The Psychedelic Patent Puzzle: Unraveling the Impact on Innovation vs. Access

Podcast Highlights

• Examining the unique patent process for the Stamets Stack microdosing protocol.
• How to enforce patents on illegal substances like psilocybin.
• Unpacking COMPASS Pathways’ psilocybin polymorph patent.
• The pros & cons of psychedelic patents.
• How psychedelic patents could hinder therapeutic expansion.
• Graham’s motivation to enter the psychedelic patents space.

Show Links

1. Calyx Law
2. Graham on Twitter
3. Chacruna Council for the Protection of Sacred Plants
4. Graham on Linkedin
5. Psychedelic Alpha Psilocybin Patent Tracker
6. Paul Stamets’s patent application for his Stamets Stack
7. Scientific paper arguing against the patentability of COMPASS Pathways’ psilocybin polymorph.
8. Freedom to Operate
9. Olivia Goldhill’s article on COMPASS Pathways’ patent efforts
10. Howard Lotsof
11. Washington State’s efforts to combat patent trolling.
12. Electronic Frontier Foundation
13. Journey Colab’s Patent pledge and statement
14. Shayla Love’s Article on Vice: New Filing Challenges Compass Pathways’ Infamous Patent on Synthetic Psilocybin
15. Shayla Love’s article on Lucid News: “Do Psychedelics Demand an Innovative Approach to Patents?”
16. Episode 172: Paul Stamets
17. Episode 193: Reid Robison
18. Episode 173: Rick Doblin
19. (blog) Microdosing Psilocybin Mushrooms with the Stamets Stack
20. (psychedelic research) New Microdosing Study Investigates “Stamets Stack”
21. (psychedelic research) Oregon’s Psychedelic Path: What Coaches and Consumers Need to Know

This episode is brought to you by Numinus, a mental health company bringing safe, evidence-based psychedelic-assisted therapies to people in need. They have clinics in the US and Canada, providing mental health treatments such as: ketamine-assisted therapy, talk therapy and virtual mindfulness programs and practitioner training. Numinus is a leader in psychedelic-assisted therapy, both through research and in practice where approved by governing bodies. Learn more at www.numinus.com.

This episode is brought to you by Sayulita Wellness retreat in Mexico. They provide a comprehensive wellness experience that includes a variety of activities such as yoga, meditation, and healthy eating merged with practical and proven methods of psychotherapy, counseling and medical support to create lasting change for participants.
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Podcast Transcript

0:00:00.1 Paul Austin: Welcome back to the Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave. Today I am speaking with Graham Pechenik, a Registered Patent Attorney and the founder of Calyx Law.

0:00:09.9 Graham Pechenik: Now, say you open a psilocybin service center in Oregon or in Colorado, or in other states going forward and there are, at that point, tens or dozens even of different types of claims that start getting granted on methods of using psilocybin for very particular indications. You're a either a service center, you're a facilitator of that service center. That may become very difficult to have freedom to use, Freedom To Operate as some of these people say in the patent world psilocybin for all the different ways that it could ultimately be used positively to benefit people.

[music]

0:00:49.8 Paul Austin: Welcome to the Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave, audio mycelium, connecting you to the luminaries and thought leaders of the psychedelic renaissance. We bring you illuminating conversations with scientists, therapists, entrepreneurs, coaches, doctors, and shamanic practitioners, exploring how we can best use psychedelic medicine to accelerate personal healing, peak performance and collective transformation.

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0:01:27.2 Paul Austin: Third Wave is grateful to Numinus a mental health company, bringing safe evidence-based psychedelic-assisted therapies to people in need.

Numinus, has joined us as a partner. They have clinics in the US and Canada where they provide mental health treatments such as Ketamine-assisted therapy, talk therapy, as well as virtual mindfulness programs and practitioner training. Numinus is a leader in psychedelic-assisted therapy, both through research and in practice where approved by governing bodies. They've also created a music as medicine program where they partner with leading ambient musicians to foster a community of individuals seeking mindfulness and alignment. Numinus has been advocating for greater access to psychedelic therapy for years, and we're proud to partner with them as they continue to push the envelope. You can learn more at Numinus.com.

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0:03:45.3 Paul Austin: Hey folks, just got off an interview with Graham Pechenik. Graham is a Registered Patent Attorney and over the last several years, he has come to be one of, if not the most prominent voice on patents in the psychedelic space. So in today's episode, we go deep into all things patents. We talk about three core patents, the Stamets Stack, COMPASS Pathways' polymorph for psilocybin and MAPS, MDMA for PTSD. And we go deep into discussing the differences between each one of those patents and talk a little bit about just the overall patent system and how psychedelics are being sort of shaped and morphed into it. Graham offers a lot of context and insight around patents. He is very well versed in this space and we haven't really talked about patents at length on the podcast today. So this was a really interesting opportunity to open up that conversation and hear about how patents get established, if and when patents can be protected, if there's something that's legally against it, what that would look like to go after.

0:04:30.2 Paul Austin: We talk about all these sort of considerations in the psychedelic space. Graham Pechenik is a Registered Patent Attorney and the founder of Calyx Law, a law firm specializing in cannabis and psychedelic-related intellectual property. Graham has a BS from UCSD and a JD from NYU and after a decade at large firms defending and challenging patents for Fortune 500 companies, he started Calyx Law to help cannabis and psychedelics ventures design and implement their IP strategies. He is also an editor at large of Psychedelic Alpha where he writes about IP, provides data for patent trackers and maintains a psychedelic legalization and decriminalization tracker. Finally, he's the steward of the IP committee of the Psychedelic Bar Association and is also a member of Chacruna Council for the Protection of Sacred Plants.

0:06:13.8 Paul Austin: The way I found out about Graham's work was through Twitter. Turns out Graham has been a longtime listener of the podcast himself, so it was nice to have this time together to really go deep into all things patents in the psychedelic landscape. All right, that's it for now. Let's go ahead and dive into this episode with Graham Pechenik. I hope you enjoy our deep and thorough conversation about all things patents and psychedelics.

0:06:14.4 Paul Austin: Hey listeners, welcome back to the Psychedelic Podcast. Today we have the founder of Calyx Law, Graham Pechenik on the podcast. Graham is a Registered Patent Attorney and the foremost voice on patents in the psychedelic space from a legal perspective. So, Graham, it's really a pleasure to have you on the show. We first touched base maybe a year ago, maybe over a year ago, about having you on. We had to reschedule once and so it's nice to talk about some of our daily routines and... No, just kidding. We're really gonna go deep into the patent world today so I'm stoked to have you on.

0:06:48.4 Graham Pechenik: Yeah, well, I'm really stoked to be on. I mean, you're one of the podcasts I think I've listened to the longest in the space and it's been a great one. And yeah, it's an honor to be able to join the platform. And thank you for the generous introduction. It's a fun conversation to be part of talking about psychedelics and patents, so I'm glad to be able to join you and chat a little bit more about them here.

0:07:08.4 Paul Austin: So the thing I wanna kick off on is, this recent announcement just came out maybe a week or two ago, and it was about the Stamets Stack. So the Stamets Stack is a combination of Psilocybin, Lion's mane and niacin named after, of course, Paul Stamets, the renowned mycologist. And a few months ago at the Wonderland Conference in Miami, I had an opportunity to chat with Paul and he mentioned the parallel between the Stamets Stack and gunpowder. In other words, you can't necessarily patent an individual component that is natural and comes from the ground, but you can patent a sort of unique combination of those that together does something that the three individual compounds can. In other words, there's a synergistic effect. So let's just open that up for a little bit. And what I'd love to hear as part of that is, kind of what was the process of Paul Stamets getting approved? I think it was a pretty lengthy one. Why is it that he was able to get a patent for the combination of these three? And what is your anticipation of whether or not you can anticipate the sort of enforceability of such a patent for the Stamets Stack? So I'll just leave that a little open-ended start and see what you do with it.

0:08:33.1 Graham Pechenik: Yeah, no, that's a fun place to jump in. And that was an application I'd been watching since, probably my start, even in this space. His application was first filed in 2016.

0:08:45.6 Paul Austin: Wow.

0:08:47.2 Graham Pechenik: Like every other patent applications, it publishes 18 months after it was first filed. So in 2017, at some point it was first published. When I say I've been watching it actually, to sort of sidestep your direct question, and just give a little bit of background. 'Cause maybe it kind of sets the stage a little bit too. Back in maybe 2018, I started keeping track of the patent applications that were published on psilocybin. At that point, I think there were not more than a dozen, and maybe a few of them were actually Paul's. And I kept them on a little tracker, which is now the tracker on Psychedelic Alpha that's well over a hundred and still probably many hundred that are not yet published that could be added to it or will be, that are already filed. And so I've been watching it since then. And it had been, as you say, a lengthy and quite extraordinary process actually of prosecution, of examination, before the patent office. So it was filed in 2016. It went through at least eight different rejections of the patent office.

0:10:03.8 Graham Pechenik: So there's something called a Request for Continuing Examination that you file after you've been rejected twice. So you get like a first office action and then what's called a final office action. Then you can either appeal or you can file what's called a Request for Continuing Examination or RCE. So it went through all these cycles really of arguing with an examiner about why it should be patentable. And so just to look at the application itself and what it was asking for, so like any other patent application, the property right that the applicant or the inventor's trying to get approved is defined by something called the claims. So the claims in this particular application were two compositions of the compounds that are in the Stamets Stack.

0:10:51.7 Graham Pechenik: So psilocybin or psilocin compounds from Lion's mane and niacin. And some of the claims are to just... Psilocybin or psilocin and Lion's mane extract. And those claims were rejected on, there's a statute called 101, 35 USC 101. So it's often called a Section 101 rejection. But Section 101 sets forth what is patentable has to be a composition, a manufacturer, a method or an article of manufacturer method of, it's forums. And there's some exceptions that it can't be an abstract idea, a natural product or natural phenomenon. And so the claims are rejected for being natural products, basically just containing compounds that are found in nature. So of course, psilocybin and psilocin are found in Psilocybe and many other genera of mushrooms, Lion's mane extracts of course are found in Lion's mane, niacin is found naturally too. Some of the claims didn't have niacin. He also had some claims that required a diluent, but the diluent could be water, which of course is found in nature.

0:12:08.5 Graham Pechenik: And so he went back and forth to the patent examiner arguing that even though they were natural compounds together, sort of, you suggested they have this particular synergy. The patent examiner applies a test about whether or not the natural products together have some, what the test is markedly different characteristics than the compounds on their own. And so these markedly different characteristics could be differences in the function, differences in the structure, maybe when you mix them together like a metal alloy or something, they have a different hardness or brittleness or something or differences in effect. So the synergistic effects, Paul Stamets argue that they had effects on neurogenesis and other synergistic effects that the compounds alone wouldn't have. And so he made this argument many times. He actually filed, I think now there's at least 10 and maybe others because, like applications they don't publish, applications can be filed and not yet public. So at least 10 other applications serve in the same family. I believe three appeals, so two appeals and one that was just in the application that led to this issued patent. And another, and a sister that led to another issued patent actually a few months ago but containing some other compounds that aren't in the sort of standard Stamets Stack.

0:13:39.5 Graham Pechenik: And so I may have a lost of track of [chuckle] I guess kind of where the question was leading, but, sort of all that to say, it was really an extraordinary effort. And it to some degree really pushed the boundaries of what the patent office was willing to find patentable in terms of what a natural product is. And so even the judges, the administrative judges weren't convinced that this was a patentable invention. And so he finally convinced the examiner after the appeal was decided in favor of the examiner's rejection, based on making some changes to the wording of the claims. So he made it more specific that it's to a pharmaceutical formulation. He didn't add anything else to the claim, so it's still psilocybin and Lion's mane extract, but it's a pharmaceutical formulation or a pharmaceutical dosage form of those things. And he also submitted an affidavit that had all this evidence. It was what's called post-filing evidence. So it was evidence that was created based on studies after that first 2016 provisional was filed. But he had also filed it in numerous later applications and it was representative of work that he did to demonstrate that having these compounds together does have this synergistic effect or at least in a way that was convincing to the examiner.

0:15:05.7 Graham Pechenik: So the examiner, finally allowed these claims after all that back and forth. So it's a kind of a good example of a really lengthy and really extraordinary, I guess, again, prosecution. I mean, the amount of effort that went into it and the way that he kinda looked at every argument and kind of hammered at every argument repeatedly sometimes until he was able to find exactly what it was, was able to convince an examiner. You asked kinda a separate question, which was whether this could stand after being issued, like how he could use it in enforcement. So as it is now a granted patent, he can enforce it. So if somebody is selling, making, using, importing those combinations, psilocybin and Lion's mane extract and the particular amounts that are in the claims, Paul Stamets and his company now has the exclusive rights to that. So they could enforce that patent and prevent others from doing those things or get damages, which would be equivalent to enforcing someone to take a license for those things. Of course, when anybody is presented with a cease and desist or a lawsuit, you can challenge the patent as being invalid.

0:16:33.1 Graham Pechenik: One thing about a granted patent is, it's kind of gold plated in a sense where there's a... Once you've gotten the patent, there's a presumption that it's valid. There's a presumption that because it went through this process, through the government and through the examiner, the examiner did their job. And the sort of amount of gold plating, I mean, I would argue on this is to some degree fairly extreme because really, the examiner saw every single possible argument somebody could make later and in the end it was still granted. One thing potentially is laws can change. And so there's many patents, especially in the software space, and actually 101 in particular, there's exception to things that are patentable. There's been a lot of challenges against software patents based on changes of law.

0:17:21.3 Graham Pechenik: And actually some in kind of life sciences too, some people might be familiar with, there's a case called the Myriad Case where, isolated DNA segments were taken all the way up to the Supreme Court, and Supreme Court found they were not patent eligible and basically overturned a whole body of patent law. And also, probably at that point thousands, if not tens of thousands of patent applications had claimed isolated DNA. And there's always a possibility that there could be a change in law or the courts decide that this is... Even the... Some amount of synergy is not enough. But that all being said, these are patents that are now enforceable and patents that join a number of other ones. Paul has, I don't know the exact number, but...

0:18:06.8 Paul Austin: For Fungi Perfecti.

[overlapping conversation]

0:18:15.6 Graham Pechenik: Probably 10. Yeah, through Fungi Perfecti for some, for his inventions around the use of fungi for B Health and because like I mentioned, he has these maybe 10 or more others in the same family that are now pending. The likelihood that other examiners or even the same examiner might allow some of those others is much higher. And some of the other claims like methods of using them, the patent examiner and the appellate, court or the administrative court already said that those method claims kind of rose or fell on the strengths of these composition claims. Because the composition might be a natural product, but a method of using it, you can still get a claim on a method of using something that's natural as long as it's novel. So those claims should all be allowed now too or allowable. So we'll probably see other applications issue from this family, in fairly short order, I would imagine.

0:19:10.2 Paul Austin: And in the show notes, 'cause there's a lot here and there's some technicalities here, we will link to the Psychedelic Alpha patent tracker. We will also link to the decision around this being a patent. There are a couple questions that are coming up from this. One of which I think you'll have a lot of insight. The other is just sort of a speculative question for the audience. I think where my mind goes when thinking about the enforceability of such a patent is a lot of the "microdosing supplements" that are currently sold are sold illegally. And it looks like for the foreseeable future that will be the case. We know in Oregon and Colorado and other states that are looking to legalize psilocybin, they're not really looking at sort of an above ground microdosing supplement that could be shared.

0:19:51.0 Paul Austin: So I think the one question that comes up is, this combination of psilocybin with Lion's mane, potentially niacin is pretty easy and straightforward. And I don't know how, I don't really know how this works out when it's a product that is basically illegal. Now, of course the intention of MycoMedica is to bring this through clinical trials to get it federally approved, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm gonna be able to go into a dispensary anytime soon and buy a microdose of Psilocybin. So I think that's sort of just one question that comes up and it's really, in some ways I think it's relevant for the entire space. And that leads into the second question that I have, which I'd love for you to dive into is what we're... I'd say the other high profile case in the psychedelic space is COMPASS pathways patenting, a polymorph for psilocybin. How did their patent process differ from the Stamets process for getting that combination approved?

0:20:51.7 Graham Pechenik: Sure. So to your first question, whether Stamets application or now granted patent can be enforced against people who are selling or companies who are selling, or at least these, gray market or black market or however you might think of them, microdosing supplements. I might see that as sort of two separate questions. One is just the sort of ability to pursue them in general, which is, I would answer it certainly exists, and so... The same hurdles one would have to climb over enforcing any other application would still be there and they might be a little bit higher in these circumstances. So, for instance, you need to know who your infringer is. Some of these like Instagram vendors may not have an obvious kind of entity behind them or a person behind them that's easy to find.

0:21:50.6 Graham Pechenik: Some of them may not have, much money to go after if you're trying to get damages or, they can, sort of disappear and pop up somewhere else. And so the sort of practicalities of trying to chase them down might not be worth the time, although certainly they would be able to be pursued. I've often thought a bit about what might happen with this other patent that was granted maybe a year ago on DMT vape pens, because certainly nobody is selling DMT vape pens legally, but also certainly people are selling them. So, could this patent owner pursue them for damages?

0:22:30.4 Graham Pechenik: And there're actually, I think that there's maybe a greater likelihood that this person could get damages from them. Maybe not through courts, but just by sending them cease and desist letters or sending them threats of potential lawsuit as long as you can figure out who they are, because you can imagine, for instance, if you're somebody who's selling DMT vape carts, and somebody sends you a letter and says, "I'm gonna bring you into court", and they've identified you and they say, "If I take you to court, you're gonna have to turn over all of your financial records and we're gonna have to subpoena all of your Instagram, DMs", and you're probably gonna be worried, "Well, maybe I haven't been paying taxes on them." Or who knows, the people that are selling these unauthorized settlements are probably kind of in a similar situation. They may say, "Well just, pay $20,000 or $50,000, just make this go away and settle."

0:23:24.8 Graham Pechenik: So that takes me, I think to the second part of the question that I was setting up, which is, would Paul Stamets or would his company sort of take that tactic? I can potentially see it in the case of the owner of the DMT vape pen, vape cart patent, but Paul Stamets I imagine, would be cognizant of the kind of backlash if... Potentially, I don't know him personally, but I can only imagine that somebody who's a little bit more higher profile, just would want to go about doing that in a way that's maybe a little bit more sensitive. So, certainly there would be a business case if there's, many people selling things, that he has a patent granted on, especially if he's building a business around doing that himself. Chasing after every last person who's selling the Stamets Stack on Instagram might be a way to, kind of... Not put yourself in the favor of at least some people. But I don't know how that calculus plays out and I certainly don't know how he does it in his mind.

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0:26:21.8 Graham Pechenik: As far as your other question around COMPASS, I think at least in terms of its kind of examination, it was a much more straightforward application. So sort of putting aside for the moment the like challenges from Freedom To Operate, Carey Turnbull's company. Just looking at the examination itself, it kind of went through pretty quickly because these types of polymorph patents are fairly common in the pharmaceutical space. Most companies who have a pharmaceutical product that they get FDA approval on at some point, they do a salt and kind of polymorph screen, they determine usually this is around the time of something in an IND or before it's being developed actually getting approved as like a final formulation, the final dosage form that gets FDA approved.

0:27:13.7 Graham Pechenik: They determine what's the best solid form for sale. What is the best shelf life and stability characteristics and what's the best way to formulate a particular drug compound like psilocybin. So there's, this is all just to say there's a lot of sort of precedent, I guess at the patent office for people doing this, and there's a fairly straightforward term analysis in terms of what's novel and what's not obvious, and what do you need to show to get a solid form patent on a crystalline polymorph as COMPASS said. Of course their challenges really came not from within the patent office, but from without it, with you know Carey Turnbull's Freedom To Operates challenges arguing that their polymorph was either not a polymorph or single polymorph at all. But this kind of like blend of different polymorphs that led to this particular X-ray diffraction pattern.

0:28:08.8 Graham Pechenik: Maybe it's worth backing up and just saying the way that crystalline polymorph is defined in the claim is by using a machine to get a this X-ray diffraction pattern, this particular peaks. And that's how the particular crystalline structures are described for purposes of the claim. The argument against their patent validity was that these peaks either didn't represent like a true polymorph or it represented polymorphs that already existed in the Prior Art. And so for anything to be patentable, it has to be novel and it has to be a non-obvious contribution over whatever the kind of the Prior Art, the standard public knowledge in that field at the time something was filed. So the argument that was made was that their polymorph A was not novel and not non-obvious. And it was really the same as all these other, crystalline forms of psilocybin that many had used.

0:29:07.5 Graham Pechenik: And the backstory for people that are kinda interested is, itself also quite extraordinary in that, Freedom To Operate funded an enormous amount of research and apparently tracked down, I think it was 50 something, 56 different samples of Prior Arts psilocybin, like I think all the way back to samples of material from Albert Hoffman and all around the world that had been used in different labs, like Bill Richards and all sorts of others that had psilocybin on hand and analyze it to try to show that all these different samples had these X-ray characteristics and were the same polymorphous, COMPASS later tried to patent so that it was therefore in the Prior Art and there's, I guess something else we could link to that's a scientific paper that came out, and was the basis really for the most recent two, Freedom To Operate challenges.

0:30:07.2 Graham Pechenik: And so yeah, there were three total challenges against three separate COMPASS patents. And I know all of them not only failed, the challenges actually kind of didn't even get off the ground. So what happens after patent is granted is you have an opportunity to what's it called file a post grant review, which is basically, two parties or, the party who owns the application and the challenger. The challenger is asking to take the questions of validity up to the administrative board, so some administrative judges at the patent office. And so the first stage of that is just asking for this hearing to even be instituted. And then the panel of judges says, we'll institute it now you can kind of brief it and you can argue it to the court. And so with these, it didn't even reach the stage of being instituted. So they just filed their initial briefs and the patent office decided they wouldn't even institute the challenge. It didn't even rise to the level of raising a question of invalidity, substantial enough for the patent office to hear it. And so I may have lost the path on that question too, but hopefully I answered.

0:31:21.7 Paul Austin: No, but this is... It's good context and Freedom To Operate, Carey Turnbull, this came up in an interview that I did with Hamilton Morris, which we have not published yet. Which was that Carey also has, I think a, like an LSD type patent. And that there's a lot of... There has been a lot of pushback against COMPASS Pathways for attempting to patent this polymorph, and a lot of people have even been doubtful that it would stand these enforcement tests, but so far it has. Do you... I think my next question around this is, let's zoom out a little bit and just talk a little bit about kind of the... One thing we had discussed before getting live on air in both our prep call and then right before we went on is how the patent system in general in the United States is broken and or not broken, but it's not the best for some reason.

0:32:20.4 Paul Austin: I'd love for you to sort of contextualize that for the psychedelic space. What is the nature of the patent system and how might this system be exploited by certain companies in the psychedelic space. And with the overall context as well, I know this has been brought up, that a lot of those in the patent office have no education or awareness about psychedelics in general, and that can in some ways be taken advantage of to get very Obvious things patented. I think the classic example for COMPASS Pathways is getting soft furniture, having a patent as part of that process for the overall sort of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. So I'd love for you to just sort of riff on the patent system in general and then how, because of its structure, how it can be manipulated by certain players in the psychedelic space.

0:33:14.2 Graham Pechenik: Yeah. Well, maybe the place to start is just like, "Why do we have a patent system at all?" The patent system is supposed to reflect a bargain between the public and the inventor in that the public grants this period of exclusivity for 20 years for purposes of encouraging inventors to go out and do work. That's bringing new innovations, bringing new inventions for the public to enjoy both during the time of that exclusivity and then, and perpetuity afterwards, so when the exclusivity expires, then because that invention was disclosed in the patent application that then becomes free for everybody to use. So it sort of has two purposes in that. One of them is just bringing this inventive activity forward by giving people reward for it. And then the other is not just bring it forward, but bring it forward to the public too, in the sense that they can all then use it after.

0:34:10.4 Graham Pechenik: So people who might keep things as trade secrets can maybe see that there's a different balance to be made by getting a period of exclusivity after sharing it to the public through the patent application. So when we think about that as a basis for the patent system, we can kind of use that lens to try to decide like "Is the patent system broken or are people exploiting it?" And maybe the way to do that is by saying, "Is the patent system being used in a way that's actually bringing forward innovation that like, from a policy perspective or even to the extent of an individual application on the level of that individual application, is this the type of innovative activity, this type of invention that is deserving of this period of exclusivity?" So this kind of comes into the sharpest relief, I think, in the pharmaceutical space because I think we can really argue in the pharmaceutical space and pharmaceutical companies strongly do, that without the reward of a patent, pharmaceutical companies wouldn't be doing innovation at all because patents or the drugs that patents are protecting are very easy to copy once somebody knows what the drug is.

0:35:25.9 Graham Pechenik: So, if you invent some new type of psilocybin that has some effects that make it better than psilocybin for some reason, and you disclose what this compound is and how to make it, if other people have that information well, that they can just go and make it too. So, if making that new form of psilocybin say, cost millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars, or as people say the drug development process, which adds a whole another layer to it because now you may have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars or even billions of dollars to get something through FDA, if you didn't have the opportunity to have a monopoly and charge those monopoly prices after you get FDA approval, well, generics, we just come and sell the same thing.

0:36:08.2 Graham Pechenik: And so you need to have that patent to be able to be incentivized to do the work to begin with. And so, there's enough ways probably of dissembling that kind of reasoning to [laughter] last through the rest of the podcast. But I think just kind of providing it as a way of looking at innovation gives a good way of trying to understand whether innovation is broken or is kind of good or not. And just probably give one way that people say it's not is by looking at the actual pharmaceutical innovation that's happening. And so many people point out that the types of new drugs that come to market are often copycat drugs. They may have some very minimal variation that sort of surpasses the test for patentability so they can get longer patent life or new patent life on it, but it doesn't really provide any therapeutic advantage.

0:37:04.4 Graham Pechenik: Maybe in this space, we can look at the difference between esketamine and ketamine. Does... Is esketamine substantially different enough that it's worth the additional costs that it has over racemic ketamine? Does it really provide an advantage? And if we look at all the activity going on now and certainly, there's a lot of companies who are bringing new drugs, new psychedelic drugs through approval or through at least, kind of early discovery and into preclinical trials. And how are these, I guess, providing advantages over and above just the advantage of the fact that they're patentable. And so there's, I think, a question there, just around does the fact that the patent system focuses on providing incentives for things that are themselves patentable take away from that fact that like, what it should be doing is providing incentives for things that are actually innovative or actually bringing real public benefit.

0:38:13.0 Paul Austin: Which kind of brings us back to the COMPASS Pathways point where a lot of people, including Carey and others, Tim Ferriss has made this point that... And I may be slightly off on this, but this is how I remember it, that Albert Hofmann had done some sort of a synthesis extract of psilocybin, that the polymorph that COMPASS Pathways patented was very similar to the Albert Hofmann one. In other words, there wasn't any sort of additional benefit from it, outside of the fact that it's just a novel thing to patent in sort of the 2019, 2020 era. And I think the other consideration as part of this is bringing up the example of Esketamine with Johnson and Johnson versus generic ketamine. I was having this conversation with Reid Robison the other day.

0:39:02.4 Paul Austin: One of the upsides, of course to being able to patent, let's say esketamine, is that it's more likely than to get covered by health insurance. And so that I think we... Which is, it's interesting because esketamine hasn't shown to be any more effective than generic ketamine, necessarily. Synthetic psilocybin, it is unlikely, this is speculation, but it is unlikely that it will be found to be any more effective than just growing mushrooms and eating mushrooms, yet because it's in a legal schedule one substance, then the sort of added benefit in the patenting of the polymorph is potentially changing the legality. And that's it. And, maybe that's okay because maybe then that opens up a lot more access for anyone who wants to work with psilocybin, whether it's a polymorph or whether it's just growing your own mushrooms.

0:39:58.3 Graham Pechenik: Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think like seeing it that way too points out that the patent system itself is within this much broader structure of the regulatory system and like the other incentives around that and the reimbursement system and just the broader healthcare system and all its structural failings. And so it very much might be correct to say if COMPASS couldn't get a patent on psilocybin, psilocybin might not be able to get through FDA approval maybe Usona could keep raising philanthropic funding, but just generally without these patents, is it possible to raise the money to be able to get something through FDA approval? So, we can maybe divert the question and ask, are there better ways of providing funding to do that? Like, why wasn't it that somebody could have tried to fund racemic ketamine getting FDA approval for depression or another indication so that it could then get reimbursement instead of having to, have only a patented sort of new form of it through Esketamine be the one to get that, and yeah. So.

0:41:10.0 Paul Austin: Which brings up another interesting point of discussion around sort of non-profits versus for-profits. Usona and MAPS versus potentially COMPASS Pathways and maybe some of these atai some of these other major biotech companies. I mean, I'm curious, could you talk a little bit about what is the difference between Usona and COMPASS Pathways in terms of the psilocybin that they're bringing through. COMPASS Pathways has patented a certain polymorph, has Usona also patented a certain polymorph that they're bringing through clinical trials? Or is that one from what I understand, that one is just open source, right?

0:41:40.9 Graham Pechenik: Yeah. Usona has not filed any patents. I believe they were one of the signatories to the Statement on Open Science and Open Praxis and have been vocal too about their commitment to open science and to making everything, I mean they made their kilogram-scale psilocybin synthesis open and their... I believe like investigators manual and their... Other elements of things that may not be open for a for-profit company they've made them available. I don't know the details of their psilocybin itself, but I do know, I mean, it's not patented.

0:42:25.9 Paul Austin: And you probably don't know much about clinical trials, Usona versus COMPASS Pathways. Is there any sort of indication of who will get approved first from a clinical trial perspective? I see PR all the time about COMPASS Pathways. They're now kicking off this phase three trial. I think Josh Hardman just wrote an update that they actually took their N number down substantially to do that. I have not seen any updates on Usona for major depressive disorder. So I don't know if you have any internal...

0:42:53.6 Graham Pechenik: Yeah. No, I mean that all certainly suggests to me that COMPASS will be first to get approval. And I mean, I can only imagine in sort of the current climate trying to do drug discovery based purely on philanthropic funding as you know, if not impossible, at least very, very difficult. And certainly MAPS has had greater and greater difficulty themselves continuing the path that they were already on given the fact that probably so many other funding opportunities for investment are competing with the same money that potentially could go to them and just the overall kind economic climate at least now.

0:43:32.1 Paul Austin: Well, and this is what Rick Doblin emphasized in the podcast that I did with him, 'cause I basically asked, "Hey, what's your biggest challenge now as an organization?" And he said it simply that with all these for-profit players coming into the space, a lot of the donor money that we used to get to support MAPS is now going to these for-profit ventures instead of going into MAPS. Now MAPS had, through Vine Ventures, they set up an interesting regenerative financing structure, which is really interesting. Can you tell us a little bit about not that specifically, I mean, if you want to talk through that a little bit, you can, but more so like how is MAPS unique in terms of the patent process that they are bringing MDMA for PTSD through, tell us a little bit about that structure and maybe how it is similar or different to COMPASS pathways or even the Stamets Stack.

0:44:24.3 Graham Pechenik: Sure. Well, I mean from what I know at least from public information they have certainly always been public about having what Rick has called an anti-patent strategy. And so I know he has spoken about this before on podcasts and thing, and if I remember correctly, I think he indicates that some of that desire to have an anti-patent strategy came from seeing some of the patents filed on Ibogaine, backed by Howard Lotsof and Howard Lotsof companies. And, I think the end of the '60s, I suppose, when Ibogaine was first being researched for its use in substance use disorders and seeing sort of how that situation never managed to, I guess, evolve into having Ibogaine as a approved product in the US. And, I don't know the full story behind why that sort of encouraged Rick to pursue this anti-patent strategy, but I know that the reason behind it, at least from what I've heard from him, has been desired not to have companies filing method of use claims to MDMA.

0:45:35.7 Graham Pechenik: And I can imagine the logic of that being because... And this is certainly a concern generally around patents being filed in this space, is that if different companies all start to get ownership interests and exclusive rights on the use of a compound, it becomes very difficult to do, if not a research, at least to work with that compound. Once it gets approved or once it gets decriminalized or once it is allowed in adult use markets. And this is one of the concerns, I've often had around having multiple companies filing the same method of use claims on Psilocybin. Let's say you open a Psilocybin service center in Oregon or in Colorado, or in other states going forward, and there are at that point, tens or dozens even of different types of claims that start getting granted on methods of using Psilocybin for very particular indications.

0:46:33.5 Graham Pechenik: And you're either a service center or you're a facilitator of that service center, putting aside their questions about whether you can be offering things for particular types of treatment anyways, but just focusing on the fact that it is... May become very difficult to sort of have freedom to use, freedom to operate as some of these people say in the patent world. Psilocybin for all the different ways that it could ultimately be used positively to benefit people because, you may have to negotiate the rights to license Psilocybin for... In this particular dosage for treating these conditions or for increasing creativity under this protocol, have to get a license from this other company or it could be a dozen of things like that. And so, what does that gonna mean in just in terms of something being able to be utilized to it's kinda fullest extent?

0:47:27.7 Graham Pechenik: Like how does the kind of market evolve in that way when there's all these like separate ownership rights that kind of lock people out of using something without like having to transact with a whole bunch of different, potential patent owners. And then when you going back to the earlier question about like, how does somebody who has a patent sue to enforce. One of the other things I think that was in, I don't know if it was in the Psychedelic Alpha newsletter recently was just the number of companies that are kind of running out of runway and potentially if they're running out of funding, may see themselves need to sell some of their assets or might go bankrupt and have their assets purchased. Among those assets often are gonna be patent applications.

0:48:11.6 Graham Pechenik: And if those patent applications ever mature to granted patents, there's a whole ecosystem of entities which people call patent trolls that basically their business model is sort of just kind of rent seeking holdup, I'm using them to extract settlement fees from people, extracting small payments from people who might be practicing them. And so, you get a number of these patent applications on methods of performing certain types of protocols or using certain types of psychedelics in certain ways. You know that can really put a damper on the development of markets in the future, whether they're medicalized markets or whether they're state legal markets or even in decriminalized settings that is possibility for...

0:49:05.6 Paul Austin: Why is that, why might it put a damper on it?

0:49:08.6 Graham Pechenik: Just because both the chilling effect of having these granted claims out there. But also if somebody starts an enforcement campaign like the, say the guy that owns a DMT vape pen patent there's people I know, who are... Or places I know that are selling them or people who are doing underground therapy using vape pens. Certainly they would be potentially a target for one of these lawsuits. And there has been an issues with lawsuits in other spaces. For instance, I think even Oregon and Washington passed laws to make it much harder to be patent trolls because patent trolls there were suing even like mom-and-pop shops, like small grocery stores and other things for the way they use like barcode readers or like printers software and all sorts of things just because it's pretty easy to sue and it cost quite little to send these cease and desist letters and you can just ask for $10,000, $20,000 in settlement, which you know might be less than even hiring a patent lawyer to defend you even to read the letter you got sent.

0:50:27.8 Graham Pechenik: This happens, I don't know if you've ever seen one from like a copyright troll, but I've seen lots of people get... For having a blog or just having a website, get a letter from, there's some of these copyright trolls. There is just one in Higbee that loves to send these letters. And they just ask for like $500 or a $1000, just to kind of make the case go away. And so, you can imagine there's some of these granted patents on methods of using psilocybin and you're a facilitator or a service center and you get some of these in your like that's not a future to look forward to, I guess.

0:51:05.9 Paul Austin: I mean, how do... Okay. So this kind of brings a full circle then we're talking about the Stamets Stack we're talking about COMPASS Pathway, MAPS, how do we protect against that? So in terms of the Psychedelic space, the Psychedelic industry specifically. We talked a little bit about sort of would Stamets actually go after folks like this, probably not, would COMPASS pathways, we don't know, but how do we sort of protect against that rent seeking behavior specific to the Psychedelic space? What are different steps that could be taken or awareness, sort of an awareness that can be brought about? I'm just I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that.

0:51:44.7 Graham Pechenik: Yeah, no, there's a number of different ways and a lot of these issues, especially around trolls, have been problems that the software industry in particular has faced for decades. I don't know if you're familiar with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the EFF, but they put out, many years ago now a kind of guidebook for ways that you can basically like encumber patent applications to make them much more difficult to be used by Trolls. And many of the bigger software companies have, for instance joined something called the License on Transfer Network where they agree within themselves that should a patent troll ever get ahold of one of their applications, then they all automatically get a springing license to it.

0:52:33.6 Graham Pechenik: So you can imagine, now there's a company that has or there's numerous companies that have applications on different protocols for delivering psychedelic therapy or different psychedelic compounds, and they wanna be able to share those with each other, but they're concerned that somebody outside of that group particularly like a patent troll, might get their hands on one of them and then use them to sue the others so they can then have something similar to this where they agree to have a system where they all get a license to whatever application gets transferred to somebody. And they can define who that somebody is in a way to make it so it's just somebody like a patent troll who might try to buy it out of a bankruptcy sale or a proceeding or something.

0:53:22.5 Graham Pechenik: One other thing that some companies have done and Journey Colab just created a patent pledge like this is you can encumber your own patents or your own patent applications, for instance, with a binding pledge that says that not only are you not gonna do certain a behavior yourself but anybody who's a later, acquirer of your applications who ends up owning your applications or your patents later would've to be bound by these same commitments. So for instance, I don't know that Paul Stamets' patents as an example or COMPASS'S patent as an example, but something like that. Like they say, "Well, we're not gonna do this." And then you can have faith that, they're gonna be a good doctor and they're not going to participate in that kind of behavior.

0:54:13.4 Graham Pechenik: But if for instance, their patents end up in the hands of somebody who does, and you know this... Like I said, really is a whole ecosystem of patent trolls. I mean, there's publicly traded companies who basically are patent trolls and who look to acquire patents that they think have value in enforcement and that will become rent seeking extractive enforcement. So you can write a pledge for your own patents to say this patent can never be used in this way, not only by me, but by anybody else who gets it later. Maybe that'll reduce the value of it in bankruptcy because the patent troll is not gonna be interested in buying it at that point. But they could be...

0:54:49.6 Paul Austin: How many companies have done that in the space? Is Journey Colab the only one that has protected it in that way?

0:54:54.3 Graham Pechenik: They may be the only one that has been public. I know MimOSA. Has talked about ones they have, but I don't think any of their applications have been published.

0:55:00.9 Paul Austin: So Elon Musk from what I understand through Tesla had a patent on the battery for the electric car. He has now made that patent open source so that anyone who wants access to that data, that intel, that technology can utilize it. And his rationale for that is he cares a lot more about the adoption of renewable energy than he does about protecting a single patent. And my point in the patent space when it comes to psychedelics is who is gonna step up and do something similar where there may be an initial protection that's put in, but then after a certain period of time that is totally open source available for anyone? Because the adoption of psychedelic medicine broadly is more important than the sort of protection of that technology for 20 years or 30 years.

0:56:06.0 Paul Austin: I guess as I'm talking through this, the MAPS, because I think MAPS is something like the applicability or the combination of MDMA for PTSD that will be protected for five years, once it comes to market, and then I think it'll be open source and anyone can have access to it. It seems like the closest thing. Are there any other patents, is Journey Colab close to that? Are there any sort of parallels in the psychedelic space of people who are really looking at the bigger picture rather than just, I got to protect my company's IP and I'll do that for the rest of the company's existence. Any sort of intel or insight into that?

0:56:44.8 Graham Pechenik: You know, this is a good opportunity to use your platform to convince people to do something like that because I think companies especially now given the climate and difficulties fundraising, but just in general, I think because the space has been so nascent and nobody has really reached the stage of having kind of revenues to be sustaining. It's a complicated space to sort of give away potential future revenues or potential ownership in something without a real commitment to the kind of broader causes that it stands for. The broader kind of public benefit behind that.

0:57:26.3 Graham Pechenik: And certainly companies have not necessarily through patents made commitments to things that weren't purely self-serving. There's, I think, numerous examples of companies that have, depending on how they characterize it, sort of like reciprocity pledges or reciprocity funds or both... Some of the companies and some of the investors as well. But I think the difference between, especially the drug development space and something like Tesla is, Tesla really benefits by the infrastructure being set out so that not just... Not just Tesla's, but having every car be able to plug in and be able to drive from Oregon down to San Diego without having however many miles where you can't really get a charging station. Being able to increase the number of electric cars on the road in general makes Tesla's business that much better.

0:58:33.1 Graham Pechenik: I think there's maybe a parallel argument I don't know. I haven't thought it all the way out to the end, but obviously the infrastructure for psychedelic therapy would benefit everybody who's bringing psychedelic drugs through market or seeking to participate in a future use market. The bottleneck, I think is most people see is in the number of trained therapists or facilitators, the number of just places to have psychedelic therapy. People are talking about real estate and all that is gonna be a benefit to everyone in the ecosystem. And maybe it's easier to have that be something that's more of a commons or more shared than having each company have their own service center that only their drugs or their trained therapists can use and nobody else.

0:59:33.4 Graham Pechenik: So potentially there's some incentives to find new ways of working around it. But certainly was just like drug discovery itself, I mean, giving away the part of your monopoly for a new drug seems it's... It certainly would be an altruistic move, I guess. But, I got the start of my patent career working for branded pharma doing patent litigation and people would fight to the death almost for an extra day, an extra week, an extra month of patent term. 'Cause companies are making in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars a month even. So, every day of patent term was huge huge amount towards shareholders and investors. And so, it's a pretty big step towards benefit sharing or reciprocity if you're giving that up and you're...

1:00:27.4 Paul Austin: Absolutely, and the parallel is renewables is a totally new paradigm compared to oil, gas, fossil fuels. It's looking at something that is, well renewable, not extractive. It's looking at something that the "carbon footprint" of it is much cleaner than maybe oil and gas. And the opportunity in the psychedelic space is similar. It's a totally new paradigm of care is what we're looking at. Where the emphasis is on the service, the emphasis is on the community, the emphasis is on the caring on the addressing the core issue, rather than the more for-profit pharmaceutical approach of take a pill for the next 20 years or 30 years. We're moving from like a very biological to a much more, my hope is spiritual lens on healing.

1:01:24.8 Paul Austin: And so, and whenever a new paradigm is being created, there's so much inertia that needs to be generated to really get that up and going. And thankfully, and this again is just my lens, Elon, because of his buyout that he had with PayPal and then some level of success with Space X, has been able to take on some of that in the short term. And of course it's paid off wonderfully well, I mean, he is the wealthiest man in the world now, and that would be awesome to see something similar happen in the psychedelic space where we have an owner or a founder who maybe is already very wealthy and sees the benefit of this at large. I just haven't seen any... I think the closest parallel is a Usona or MAPS being nonprofits in the space.

1:02:11.0 Paul Austin: Bill Linton maybe is the best parallel 'cause Bill has become quite wealthy through the other company that he started that has funded a lot of Usona. I just, there isn't much that we hear about Usona these days, frankly, I don't really know where they're at in Phase II or Phase III trials when it comes to psilocybin. Okay. Final question, Graham, just 'cause we're nearing the end of our time together, and usually I start with this question, but there was just so much juicy stuff I wanted to dive into today. And this is really the first time we've talked about patents. Why is it that you became a patent attorney in the psychedelic space? What is it that inspired you to go from the career that you were in previously to really becoming more or less the most prominent lawyer in patents in the psychedelic space?

1:03:00.1 Graham Pechenik: Well yeah, first thing, thank you again for that. But I think, for me it was just I had an interest in psychedelics that went back to when I was in college. My science background itself, actually, I chose my science majors after my first psychedelic experiences and thought in college that maybe I would study psycho-pharmacology or have some career doing some form of research relating to psychedelics. And so I had continued to follow the science and follow an interest in it since then. And when I went to law school, didn't think I would do anything in patent law, actually, I thought at the time after realizing not really getting any encouragement that there would be some career doing science related to psychedelics that maybe there'd be something in either drug policy or cognitive liberty.

1:03:57.6 Graham Pechenik: But having gone to law school in New York and not had scholarships and then seeing really the only way of paying those debts back was by going to a big law firm, realized that it was fairly easy, I suppose to capitalize on my science background by doing work for pharmaceutical companies. So maybe there was an irony 'cause I actually wrote my law school thesis paper on how pharmaceutical companies kind of abused the patent system to keep generics stuff on the market and keep their prices up.

1:04:33.0 Paul Austin: Interesting.

1:04:34.3 Graham Pechenik: Then immediately went to go and work for a firm where we were basically doing exactly that. So, to some degree I like to think I'm working off some of that karma now or these getting a little bit more closely aligned with both my more ethical interests and my interests in psychedelics. But yeah, I guess, once I had paid off those loans and once I had to some degree realized that I was just no longer interested in pursuing a, I guess I kind of, career at a big law firm where I was before. I was at a thousand lawyer plus law firms working on cases in a way that just wasn't giving me the satisfaction that at least the effort I was putting in I felt I deserved. And so...

1:05:31.7 Paul Austin: When did you make the leap? At what point did you go from doing that to doing this? Was this 2018 or 2019 or when did it become worth it?

1:05:40.6 Graham Pechenik: Yeah. Well, on 2015, cannabis was on about for adult use in California and I had a number of friends who were trying to think about starting cannabis businesses or had, like, legacy businesses that they were seeing, how could they bring them above board as businesses under the new regulatory scheme that would come out of that. And went to a number of like cannabis business conferences, and I had already left my previous law firm and I was doing some prosecution work, primarily trying to find a way of doing something very different from what I was doing before, which was working on these cases for oftentimes in a fairly anonymous way, we were dealing with inventors. I mean, sometimes we would be working with inventors who hadn't even remembered that they had been the named inventor on a particular patent and didn't weren't really that invested in the work of the patent.

1:06:47.7 Graham Pechenik: And so I had decided to work specifically with some smaller inventors and some smaller companies and then saw that cannabis was actually gonna be a really interesting space to work in both because I had also spent a lot of time besides just working for branded pharma, litigating against a lot of big patent monopolists, so Monsanto and Apple and Microsoft. And a lot of the conversation around patents to the extent there were conversations around patents in that really transition from cannabis going to adult use were around was just gonna open up the market for like big tobacco or big Ag or big patent monopolist to come in amd like buy up to generics or buy up all the extraction technology or file patents on all of it and push out the people who had been in the space for the longest and who are trying to start businesses.

1:07:45.5 Graham Pechenik: And so I saw that there was an opportunity to use patents both to work with the smaller entrepreneurs who maybe wanted to file applications on their own extraction technology or their own work they were doing. And also in a way to try to prevent those big monopolist from destroying the ecosystem or at least reducing the broader diversity of the ecosystem by owning all of the patent rights on something. And so...

1:08:22.2 Paul Austin: This is in the cannabis space?

1:08:23.2 Graham Pechenik: That was in the cannabis space? Yeah. So that was a long windup but in 2018 right when I started, as I mentioned at the very beginning just to tie it back up those psilocybin patent applications, Paul Stamets and others, I saw that there was gonna be something somewhat similar in the psychedelic space. And actually I was volunteering at a MAPS info table in 2018, I think I know, kind of fall of 2018 after an article had come out by Olivia Goldhill, one of the first articles on COMPASS' patent applications before any had even published talking about Millionaire Magic mushroom monopoly or something very alliterative. And for this weekend, I was volunteering at this info table, a lot of people had read the article and were asking me, you mentioned I was a patent lawyer but like, well, how are people gonna be filing patents on psilocybin and what would happen if somebody owned psilocybin?

1:09:22.9 Graham Pechenik: And what would this mean for the chances for psilocybin therapy to appear in state markets or does this mean it's all gonna be medicalized and only through FDA? And so I started thinking about those questions at that point and realized that the same things that drove me into starting work with cannabis, thinking from both directions of is it possible to file patent applications but also be wary of the controversies around the possibilities of monopoly and thinking about how there's obviously a tension in both being critical of patents but also in filing patents. Like is there a way to balance that tension in a psychedelic space but be able to do work within it too? And so that I guess is what first precipitated seeing that there was work in the psychedelic space and then that just evolved naturally into... Spending more time in conversation, I guess, around, this tension and those controversies and then trying to find work that was able to balance those tensions in my own work, but stay as part of the conversation.

1:10:42.9 Paul Austin: Well, and it's one of the hottest topics because there are... The movement itself has been so grassroots and when people hear patent there's this allergic, "Ugh, you know, I can't believe it." And yet, once you actually start to dig deeper into the nuance, which you've done a great job of providing nuance for Shayla Love has and even Josh Hardman at Psychedelic Alpha, there have been a few others, there's always a lot of gray, right? There's always a lot of nuance, the pros and cons to the cost and benefit. I'm glad we talked about these three core examples today, Stamets, COMPASS and MAPS, 'cause those are all three different examples of how it's happening. The anti-patent strategy, the polymorph, and then the combination and it's like even I... Another parallel it's coming up, it's like corporate science, so to say, or science in general is often influenced by the people who are actually carrying out the research.

1:11:38.2 Paul Austin: As much as we don't want that to be true. And I think patents from what I'm hearing it's similar. The Stamets is behind it compared to George and Ekate at COMPASS compared to Rick in MAPS, that energy also influences potential of the enforcement policies or even Journey Colab whether or not a patent troll can take over it. So even just covering some of these overall items there's probably gonna be a lot of listeners like myself who now have more questions than answers 'Cause this has opened up a lot. And we will have folks WHO do wanna dive deeper into some of these patent questions. We will have some show notes, we'll point to Shayla Love's article in Vice, she also just published one in Lucid News that we will point to, we can point to the Stamets.

1:12:21.7 Paul Austin: But in overall this has been a really good introduction, Graham and as questions start to roll in and even as this is going to be an ever-evolving conversation in the psychedelic space. I would love to have you on again at some point down the line just to further elucidate what's happening and how is it relevant and why is it relevant. I mean, we haven't even reached a point where any of these have become FDA approved yet. And so it'd be really interesting to have this conversation two years from now after potentially MAPS and COMPASS have gotten through and see what is enforcement policy, what's actually happening, how are people going after this, etcetera, etcetera.

1:12:58.3 Graham Pechenik: Yeah. Well thank you so much for inviting me here and I'm glad we got to scratch the surface a little bit and always happy to dig deeper. So yeah, be delighted to come back on again.

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