After making its debut on Canada's NEO Exchange, MindMed made its Nasdaq debut. The mental health wellness company uses psychedelic substances as treatments for patients.
Psychedelics have made tremendous mainstream progress when it comes to the general public understanding the benefits, but Rahn said it's just "early innings for the entire industry and for our company" after becoming the first publicly traded psychedelics treatment company a year ago.
"For many, many years, solutions in the mental health space just really haven't been moving the needle in solving mental health for folks, and so what MindMed is doing is reimagining and reengineering how we are approaching mental health," CEO J.R. Rahn told Cheddar. "But we're doing it through substances like LSD, MDMA, psilocybin, these are psychedelics that from the 1960s were really demonized by society but we see great promise in what we call psychedelic-assisted therapy."
However, while marijuana legalization efforts have been going the route of deregulating for both medical and recreational purposes, Rahn said he doesn't believe the psychedelic industry should take the same path, touting the company's plan on sticking to FDA approval.
"I think the cannabis industry is vastly different than what we're trying to achieve here in the psychedelics medicine industry. There was a lot of mistakes made in cannabis. It's still not federally legal in the United States," he explained. "Our objective is to make these medicines accessible in all 50 states and all at the same time and do that in a scalable manner because 40 percent of the country needs these medicines. I think we are, as a company, going to stay away from legalization efforts and really just focus on the FDA pathway because that is how medicines ultimately get approved in the United States."
However, while he emphasized MindMed's approach through the U.S. government's regulatory framework, Rahn recognized that efforts to legalize and decriminalize psychedelics as the "voice of the people" hoping to find new solutions for mental health conditions.
MindMed trading under the ticker symbol MNMD closed at $4.02 per share on the day.
Updated on April 27, 2021, at 4:43 p.m. ET.
