🫠 Psychonaut POV

PRESENTED BY ALTHEA 🤝

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that types each letter with surgical precision. Unfortunately, we edit with mittens, so please excuse any errors. 🫥

Rhonda DeSantis is all for natural medicine. But according to her, natural is no excuse for sloppy. As founder of Colorado's first licensed cultivator and manufacturer, she brings an engineer's precision to dosing, in a market that’s historically run on prayers and vibes.

We asked Rhonda what it takes to run a commercial cultivation facility, why whole-body mushrooms have no place in therapeutic settings, and how policymakers can keep adulterated products from flooding the market.

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You already run a successful construction company. Why get involved in the emerging psilocybin industry in Colorado at all?

For me it was a life-changing experience. I had a very small dose of psilocybin that helped me through a critical time in my life, and from that one experience I had a dramatic reduction in trauma triggers. I did three more of those same small doses over the course of a year, and by the end of it my whole life was reset. It was profound.

Whenever I find something I think can help others, I do everything in my power to get it to as many people as possible. As I started learning more about psilocybin, my geeky scientific mind revved up. This work touched all the fields I love—medicine, helping people, solving problems.

As soon as it was clear psilocybin would be decriminalized in Colorado, we started our research and development. Psylutions is the first licensed cultivator and first licensed manufacturer in the state. But I didn't want to just make the medicine; I wanted to help people directly, too. I enrolled in the first licensed facilitator program through Changa Institute so I could better understand the patients' needs and how they applied in the therapeutic setting. Then I reverse-engineered what we needed to do and achieve with our medicine to meet those needs. It couldn’t just be, “Here’s your mushrooms. Let's hope it goes well.”

How is cultivating psilocybin at commercial scale different from a hobbyist's home grow project?

Growing at home is great if you know the strain, you're getting your supplies from a reliable source, and you can mitigate any contaminants. But that’s extremely hard to do. We have advanced air handling systems that change our air more than 30 times an hour to meet ISO 5 standards. We have to be concerned about employee safety, cross contamination, and infected grows, so we test excessively. That's what distinguishes regulated from unregulated medicine. When you get our product, it's been tested four to six times to ensure potency, purity, and consistent pharmacological signatures.

We’ve figured out that the way you grow mushrooms and certain environmental attributes you apply to specific strains can alter their full alkaloid profile. It's a nature and nurture situation. We can increase what we want and decrease what's less desirable for certain strains. Then we align those profiles with patient data. We've found certain profiles work better for trauma and PTSD, others are more effective for pain relief and grief, some are better for depression, and others work well for mystical experiences and self-exploration.

When facilitators call, we review the patient data with them. We go over their medication intakes, their primary concerns, and what they're hoping to achieve. Then we match each patient with the best product and dosing strategy. It's personalized medicine for everyone who works with us.

Precision matters in a therapeutic setting, but that can be tough with natural medicine. How do you manufacture precise doses given the variability in potency between mushrooms?

You hit the nail right on the head. This is one of my soapboxes. I do not believe in whole-body fruits being administered in a therapeutic setting because there's no accurate way to dose them. I’ve seen one pin grow next to another pin and have 30 milligrams in one and 4 in the other. There's no visual way to confirm they'll be equally potent, even if they grow right next to each other.

The only way to achieve precise dosing is through homogenized powder or some form of homogenized product. Some people really believe in the ceremonial aspects of whole-body fruit, and I get pushback sometimes. But if you want precision dosing in a therapeutic setting, homogenized product is the only way.

We homogenize in single strains per flush. The state only requires testing per harvest, but that could be 14 different boxes of flushes harvested at the same time. We test every single box individually, above and beyond the state requirement. We want to know exactly what you're getting every single time.

We’ve found that when you're dosing with precisely homogenized powder, how much you need to achieve true “journey” status is far less than people typically think. That’s why we never refer to medicine in grams. I still get facilitators asking what something would be “in grams,” and my answer is always that it doesn't matter. Some of our strains are 26 milligrams of psilocybin per gram of dried mushroom, and our lowest is 12 milligrams per gram. The average Golden Teacher is between 4 and 8 milligrams per gram. You simply cannot go by dry weight.

What are the gaps in the supply chain right now? Where's the opportunity for entrepreneurs to step in as this industry emerges from the underground?

One of the gaps is public awareness. We need the general population to be educated that there's actual science behind this and real data showing it's helpful. Although the state is doing a fabulous job, their staff is limited and they get bogged down. There's a whole process of background checks and regulations to get licensure, so we're seeing a slow turn on licensing. Some healing centers have been in the queue since before the first one was approved.

Another big gap is testing labs. There's only one right now, Nordic Analytical Laboratories. They're coming from cannabis and crossing into psilocybin, so there's been a learning curve. Since we started working with them, they've realized they don't need as much product as they initially thought to run their tests. That's been cost reductive for us, which makes medicine more affordable. Every time we reduce our costs, we pass that on to consumers.

As of now, regulated labs can only test regulated medicine. I believe that needs to change. Personal-use testing should be allowed at regulated labs because it's practically impossible for a lab to operate solely on legal medicine. There's just not enough business. Besides, I'm for making medicine safer across the board.

Do you think your products should be available to people outside a facilitated use model?

That's a complex question. My first answer is definitely yes. Mushrooms are exceptionally safe. Even in a bad trip, very little actual harm occurs. Compared to alcohol and other legal drugs, there are much lower rates of incidents with mushrooms. Do I think it’s wise to do a heroic journey on your own? No. Do I think you could do a social dose on a Friday night instead of drinking alcohol? A hundred percent.

The biggest issue is that there are plenty of retailers out there right now selling unregulated products. They're not precisely dosing anything. Half the time there's not even psilocybin in it! You don't know what you're getting, and that's a safety issue.

I would much rather see the legal realm move into adult use than have all these off-market products doing potential harm. Although it wouldn’t be ideal, I'd even rather see the burdensome regulation they ended up with in cannabis. I believe adult use could come as early as three to five years from now.

If we can get the FDA to reschedule psilocybin, things should start moving more quickly because it suddenly becomes much easier to run clinical trials with natural medicine. I expect you’ll see significantly more profound outcomes than with synthetic. The entourage effect is where the power of the medicine really comes into play.

Want more from Rhonda?

Read her precision dosing guide, or connect with her team at Psylutions.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.