At the MAHA Summit: Will Psychedelics Become a Key to Mental Stability?

By Dick Russell, Contributor, The MAHA Report

Last week’s MAHA Summit in Washington brought a full day of fascinating panels, on subjects ranging from “food as medicine” to breakthroughs in biotechnology. Perhaps the most thought-provoking of all was a discussion between German billionaire entrepreneur Christian Angermayer and Matt Zorn, deputy general counsel for Health and Human Services (HHS). Their panel, titled “Psychedelic Medicine: The Next Frontier in Mental Health,” centered around what both men described as a coming new era of mental health care that will use a class of psychoactive substances, known as psychedelics or hallucinogens, to treat depression and other conditions.

First, some background on Angermayer and his wide range of interests. Now 47, he’s originally from rural Germany and today resides in a London penthouse. His visitors are greeted at the door by a large skull of a triceratops, whose skeleton he unearthed during his work with paleontologists. Inside the apartment are ancient artifacts including a bronze statue of the Egyptian god Osiris and a large stone statue of the Greek goddess Demeter. Both deities had disciples involved with hallucinogenic rituals around psychedelics, Angermayer’s research has revealed.

Angermayer made his fortune as a shrewd investor in biotechnologies. His initial company, Ribopharma, pursued ways to deactivate problematic genes and, after a merger with an American company in 2003, made him a billionaire. His Apeiron Investment Group went on to pour capital into a range of start-ups, including life-extending treatments and brain implants for people with paralysis.

His latest venture, psychedelics, emerged from a life-altering experience in 2014. Encouraged by a personal physician, Angermayer joined a handful of close friends on a yacht that sailed into tropical waters of a jurisdiction where psychedelic substances are legal. A teetotaler his entire life, his experience taking psilocybin (derived from so-called “magic mushrooms”) became “the single most meaningful thing I’ve ever done.” He has a tattoo of the compound’s structure on his right forearm.

Over the next several years, Angermayer assembled a team of like-minded entrepreneurs (including Silicon Valley billionaire, Peter Thiel) to invest in a handful of startups aimed at developing psychedelics for medicinal purposes. In 2018 Angermayer started his own firm, the German-headquartered ATAI Life Sciences, which he took public in 2021 on the Nasdaq. “The fact that psychedelics have been criminalized and shunned over the last fifty years is crazy, Angermayer has said, “because they have long had a place in human history.” They work on areas of the brain where pain and trauma are stored, shutting down the ego and allowing an inner voice to emerge and begin working on dissolving past trauma.

This is not about sanctioning recreational use. The current FDA leadership is supportive of using psychedelics for medical treatment under supervision, meaning the patient takes the prescribed drug in a therapeutic setting. When traditional medications don’t provide the relief from depression that someone needs, an example already approved is a new pharmaceutical called Spravato. It’s a potent form of ketamine, manufactured by Johnson & Johnson and administered as a nasal spray,

Angermayer’s AtaiBeckley company has just raised $150 million from investors. It has ongoing clinical trials for several substances. Angermayer told the MAHA Summit gathering of almost a thousand people that he expects psilocybin to be approved by the FDA for treatment-resistant depression by the end of next year. “It’s very gentle and has very little side effects,” unlike current pharmaceutical methods, Angermayer said.

ATAI’s lead prospective drug is intra-nasal DMT, the active ingredient in the plant medicine ayahuasca and, in a limited way, found naturally in the human body. The company is also working toward a better version of MDMA, commonly called Ecstasy, which has been used with great success treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in military veterans. Ibogaine, a powerful plant medicine from Africa, has had an 80 to 90 percent success rate in curing addictions.

At the MAHA Summit, it was quite clear that much is moving forward under the Trump administration. Matt Zorn, moderator of the psychedelics and medicine half-hour with Angermayer, was appointed in May as the federal government’s first “Psychedelics Czar.” As an attorney, Zorn had been part of numerous marijuana and psychedelics cases over the years, gaining recognition for his successful lawsuits against federal agencies over their strict cannabis and psychedelics policies.

Zorn is not alone. In June, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified before the House Energy Committee in favor of using psychedelics. During his testimony he referenced eleven clinical trials of psychedelics underway at the FDA. “Preliminary results are very encouraging,” Kennedy said. He added that he’d had a number of conversations about psychedelics with Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins, who had referenced such psychoactive drugs at a cabinet meeting during which President Trump pressed him about what he was doing to drive down the high suicide rate among veterans.

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary is also onboard. In a recent interview with NewsNation, Makary said: “When it comes to some of these psychedelics and other plant-based therapies, I don’t think we’re listening to patients.” Makary promised “an expeditious and rapid review” of data from psychedelic clinical trials and added: “I don’t think it’s a silver bullet, but we owe it to people who are suffering to do everything we can as a government to get a decision on the results as soon as they are available.”

All of which adds up to what Angermayer envisions will be a lucrative as well as transformatively beneficial future. Even neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s may be prevented in the long term, he believes. He is looking toward a day when a whole range of psychedelics will be approved for a therapist to choose from with a patient.

One psychedelic Angermayer can’t see a place for is LSD, due to the length of the treatment required (around 14 hours). Psilocybin, in a therapeutic dose, also takes awhile (around six hours), so Angermayer has said the short duration of DMT may prove the most effective way to go in many cases.

In the topsy-turvy times we are living through, Angermayer told one podcaster, “we can’t handle very quick disruption and change, and we’re going through that all the time. We need to have a tool ready, psychedelics, to help us move from one era in our lifetime into the next one. I think this could be the key to global mental sanity.”

Dick Russell is the award-winning author of 16 books, including The Real RFK Jr.