The Electric Kool-Aid Currency Test
The CPI print for the last 12 months according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics was 2.6 percent. Yet, the price of commodities, stocks, bonds, cryptocoins, residential real estate, and virtually anything one actually buys in order to live is rising.
Created as a joke, goofing on Bitcoin, dogecoin has gone from .03 cents to 61 cents as I write up 109,007.44 percent. Available wherever crypto is sold. It’s enough to make you mad. Happily, there’s something for that. Last November Oregon joined Denver, Colorado in decriminalizing psychedelics. And you thought all the libertarians had moved to New Hampshire.
With cannabis spreading nationwide, legally, pot companies selling shares and state governments filling budget holes with stoners’ money, MindMed and Compass Pathways are the first psychedelics companies to be listed in the U.S. on the Nasdaq. According to Real Vision, “By 2027, it’s predicted that the [psychedelics] sector will reach a market cap of nearly $7 billion.
With apologies to the late Mickey Newberry, for those who “tripped on a cloud and fell-a eight miles high.” If you tore your mind on a jagged sky. You can now drop in to see what condition your condition is in. The sale of psychedelics has gone corporate. Big Pharma and the tax man eagerly wait.
We’re not talking Tom Wolf’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, chronicling the adventures of Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and his group of merry pranksters. No, here’s Steve Hawkins, President and CEO of Horizons ETFs in an interview with Real Vision’s Haley Draznin, “These things are all very different around the world, but they are all contributing factors to more mental illness around the world, more depression. We really, as a society, really need to make inroads into potential cures for that. That's where we really see the potential for psychedelics.” This January, Horizons launched the world's first psychedelics ETF in Canada
You see, instead of the bread and circuses of ancient Rome, we’re served up gluten-free muffins and constant stimuli. The result is a world-wide epidemic of depression, anxiety, addiction, and PTSD. Timothy Leary figured it out long ago. Famously saying, "Turn on, tune in, drop out." In a more thoughtful moment, he said, “We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.”
Well, now we’re going somewhere. MindMed and Compass Pathways are not penny stocks, trading for $3.41 and $34.66, respectively, as I write. The two companies each have impressive market caps around $1.2 billion. But, that’s nothing compared to dogecoin, again, made to have no redeeming value, which has a $75.8 billion market cap. According to Forbes, “At its current value, dogecoin is worth more than gaming company Nintendo, car maker Mitsubishi and bank Santander.”
Don’t feel snotty if you’re holding U.S. dollars instead. As Mark Turner the writer of The IKN Weekly explains, “the only real difference between a joke crypto currency connected with enigmatically smiling dogs and the most powerful currency on the planet is that the USD is backed up by laws and statutes, while Dogecoin doesn’t have an army of people with guns and bombs to insist it is real. Apart from that, same thing.”
Today’s merry pranksters, Jerome Powell and Janet Yellen, with their minions at Treasury and the Fed are simply expanding the money supply, not their consciousness. They have the guns and the numbers.
Professor Paul Cantor, in his seminal article “Hyperinflation and Hyperreality: Thomas Mann in Light of Austrian Economics” concludes, “Reading Mann's story ["Disorder and Early Sorrow"] can help remind us that it is not human life as such that is unreal — it is the money our governments have surreptitiously imposed upon us in an inflationary policy that has caused our sense of reality itself to attenuate in the twentieth century.”
P.S. The author has a micro dose position in Mind Med shares.
