A Canadian psychedelic drug company has created medical grade ayahuasca

Not so long ago, if you wanted to explore the healing powers of ayahuasca, a psychedelic substance used in traditional medicine by Indigenous people in several South American countries, you pretty much had to travel to the Amazon rainforest.

Now, for the first time ever, Filament Health, a Canadian psychedelic drug company, has created medical grade ayahuasca.

Why is this a big deal? Well, within the burgeoning world of psychedelic therapy (despite a lack of high-quality research supporting it), there’s a lot of interest in ayahuasca stemming from the many anecdotal stories of people who’ve successfully used it treat substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorders.

Now, it’s not coming to a pharmacy near you anytime soon, but ayahuasca-assisted therapy might be an option in North America within 10 years.

“Drug development is long and expensive,” explained Ben Lightburn, CEO of Filament Health, “A typical drug development course takes five to seven years, at minimum, and we’re only in the very early stages right now.

“That said, we’re seeing doors opening slightly for psychedelic therapy that are outside of the traditional medical pharmaceutical prescription model.”

Lightburn is referring to the spate of recent ballot initiatives that have seen regions decriminalize and/or legalize several drugs that are thought to have therapeutic potential.

In the United States, for example, psilocybin — one of the active ingredients in psychedelic mushrooms — has been decriminalized in Denver, Oakland, Seattle and Washington, D.C., among other American cities. And, in 2020, the state of Oregon went further, by actually legalizing the therapeutic use of mushrooms. Earlier this month, residents of Colorado voted to join Oregon in the vanguard of the psychedelic renaissance, legalizing psilocybin and, at the same time, decriminalizing the use of several similar substances, including DMT (Dimethyltryptamine), a naturally occurring alkaloid that’s also the psychoactive ingredient in ayahuasca.

DMT is a funny little alkaloid, though, which is something you’ll learn if you ever take a trip to, say, Peru’s Tambopata National Reserve and sign up for an ayahuasca experience. If you consumed DMT on its own, you wouldn’t feel any effects from the drug. Our enzymes break it down, rendering its psychoactive properties inactive.

To get around that, the shamans who practice traditional medicine in Peru mix two plants together. One contains the DMT and the other is rich in a compound that is a “monoamine oxidase inhibitor,” (MAOI), which stops our body’s enzymes from doing their job. Fun fact: MAOIs were used as anti-depressants in the 1960s.

All ayahuasca brews use these two ingredients, but some use more. There are actually thousands of different recipes. Working with the ethnopharmacologists at the McKenna Academy, Filament is sourcing one of these traditional preparations to extract the medical grade ayahuasca. That’s a unique approach, since most other drug developers have concentrated on synthetic ayahuasca or finding other ways to administer DMT (intravenously or through inhalation).

These are arguably easier strategies than sourcing the traditional medicine and turning it into drug form. So why is Filament taking the long road?

“Partly because ayahuasca has actually been studied a fair bit in, as we call it, ‘the wild,’” said Lightburn. “And what’s interesting about that is that the FDA has what’s called a ‘botanical drug pathway.’ So when you’re making a drug based on a natural substance that’s been in traditional use, you can actually use the historical evidence for the safety and efficacy of that particular botanical substance in support of your application.”

Lightburn is hoping Filament’s medical-grade substance, which has standardized and measurable levels of the active ingredients, will make it possible for researchers to conduct proper clinical trials. He’s working toward an FDA-approved trial next year.

As mentioned earlier, almost all of the evidence in support of ayahuasca’s efficacy is still anecdotal.

There are a lot of stories that support the promise of the treatment, though. Aside from the many Joe Rogan and GOOP followers who’ve either gone to the rainforest or availed themselves of services offered by travelling shamans (something that’s becoming more common), there’s evidence that it’s been in use for at least 1,000 years in South America.

And that points to another reason that Filament is focused on starting with actual ayahuasca brew as opposed to shortcuts and workarounds.

“We have a hypothesis that the reason ayahuasca might work well for certain indications has to do with the fact that it’s not just DMT, but the combination,” said Lightburn.

In other words, while everyone has been focused on DMT as the hero ingredient of the brew and the MAOIs as a mere enabler, Lightburn’s team suspects that the both plants might be bringing something important to the table — possibly connected with the potential anti-depressant properties of MAOIs.

Over the years, many have remarked on how extraordinary it is that Indigenous people developed this method of combining plants to help unlock each other’s superpowers — centuries ago — without the aid of a chemistry lab or the periodic table of elements. It’s hardly the only example of Indigenous people understanding plant properties better than Western practitioners, though. There are many others.

And, thanks to this new development, which will allow researchers to study these plants’ effects in a controlled environment, we may soon have an interesting chance to learn even more.

Correction — Dec. 5, 2022: This file was updated to correct that DMT (Dimethyltryptamine) is a naturally occurring alkaloid that’s also the psychoactive ingredient in ayahuasca. A previous version incorrectly said chacruna was a necessary plant.

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