Name: The Race to Commercialize the World’s Most Powerful Psychedelic
Uploaded: 2026-07-14T19:00:00Z
Duration: 15 min 9 s
Description: An obscure psychedelic is drawing intense interest from the pharmaceutical industry. WSJ explores why companies are betting hundreds of millions of dollars on the therapeutic potential of a toad poison.

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An obscure psychedelic is drawing intense interest from the pharmaceutical industry. WSJ explores why companies are betting hundreds of millions of dollars on the therapeutic potential of a toad poison. Photo: Alexander Hotz

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260714/f24e9b22-38d3-4bfc-b80a-3b5f73423e0c/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

An obscure psychedelic is drawing intense interest from the pharmaceutical industry. WSJ explores why companies are betting hundreds of millions of dollars on the therapeutic potential of a toad poison.

The Race to Commercialize the World’s Most Powerful Psychedelic

5-meo-dmt is probably the most potent, bizarre, and profound psychedelic out there.

Within seconds, you have an altered state of consciousness. It feels like your ego disappears.

From all the different psychedelics, I think 5-meo is the most promising because it helps people address deep-seated issues like depression, anxiety. This is above and beyond more effective than traditional SSRIs. Hoo. I used to wake up in the morning and like not want to be here. Now it's no longer the case. I like to think that if I would've found the medicine 10 years ago that I probably would've saved myself and my family a lot of pain and grief.

Putting it within a medical model, allowing for reimbursement, allowing for insurance coverage, you're looking at somewhere around three million, maybe five million patients.

What do you think that the sort of market would be for a drug like 5-meo-dmt if your version was was approved?

Several billion dollars.

Why are psychedelic therapies and support for research around psychedelic therapies a priority for this department?

One of the arguments is kind of what's the alternative. You know, a lot of people are out of options. And if a drug is shown to be efficacious or has a chance of working, why wouldn't you want that to be available?

And on your next exhale, dropping your attention into your body. Taking a moment to notice your breathing and simply whatever else is present with you physically, cognitively, emotionally.

Every week, a new batch of veterans arrives at The Mission Within, a clinic that specializes in psychedelic therapies. They come here as a last resort after conventional mental health treatments haven't worked.

And take another two breaths, and then when you feel ready, you can bring your attention back to the room.

Today, a group is preparing to take one of the most powerful psychedelics in the world.

All right, fellas. So we'll talk a little bit about tomorrow's medicine, 5-meo-dmt, often known as bufo, poison secreted from the back of the Colorado River toad or Sonoran Desert toad. And this is what the medicine looks like. It's weighed out by dose in these little vials and they screw into this pipe.

5-meo-dmt is illegal in the US, but here in Mexico where it's still unregulated, clinics like The Mission Within are using it to treat veterans with severe mental health disorders like depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Visits can cost thousands of dollars and need to be booked far in advance. The wait list is currently six months long. What led you to seek out 5-meo-dmt?

I've tried the traditional route. I've done talk therapy, multiple SSRIs, SNRIs, and I felt like with those, the efficacy only lasted so long. The depression that came along with that started to resurface over time.

I tried the VA, tried talk therapy, I tried AA, I tried the gym, I tried all the things. I remember even then I would like be in the shower and I was like, dude, there's no way life can be this hard.

And so just through looking on veteran forums and talking to multiple veterans that I discovered the utilization of these alternative medicines and they were scary.

What was scary to you about it?

Well, watching videos on YouTube. It's some very intense experiences when people ingest the medicine. I couldn't see how that would serve me, but at the time I felt like I didn't have another choice.

I remember when I was coming down the stairs to be in this space with the medicine, I remember thinking, uh-oh, what am I getting myself into?

Can I say a little prayer for you?

Yes, please.

A 5-meo-dmt trip only lasts about 30 minutes.

Whoa.

But it can cause physical shaking, loud noises, and on rare occasions, prolonged dissociation. The Mission Within says that about 5% of its patients describe the experience as too intense. But on the other side, many also find both immediate and long-lasting relief.

I used to wake up in the morning and like not want to be here. Now it's no longer the case, you know? I might not be thrilled to roll out of bed every morning, but I like know the point now, you know, and like I'm in life again, I'm living life and I love it.

The change, how quickly the change happened, and the relief that was almost instantaneous after partaking in the medicine have lasted until today. That was 15 months ago when I had my first 5-meo-dmt experience.

So this is like maintenance or it's like a reset to get you back to where you were 15 months ago.

The healing journey that I'm on, it's not gonna be over anytime soon. But utilizing this has been a significant step change for me. I think the best way for me to describe my first 5-meo-dmt experience was when I walked away from it, it was like I had had many years of therapy just in a weekend.

People have been getting high off 5-meo-dmt since at least the early 1980s when a man named Ken Nelson wrote about his experience extracting the toad poison and then smoking it. In the decades since, the drug has become a trope in popular culture. Ever seen someone licking a toad and then losing their mind? That's 5-meo-dmt. But the obscure psychedelic is also captivating scientists who are finding that it offers far more than just a crazy trip. What is this, DM, what's written here?

So this is one, two, three, four, five methoxy, DMT, which is dimethyl. And this is tryptamine.

Dr. David Lankari is a psychedelic researcher at Columbia who spent the past five years studying 5-meo-dmt.

5-meo-dmt is probably the most potent, bizarre, and profound psychedelic out there. It's very short, but it's very, very profound. It completely deconstruct your reality.

Dr. Lankari makes analogs of the drug in his lab at Columbia and then runs tests to better understand how it works. He knows that it triggers two different serotonin receptors in the brain. Are there other drugs that activate 5-HT1A receptors?

Yes, many drugs. Vilazodone, buspirone, all these commercial drugs activates 5-HT1A and they are used to create depression and anxiety and other psychedelic drugs. LSD, for example, also activate 5-HT1A. Why are they different? We don't really know. It's just probably the right proportion or the right potency of how it activates.

Dr. Lankari and his team have shown that 5-meo-dmt helps treat depression in mice even when you remove its psychedelic effect. But he suspects that the psychedelic component plays a role in the drug's therapeutic qualities, and he knows that we're still only just scratching the surface. What do you hope to learn about 5-meo-dmt as we continue to study it?

I think that 5-meo-dmt can teach us a lot about how the brain works and what causes depression, what these kind of drugs can do and how to improve them to be more accessible to treat these kind of problems. I'm not saying it's a silver bullet or anything like this, but it is helpful, it helps people. And it's much faster and much more effective than taking a pill every day.

That sentiment is shared by many others, and not just researchers like Dr. Lankari. The medical promise of 5-meo-dmt has also captured the attention of the pharmaceutical industry, where the market for psychedelic therapies is projected to reach $10 billion by 2034. Today, a growing pool of biotech companies are racing to turn 5-meo-dmt into a commercially available medicine. Is this a Burning Man?

This is a Burning Man. This is a Burning Man. This is in 2019, and I think I may be one of the few people that was actually able to expense Burning Man as a business expense.

Srinivas Rao is the co-founder and CEO of AtaiBeckley, a publicly traded biotech company that's trying to bring psychedelic therapies to market. AtaiBeckley's leading candidate is a synthesized version of 5-meo-dmt.

Most antidepressants, you get a pill and, you know, get a bottle and you go home and you take it every day. That's basically how it's been for a very long time. The problem has been that people get side effects immediately. They don't get benefit immediately, and many of them don't get benefit at all. The big benefit with the psychedelics, you got rapid onset and you got durability.

At least three other companies are working on their own versions of 5-meo-dmt. AtaiBeckley's main competitor, GH Research, has two different analogs that are currently in clinical trials. And biotech giant AbbVie recently acquired another compound in a deal that could eventually top $1 billion. But AtaiBeckley's is the only one that's been granted breakthrough designation by the FDA, which means the government wants to help speed up its development and review process.

It's been very positive. We raised about just under $300 million last year for continuing development of our program.

What do you think that the sort of market would be for a drug like 5-meo-dmt if your version was approved?

I mean, so the analysts that follow us do put out estimates and it's all several billion dollars.

Spravato, Johnson & Johnson's ketamine-derived nasal spray has already proven the concept. The first and still only commercially available psychedelic therapy is being administered under supervision at clinical sites throughout the country, and it's ballooned into a nearly $2 billion blockbuster drug.

The psychedelics, they will be kind of like Spravato. You go in, you get dosed, get monitored for two hours, you get discharged, but instead of coming in every week, you're coming in every two months, three months. The paradigm of going to the doctor's office was established by Spravato, and that's what we're gonna be leveraging.

The race to commercialize 5-meo-dmt is part of a much broader effort to turn all kinds of psychedelics into federally approved mental health treatments. Today, there are dozens of psychedelic therapies in mid to late stage clinical development. And it's no longer just the private sector that's rooting them on.

All right, so here's where the magic happens. This is certainly not a job that I thought I was gonna have a few years ago.

Matt Zorn spent years challenging the federal government's choke hold on schedule I drugs. Now he's on the other side, working within the administration to help speed up research.

I think that we have a mental health issue where, you know, I'm not gonna sort of disparage the current treatment. It's just as a factual matter. They just don't reach everyone. They're not efficacious for everyone. A lot of people just don't have alternatives. And if a drug is shown to be efficacious or has a chance of working, like, why wouldn't you want that to be available?

Zorn's boss, Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., has gone even further.

This line of therapeutics has tremendous advantage if given in a clinical setting. And we are working very hard to make sure that that happens within 12 months.

In April, President Trump signed an executive order to expand access and research into psychedelic therapies. It was written by Zorn.

Mr. President, I want to thank Matt Zorn, who's hiding in the back there, who actually on Sunday wrote a draft for this.

Why are psychedelic therapies and support for research around psychedelic therapies a priority for this department?

You know, there are medicines that are approved that are incremental in improvements, but there hasn't kind of been a paradigm shift that's really been transformative. And I think the hope and what preliminary evidence is suggesting is that these medicines are more than just a marginal improvement.

It seems to me like in a few years, it's not unreasonable to think that some of these will be available to people who've been seeking them out in like the gray market, going down to Mexico to seek them out for a long time now.

5-meo is a, it's a promising compound that, you know, potentially can have negative, you know, adverse events, negative experiences, like everybody knows about so-called bad trips. So this is across the board, even with the current compounds. I mean, I think that the evidence is like sufficient for approval, but it's like, how do these things perform out in the wild is gonna be like a super important thing for us to understand.

Since Trump took office last year, biotech startups developing psychedelic therapies have seen their stock prices surge. AtaiBeckley's is up by about 250%.

We just want to get these drugs to as many people as possible and help as many people as possible. And that really does require this more medical approach. That is how you get scalability. That is how you get it to as many people as you can.

AtaiBeckley recently initiated the phase III program for its version of 5-meo-dmt, One of the most critical steps before a new medical treatment could be approved for public use. Barring a major setback, AtaiBeckley's drug could hit the market in as little as four or five years. Until then, international clinics like The Mission Within will remain the only legal route. A few hours after their treatment, the veterans gathered at the beach to reflect on their experience.

How you feeling, man?

Incredible.

And to be clear, you're not on 5-meo-dmt right now.

This is me all natty, baby. Yeah, this is, yeah, this is me not on the 5-meo-dmt at all whatsoever.

Since I got out of the room, I've been, you know, deeply contemplative, but also just kind of full of joy.

I feel like you had a really clear sense of what you were hoping to get out of this. Are you where you were hoping to be?

Absolutely. It was very cathartic. And I felt that it was a rebirth of sorts.

This is like the last door that I knocked on, you know? Like, I know it works.