“Five years ago, it would’ve been an outlandish idea that 99.9% of people would never have considered even a remote possibility. And here we are,” says Ronan Levy, a cofounder and the executive chairman of Field Trip. “It’s a recognition that there's a lot of people who see psychedelics being not only a significant medical application, but significant cultural influence going forward in the future.
“We want people to have as psychedelic an experience as possible with the lowest dose possible because philosophically, and as the evidence seems to suggest, the best outcomes come not only from the antidepressant effects of ketamine and other psychedelics, but through the emotional processing that seems to happen when people have intense mystical psychedelic experiences,” says Levy.
The experience Field Trip offers is nothing if not high-end. For $750, a person with treatment resistant mental health conditions, including depression, generalized anxiety disorder and trauma, can get a ketamine-assisted therapy session. During a session, a patient sets an intention for the psychedelic journey with a therapist, sits in a zero-gravity chair and puts on eyeshades and noise-cancelling headphones and gets a shot of ketamine in the arm.
“Our clinical infrastructure will be molecule agnostic,” says Levy. “Different molecules will serve different patients; different indications and we intend to support any psychedelic-assisted therapies. It could be MDMA, psilocybin or our own novel molecules, and if LSD gets approved for something, fantastic.”