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).

Wilson’s several guided psilocybin trips helped him— among other things—to work on his relationships and let go of “holding things against” his parents, business partners, and others. He has also smoked what is perhaps the strongest psychedelic, 5-MeO-DMT, though he says he prefers ketamine, as a psychedelic therapeutic. All this tripping, overseen by shamans and sitters, “has allowed me to unlock something in the blockage center of my brain,” he says. “The experiences have created openings for me to ‘get out of my own way.’ The result is that everyone’s so much happier.”

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His father, Chip Wilson, is right behind him. An adviser to Optimi, he wrote on social media recently that the company is well-placed to “commercially globalize psychedelics on a scale never seen before” after attending the opening of the Optimi HQ in the sleepy mountain town of Princeton, some three hours from Vancouver, last year. “My family is supportive of my business endeavors,” adds Wilson, his triceps bulging from underneath his R-shirt. “We work together on many different projects.”

Wilson, an amiable, firm-handshake kind of bro, is dressed as if he could have just come out of the high-octane functional exercise class taking place in the adjoining gym studio (incidentally, co-owned by the family of his girlfriend, who comes over to say hello). He speaks like an entrepreneur—all “phases” and stock prices—but there is also a boyish enthusiasm underpinning an ambition to emulate his father which is bare for the world to see. According to Optimi’s promotional material, he “bears the weight” of his family legacy.

The man described to me by one Vancouverite as the city’s most eligible bachelor—due to his wealth—did not attend The Daily Beast’s recent visit to the company’s facility on the outskirts of Princeton, which holds one of the largest legal pharma-grade mushroom farms in the world. More than 200 kg (440 lbs) of psychedelic mushrooms and 1,000 doses of pure MDMA were stored in the immaculately sterile lab that day. Co-founder Dane Stevens, a fellow entrepreneur and heir to a jewelry fortune, led the tour, wearing a “Mushroom Lover” hoodie and telling of his love for psychedelic fungi. “We can hold up to CA$50m worth of mushrooms and MDMA onsite at any time,” he says. “We need a lot of mushroom biomass to make the standardized extract.” It could be any other science laboratory—if it wasn’t for the hi-tec mushroom growing rooms set up to mimic the climates of places like Costa Rica and the Oregon coastline. It’s no wonder Optimi has staked some $25m on all of this technology.

As it stands, the legal psychedelics market is expected to generate almost $11 billion by 2027. All of the legal tripping, naturally, will require industrial amounts of psychedelics made in line with high pharmaceutical standards—but the infrastructure to service this mind-bending shift in medicine is only just emerging. The Optimi lab is one of several popping up across the world to cater for the growing demand as reforms enable greater access.

The U.S. could approve MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD in a matter of months, Australia has already greenlighted “ecstasy” and psilocybin for PTSD and depression under narrow conditions, and the number of clinical trials underway is at record levels. Already, Optimi is providing MDMA and psilocybin for Canada’s limited access program, supplying Israel with MDMA for an addiction study, and shipping psilocybin to a research institute in New Zealand.

A steady stream of peer-reviewed science has helped propel psychedelics from public enemy to potential salve for the dual mental health and addiction crises but serious questions remain around the future safeguards for people who might be prescribed microdose pills containing psilocybin or MDMA, as well as the safe scalability of intense psychedelic therapy courses. Some people have been rushed to hospital after taking psychedelics, others left profoundly destabilized. However, studies increasingly show that psychedelics, used properly, can address traumas and ease depression.

“We’re bullish on what’s going to happen here for the business,” says Wilson. “We are confident that the facilities are the best in the world—ready to deliver world class medicines.” It's a win-win all round, he adds. “We’re making products that are going to help people: That’s pretty rad.”

There are plenty of other psychedelics start-ups, specializing in everything from creating new drugs, devising treatment and training plans and opening mushroom and ketamine clinics where they can do so legally. Optimi is one of approximately 50 publicly listed such companies, but few others aim to produce psychedelics on an industrial scale.

It’s unclear what Vancouverites will make of the news that the Wilson family could hit the jackpot with psychedelics. Chip, whose $60m beachfront property is the city’s most expensive, is not a universally popular figure. A decade ago, the yoga gear magnate was forced to resign as the company’s chair amid a furor after he said of the brand’s see-through leggings, that “some women’s bodies… just actually don’t work for it.” Earlier this year, he was criticized for pooh-poohing the “diversity and inclusion” efforts of Lululemon—in which he still holds an 8 percent stake.

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But his family’s philanthropy may not have received the attention it deserves. In 2021, Chip was instrumental in returning two islands off Vancouver, as well as critical parts of another, to public ownership, at a cost of more than $3m. The next year, he donated $74m to British Columbia’s provincial parks foundation to buy up and protect forests. In November, he donated the same figure (which is CA$100m) to help find a cure for a rare muscular disease that he lives with.

Conversely, it seems that conditions like PTSD and depression now have potentially effective treatments. Soon, Optimi’s medicines could be helping thousands of people. Optimi’s chief science officer Dr Preston Chase says there have been moments where he has marveled at having created a couple thousand doses worth of MDMA and felt like Walter White, the methamphetamine-creating drug baron from TV series Breaking Bad. “We’re not here to be the big bad pharma company,” he says. “I’m reading a recipe that a chemist knows how to follow.”

Word of Optimi’s avant-garde activities has made it down to the local town, a copper mining hub. Chase recalls telling staff at the local pet store that he works at Optimi. “They said, ‘Oh, the mushroom place, right up the hill, next to the weed place.’” The psychedelics lab is housed next to a cannabis farm owned by two of the other Optimi executives.

The intensity of the work has meant that Optimi’s head of mycology and cultivation, Scott Marshall, has not left the rural neighborhood in more than a year after relocating to Princeton with his wife and two children. “I was instructed to fill this vault,” he says, standing next to stacks of dozens of boxes all brimming with vacuum-packed bags of mushrooms. He is mindful he is at the cutting edge, and as media interest grows, Marshall seems camera-shy—despite fastidiously updating his Instagram page with mind boggling mushroom growths. “I just want to gain professional achievements at my own rate without looking like I’m trying to be a Hollywood movie star.”

Wilson has also avoided talking up the company much until now—with the company well positioned as regulators may soon open the floodgates. “I’m very much, don’t talk about it till it’s ready,” he says. “We’ve been working really hard for a number of years, getting everything ready for this moment.” With psychedelics gearing up for its gold rush moment, the industry is set for a multibillion-dollar trip. Buckle up, because it’s about to get truly, well, trippy.