The post ‘We want to help people today’: Silo Wellness CEO Douglas K. Gordon is Going All In on Health and Wellness Right Now appeared first on Psychedelia.
By Garrett Rudolph
There’s a legitimate debate in society about the future of psychedelics. While everyone seems to agree that the regulatory landscape is tilting toward some variety of decriminalization or legalization, some believe access will be strictly limited to patients with specific indications and a prescription from their doctor. Others see a more open pathway that would allow all adults to buy and use psychedelics for any reason they see fit, from purely recreational purposes to the full gamut of therapeutic applications.
Silo Wellness CEO Douglas K. Gordon is willing to wade right into the middle of that debate. He prefers to look at psychedelics through a wider lens: “From our perspective, it’s really about wellness,” he says. “Our retreats are geared toward, how do you get to your next level of performance as an individual? How do you get to your next level of being expansive in your thinking and your ability to find more of yourself? And that, to me, all falls under wellness.”
Gordon’s focus on wellness is evident in all facets of Silo Wellness, a company that is being built not only for the long-term potential to service clients in the rapidly evolving psychedelics space, but also developing products and services to help consumers with their health-and-wellness needs right now.
“We want to help people today,” he says. “And that might sound like a very straightforward thing, but the reality is the way a lot of psychedelic companies are set up, if they succeed through their various clinical trials, they’re not actually able to provide medicine to clients for five to seven years.”
In June 2021, the company launched the Marley One line of functional mushroom tinctures, in collaboration with the family of Bob Marley. The Marley One tinctures come in five varieties made with different mushrooms to provide different wellness benefits, including lion’s mane for focus, cordyceps for physical endurance and mental function, and reishi to improve sleep.
The functional mushroom tinctures serve not only as a traditional health-and-wellness product, but also a way of setting the stage to teach people more about the various health benefits of mushrooms, including those of the psychedelic variety.
“If you’re having a conversation around the health benefits of mushrooms for your body, you’re much more open to hearing about the health benefits from a psychedelic perspective of mushrooms, and by extension, psychedelics in general,” Gordon says, adding that Bob Marley was the perfect celebrity with whom to align the brand because “his music, his global presence was always about one people.”
With Marley One, in particular — and perhaps with psychedelic mushroom products down the road — the idea of “being one with the Earth and being one with nature” is central to the brand identity, Gordon says.
While functional mushrooms provide consumers a soft introduction into the wider world of mushrooms and psychedelics, Silo Wellness’s retreats in Jamaica provide guests with the full psychedelic experience.
Although modern medicine has made incredible advancements in treating certain ailments and diseases, it hasn’t truly found an answer for post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, addition or other, more subtle traumas like stress from work and relationships. These are areas where psychedelics are showing tremendous promise.
“I think the overwhelming evidence we’ve seen in terms of the positive impacts, and the potential positive impacts, for mental health, from a psychedelics perspective, is very powerful,” Gordon says. “We put a lot we put a lot of thought and work into our retreats and sort of said, instead of just being a psychedelic experience in Jamaica, how do we make this a very memorable immersive experience?”
Each retreat starts with a detailed screening questionnaire to determine if the experience is right for each person and to ensure the more comfortable set and setting possible for the guests. The company also looks at what issues each person is trying to resolve, while taking the approach that the retreat leader is not there as a healer, but a facilitator. It’s a subtle, but important difference from some other psychedelic retreats. It’s a holistic approach of creating an atmosphere where each individual can feel completely comfortable.
A big part of the psychedelic experience, to Gordon, is the idea of “achieving your true potential.”
“But it’s also this ability for so many of us to have this much more fulsome experience of life,” he says, “because we process the traumas that have prevented us from doing that on our own in the past.”
When Gordon began his foray into the psychedelics space, he began doing more research into its history and understanding the role of indigenous communities in psychedelic medicine. And while hundreds of entrepreneurs debate the future of psychedelics, Gordon believes it’s equally important to look to the past and “to be respectful of and honor and understand the indigenous cultures that really laid the path for so many hundreds of years.”
Gordon, who founded the CanEx Jamaica cannabis conference, has seen how the cannabis industry has failed in that regard, but with psychedelics being such a young industry, there’s still time to ensure it’s on the right path.
He says he’s proud of the way the senior management of Silo Wellness has embraced the notion of being real stakeholders in Jamaica, instead of being a company that plants its flag there just to take advantage of Jamaica being the only country in the Western hemisphere to legalize psychedelics.
“How do look at where you’re going to go and where you came from?” Gordon asks. “We have to be mindful and respectful of that whole indigenous history. At the same token, we have to be respectful and mindful and understanding of the role that the medical infrastructure plays. We have to find a creative way to be mindful of those two worlds, so we don’t unduly punish one for the other.”