilocybin industry is still in its nascent stages. And legalization still has a long way to go before it reaches critical mass.
But there lies the opportunity. Momentum is building. Even if the legal psilocybin industry is only a fraction as successful as the legal cannabis industry, the profit potential is too big to ignore right now.
Mind Medicine is above Nick’s recommended buy-up-to price right now. So it’s not a current recommendation.
And because the psychedelics trend is so new, there aren’t a lot of other easy options for getting exposure.
But this is a trend to keep a close eye on. As new investment options come on stream, I’ll make sure to update you.
Regards,
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Chris Lowe
September 28, 2020
Bray, Ireland