The world’s first magic mushroom research centre is launching this year in Jamaica. The centre will be located at the University of the West Indies in Mona, and funded by Canadian psychedelic company, Field Trip.
There are more than 180 types of psychedelic mushrooms, and the research aims to answer a range of questions, from what makes certain mushrooms psychedelic, to how best to extract these psychedelic properties, to exactly just how psychedelic they are.
The world’s first magic mushroom research centre is coming to Jamaica this year, aiming to answer all the big questions about what makes mushrooms magic.
The company plans to use the research for profitable means, with company co-founder Ronan Levy identifying two potential business targets.
The first is to quantify the psychedelic properties of magic mushrooms in order to enable users to have more accurate expectations of their effects. The second is that the research could uncover potentially patentable intellectual property, like previously undiscovered psychoactive molecules. The company will maintain rights to any discoveries they make.
Levy said that the former goal would be useful in Jamaica, where mushrooms are legal and freely sold, but there is no regulated market where users can know the strength of the mushrooms they’re taking.
The announcement comes after John Hopkins was recently named the largest psychedelic research centre in the world. However, unlike this venture which will focus on mushrooms themselves, places like John Hopkins look at psilocybin produced chemically.
Field Trip believes that in the coming years, psychedelic drugs will be legalised for therapeutic purposes, and that figuring out ways to synthesise any potential new molecule discoveries will allow them to be put forward for clinical trials.
The centre is currently still under construction but is scheduled to be opened later this year.
