Lululemon Scion JJ Wilson Plots to Make Psychedelic Drugs the New Yoga
VANCOUVER—Many people switched out alcohol for psychedelic edibles during the pandemic. But JJ Wilson, the eldest son of multibillionaire Lululemon founder Chip Wilson, went one step further. Not satisfied with simply “feeling amazing” and not being hungover, he decided to become one of the world’s first psychedelics tycoons.
In 2021, JJ Wilson, scion of the yoga apparel empire, co-founded a pharma-grade psychedelics manufacturer which he named Optimi Health. He stumped up start-up costs of more than $2m, a figure matched by his fellow co-founders, with more than $10m coming from financing rounds. The company is today on the brink of receiving a top-tier Health Canada license to purvey naturally-grown psilocybin and lab-made MDMA to legal medical markets around the world.
“I’m on a 30-day mushroom microdose protocol right now,” Wilson told The Daily Beast at a bistro in his home city of Vancouver, Canada. “Recreational therapeutic treatment can help make good people great.” A brave new world is coming, he predicts, in which most people will microdose psychedelics to banish daily scruples, enhance focus and boost well-being. After a half-century war on psychedelic drugs, this seems almost fantastical but in this near future, taking mild, even sub-perceptual, daily doses of psychedelics could be as normal as multivitamins, Wilson expects.
These psychedelic capsules, which will in many cases be blended with non-psychoactive mushrooms like reishi and lion’s mane—so-called adaptogens said to help stave off neurodegenerative decline—may replace antidepressant drugs. Some registered psychiatrists are already rumored to be prescribing psilocybin microdoses under the table.
“Psychedelics are the next yoga,” Wilson says, noting that the ancient Indian spiritual practice was the first mainstream form of meditation to encourage Westerners to take a break from a smartphone-fuelled modern life which has helped spawn a mental health crisis. He believes psychedelics will take that up a notch, and then some. “It’s all a part of people wanting to optimize their life, health, and how they operate, to be the best version of themselves,” Wilson says, as he sips a lemon and ginger tea. (He said he had four coffees earlier, as well as 250mg of psilocybin).
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