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Comment by jasonhansel | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people here are claiming that Big Pharma is suppressing the truth about psychedelics so that they can make money from SSRIs. But remember: Big Pharma isn't making much money on SSRIs anymore, now that they've gone generic. If anything, it's the movement against SSRIs and in favor of new treatments that may be motivated by profit.

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Psilocybin is still something that can be grown/synthesized outside of a lab. Sure, major pharmaceutical companies could synthesize pure psilocybin and sell that as a new treatment in some kind of ideal form but it seem that from a lot of anecdotes posted here as well as many other stories I’ve heard, “normal”, non-lab-produced psilocybe mushrooms can have a profiundly positive effect. This might be what big pharma is seeing as a potential opportunity loss and therefore funding studies that skew results in a less positive way.

The issue is that your doctor can't write a prescription for the mushrooms themselves, so those aren't likely to become a mainstream treatment.

The more likely outcome is that the industry will create a synthetic analogue of psilocybin, conduct the trials needed to get it FDA-approved as a depression treatment, and then market it widely, making it more readily available and widely known than psilocybin itself.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing: such an analogue might (say) have fewer side effects or work more reliably. But it will result in the pharmaceutical industry getting the bulk of the profits.

Big Pharma has more money to make from psychedelics than from suppressing them. They're already selling ketamine and ketamine-adjacent drugs for depression.

A drug becoming available as a generic doesn’t mean end of shady practices to maximize profits. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/pharmaceutical-companies-pay-...

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