The FDI angle:  

• As one of the only countries to not outlaw magic mushrooms, Jamaica is trying to develop its nascent, yet uncertain psychedelic industry.
• Foreign companies have flocked to the island to set up mycology labs and resorts offering psilocybin-assisted treatments, attracting thousands of high-paying tourists to Jamaica.
• However, as the largely unregulated industry develops there are concerns about safety of patients, testing of products and whether it will benefit local Jamaicans.

In early 2020, Jamaican physician Dingle Spence was approached by a paediatrician who works with bereaved parents. At first she hesitated. As a specialist in clinical oncology, she had little experience treating parents grieving for a lost child.

After further discussion, the paediatrician cut to the chase: “I’m just going to say two words to you, and if they resonate, we can keep talking. Magic mushrooms.”

The unusual proposal came from Chris Adrian, a paediatric palliative care doctor from Los Angeles, who was hoping to use Jamaica as a base to conduct a psychedelic-assisted bereavement support group. As one of only a few countries that do not prohibit cultivation or consumption of psilocybin mushrooms, Jamaica aims to establish itself as a leader in the emerging, yet uncertain, natural psychedelics industry.

A number of resorts have been set up in recent years offering therapy assisted by psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in ‘magic mushrooms’, expanding the tourism offering on a Caribbean tropical island renowned for its reggae and dancehall music, sports stars like Usain Bolt and sandy beaches.

These retreats claim to offer ‘mystical’ experiences with medically trained ‘facilitators’, aimed at helping people with psychiatric disorders like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Research has shown that psilocybin and other psychedelics like LSD can be effective in alleviating treatment-resistant disorders, but both medical and recreational use remains illegal in most countries.

Jamaica’s government is keen to promote private investment into its booming psychedelic mushroom industry. But there are concerns about the still largely unregulated industry in the conservative, mainly Christian country. Those involved in the industry tell fDi that they worry about the safety of patients, testing of psilocybin-based products and that local Jamaicans may not benefit from its potential economic and health benefits.

Sprouting mushrooms

Dr Spence, who serves as director of the non-profit Jamaica Cancer Care and Research Institute (Jaccri), is now fully trained as a psychedelic facilitator working with a number of retreats. Since March 2022 she has hosted three groups at Jamaica Grief Retreats (JGR), which combine bereavement support activities with two psilocybin ceremonies for parents who have lost a child to sudden death, such as suicide, car accidents and overdoses. 

“People are coming because they’re dealing with complex, prolonged, complicated grief,” says Dr Spence. “We’ve really had a lot of success in helping people shift [their thinking and emotions].”

JGR is hosted at the Good Hope estate, a 2000-acre former sugar plantation in the hills of Trelawney that used slave labour during British colonial rule. Situated about 45 minutes from Jamaica’s tourism capital Montego Bay, the estate is also rented by Beckley Retreats, which is set to host a total of 18 psilocybin retreats there in 2023.

Beckley, which raised $1.5m in October 2022 to run retreats in Jamaica and the Netherlands, was co-founded by Amanda Fielding, a long-time advocate for psychedelic research and drug policy reform, and Neil Markey, a US army veteran who has used mindfulness and psychedelics to help treat his depression and PTSD. “There’s this timely opportunity for Jamaica to position themselves as a real standard bearer for this work,” says Mr Markey.

We’ve seen unbelievable growth and are booked out months and months in advance

Justin Townsend

Retreats offering psilocybin-assisted therapy in Jamaica, most of which are foreign-owned, have been growing in popularity. “We’ve seen unbelievable growth and are booked out months and months in advance,” says Justin Townsend, a former venture capitalist who in 2017 became CEO of MycoMeditations, a retreat in Treasure Beach on Jamaica’s south coast. 

He notes that when MycoMeditations first started in 2014, it was a “wild wild west”, where retreats were more focused on recreational psilocybin use without any therapy. Today, MycoMeditations has a “very detailed” pre-screening process, which excludes about 30% of applicants, for its week-long programme with three psilocybin-assisted group therapy sessions. 

The retreat, which has been attended by more than 2000 people aged anywhere from their early 20s to late 80s, is followed by five surveys assessing the impact on guests’ mental health in the year after they leave. MycoMeditations expects to host at least 40 retreats in 2023.

Aside from addressing mental health disorders, many retreat experiences are also geared towards ‘wellness’ and ‘personal growth’. High-net-worth individuals including Silicon Valley executives, have flocked to Jamaica, willing to pay anywhere from $5000 to $23,000 to experience psilocybin ceremonies claiming to offer the “potential to inspire deep personal transformation”.

Industrial-scale cultivators, including Canada’s Rose Hill, have also established operations in Jamaica to supply psilocybin mushrooms to the local retreats and export to research institutions in the US and Canada. 

“The Jamaican government is extremely supportive of the psychedelics industry,” says Tim Moore, CEO of Havn Life, which began operating a mycology lab in Jamaican capital Kingston in May 2021. 

Despite facing some infrastructure and logistics challenges in setting up in Jamaica, including customs processes slowing down the importing of equipment, Mr Moore believes the supportive environment means the island nation has positioned itself “to be a leader in psychedelic-assisted therapy”. 

Beyond the hype 

Locally grown magic mushrooms have been sold to tourists in Jamaica, alongside marijuana, known locally as ‘ganja’, since the 1960s. In Negril, a town with miles of sandy beaches popular with music stars ranging from Bob Dylan to the Rolling Stones, cups of magic mushroom-infused tea have long been sold for recreational use.

In recent years, the formalisation of psychedelic experiences and treatment have been coupled with an openness from the Jamaican government. In July 2021, interim protocols were put in place to allow legal cultivation and processing of psilocybin-containing mushrooms. 

A technical industry committee, headed by senator Saphire Longmore, a trained psychiatrist, has been brought together to implement standards for the growing, processing and selling of psilocybin-containing products.

Aubyn Hill, Jamaica’s minister of industry, investment and commerce, told fDi in an interview in Montego Bay that he is “keenly interested” to develop the mushroom industry. But he wants to ensure it is “framed properly” and that Jamaica avoids issues it faced with the cannabis industry, where companies have complained about slow licensing processes.

“We want to make sure we understand what’s going on and how it can help the economy and those people who need help,” Mr Hill says. The global psychedelics market is estimated to be worth $6.4bn by 2029, almost three times its value in 2021, according to Data Bridge Market Research. Venture capital (VC) funding to psychedelic-related start-ups peaked at more than $236m in the 12 months to July 2022, an increase of $96m on the same period of the previous year, according to Crunchbase data.

Mr Townsend of MycoMeditations, which has self-funded its growth, cautions against the use of VC, citing the collapse of several psychedelic retreat companies, including Canada’s Field Trip Health and US-based Synthesis. He says that the psychedelic industry is now “out of the hype phase into the criticism phase”, noting that there has been a lot of consolidation in the past few months.

Learning the lessons from cannabis

Jamaica has a cultural history with cannabis, due in large part to its popular use by religious groups like Rastafarians. About 18% of Jamaicans reported having consumed cannabis at least once in 2016, a figure that rises to 28.5% for men, according to the UN’s World Drug Report. This is far higher than the estimated 2.5% of the global population that consume cannabis.

Despite the government decriminalising cannabis in 2015 and establishing a medicinal market, investors say that Jamaica missed an opportunity to develop its local adult consumption market.

“A lot of people think Jamaica is very open for cannabis. But Jamaica actually sat on its hands for a while,” says Dustin Robinson, a lawyer who advises cannabis businesses and runs Iter Investments, a venture capital fund investing across the psychedelic industry, including in Beckley Retreats.

Now, the hope is that Jamaica can get ahead of other countries and set legal standards for the psilocybin industry. Mr Robinson says that unlike cannabis, which is grown on large-scale farms, there is less economic opportunity in the cultivation of psilocybin, because it can easily be grown in small spaces and people tend to only take small amounts, a few times.

Instead, he says that there is an opportunity in research and development (R&D), since it is much cheaper to do research into psilocybin products in Jamaica than the US, where it is still classified as a schedule 1 narcotic. Foreign investment into higher-value-added activities like R&D can bring a host of benefits, including the transfer of knowledge, technology and best practices to local Jamaican talent and companies.

Other economic opportunities include income from retreats and the attraction of foreign academics and medical professionals wanting to legally research and train as psychedelic facilitators in Jamaica.

“We’re now training people internationally,” says Ben Graeme, the CEO of local mycology lab Hypha Wellness, who is involved in Jaccri and the committee trying to standardise the industry. He adds that Jamaica could generate an even greater opportunity by setting up an official medical register for psilocybin and other natural-based compounds.

He notes that while the large number of Jamaica’s ministries, including tourism, agriculture and industry, are “not all necessarily in lockstep together” they are leaning into and trying to support the psychedelic industry in “quite a positive way”.

Local safety concerns

Winston De La Haye, a consultant psychiatrist at the University Hospital of the West Indies, has been conducting research into the use of psychedelics. He has already administered psilocybin treatments to more than 100 patients at his private clinic in Kingston.

Dr De La Haye, who is also the chairman of the Caribbean Psychedelic Association, says that psilocybin is “not a silver bullet” for all mental disorders. He cautions about the risk of adverse effects like anxiety from higher dosages and the need to follow “clear exclusion criteria”, including for patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

“We have to be serious about safety,” he says, underlining the need to test psilocybin products before giving them to patients. He adds that safety is the primary aim of the Jamaican government’s technical industry committee working to set standards.

Dr De La Haye believes that Jamaica's “niche in the scientific, psychedelic world” is to help conduct clinical trials, which could contribute to psychedelic products becoming approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In June 2023, the FDA published its first draft guidance on designing clinical trials for psychedelic drugs. 

“Whether it’s a shaman or herbalist, without appropriately run clinical trials, you’re not going to have an FDA-approved product to be used and benefit all persons,” he says.

While there is a wide-scale adoption of plant-based medicine in Jamaica, those speaking to fDi say there is no culture around Jamaicans using mushrooms, especially given the “deep religiosity of society” with the majority of Jamaicans being Christians and the island having one of the largest number of churches per square mile anywhere in the world.

But for psychedelic advocates, psilocybin-based treatments could be a viable alternative to help address Jamaica's relatively high levels of mental health issues. The Jamaica Health and Lifestyle survey in 2016-17 found that 14.3% of Jamaicans suffered from depression, far higher than the World Health Organisation’s global estimates of 5% of adults.

Lack of accessibility

Another major concern is a lack of access to psychedelics and job opportunities for local Jamaicans. Mr Graeme of Hypha Wellness tells fDi that he is concerned that some retreats are making lots of money without passing on benefits to local people.

I want wealthy people to come to Jamaica for treatment ... but I don’t like seeing the majority of the companies just treating people that can afford it

Ben Graeme

“I want wealthy people to come to Jamaica for treatment. It is a great market. But I don’t like seeing the majority of the companies just treating people that can afford it,” he says. 

Some local tourist operators argue that the attraction of psychedelic companies to Jamaica has also been driven more by the legality of psilocybin, rather than any interest in Jamaican culture itself.

The retreats, like most in Jamaica, “were hosted at resorts and guest houses – not communities where Jamaicans themselves live”, writes Firstman, one of the founders of Rastafari Indigenous Village (RIV), a sustainable Rastafari community near Montego Bay where around 20 people live full-time. In recent years, RIV has begun to invite “a limited number of visitors” to ceremonies involving psilocybin.

The lack of accessibility is not news to some of the retreat operators. Beckley has issued 15 scholarships this year to people from marginalised communities, including Jamaican students, to experience their 11-week programme. Dr Spence, who runs much smaller retreats for Jamaicans, says there is a “recognition” about giving back to the community. 

But as the emerging psilocybin industry remains in its infancy, with decriminalisation efforts just taking shape in liberal US states like Oregon and Colorado, only time will tell if Jamaica could become a world leader, and if local people, rather than just retreat operators and high-paying tourists, will benefit. 

This article first appeared in the August/September issue of fDi Intelligence