Klee Irwin And His Plan To Bring Psychedelic Therapy To The Masses
For the past few decades as an author, physicist and businessman, Klee Irwin’s public persona has been split between two worlds: nutraceuticals and the study of consciousness through quantum physics.
Now, through his plan to build the largest network of affordable psychedelics therapy clinics, Irwin is building a bridge between his business persona and his second identity as an independent physics researcher.
The chain of clinics, launching under the banner “Irwin Naturals Emergence,” will take advantage of a large-scale operation to bring pricing down and “bring psychedelics therapy to the masses.”
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From Dietary Supplements To Psychedelics Clinics (With A Stop In Quantum Physics!)
Irwin’s household brand, Irwin Naturals, has been in the market since 1994 and can now be found across the country in stores like Walmart and Whole Foods, among thousands of other retailers.
The company has been on a profitability streak since its founding and its shares are traded publicly on the Canadian Securities Exchange and the American OTC.
Irwin Naturals adopted a cannabis strategy in 2018 after CBD sales exploded across the country with the signing of the 2018 Farm Bill that made the cannabinoid legal throughout the US.
In parallel, Irwin developed a career as a scientific researcher. In 2009, he founded Quantum Gravity Research, “a not for profit scientific institute, working on the connection between mathematical physics and consciousness,” in his words.
Since 2012, Irwin has co-authored numerous research papers and scientific articles that build up the corpus of what he and his colleagues call the “Emergence Theory.”
Today, Irwin’s research into the scientific principles behind a theory of everything spills into his business ventures in the psychedelics industry. This relationship, at first glance, is set up by the concept of “emergence.”
“I’m trying to create a kind of cross branding between what I do in the psychedelic and nutraceutical spaces and what I’m doing in the scientific world, connecting unification physics to consciousness,” he said in an exclusive interview.
“Irwin Naturals Emergence” is the name of a chain of mental health clinics that Irwin Naturals is building as a subsidiary.
Irwin explained that the name for his emergence theory comes from the idea that complex things emerge from simpler things. The theory essays to explain how, for instance, consciousness can emerge from the behavior of quarks and electrons in one’s body.
In the field of mental health, the concept of emergence appears in motifs like “emerging from the dark waters of depression,” he says.
Irwin Naturals Emergence: The Jenny Craig Of Psychedelics
At the time of this writing (July 2022), Irwin Naturals owns eleven mental health clinics, and hopes to be at 50 by the end of the summer.
The company’s clinic strategy began in February of 2022.
“It’s entirely through acquisitions, which is what allows it to go so quickly,” says Irwin. “We have about a $1 billion market cap, and most of our acquisitions are done by stock. So they’re really not technically acquisitions, they’re mergers.”
Irwin says he began to think about a mental health strategy for his company after looking at the global mental health crisis and how, at least in North America, one out of four adults is suffering from a mental disorder.
“It’s just a growing trend, as though the world is going progressively and collectively insane,” he says
Irwin realized he can use the influence and resources of his supplements brand “to effectively endorse and help validate this mental health revolution, which is psychedelic mental health treatment.”
“We can create this chain of psychedelic mental health clinics called Irwin Naturals Emergence, and we can use our stock as a public company to do a roll-up and really become the Jenny Craig of psychedelic mental health clinics,” says Irwin.
Jenny Craig is a chain of weight loss clinics that was able to “bring weight loss clinics to the masses,” through the 1980s and 1990s, by providing a reduced cost structure when compared to the luxury weight loss clinics of the day.
Part of Jenny Craig’s ability to bring pricing down was related to the scope of its market presence, which today runs at more than 700 centers in Australia, the U.S., Canada, and New Zealand.
Irwin Naturals plans to follow a similar strategy. By centralizing certain administrative processes like insurance billing, Irwin expects to reduce the final cost of treatment for the patient.
Irwin expects that, by bringing prices down while maintaining good quality, competitors will be forced to bring their own prices down to live up to a new standard. This will “overall help the patients out there.”
What Happens At Irwin Naturals Emergence Clinics?
“As these clinics come in and they join up with us in a strength-in-numbers play; we want to standardize pricing, we want to standardize the name of the business and we want to standardize what we offer,” says Irwin.
His plan is to offer consistency of service across all clinics in a similar way to the Starbucks model, where “they’re not all identical inside, but they have a style guide that gives a similarity from Starbucks to Starbucks.”
Today, the company’s plan is to offer ketamine as a psychedelic, being the only psychedelic-type compound currently legal.
Ketamine will complement a base group of treatments that will be offered in all clinics from the start. These include stellate ganglion block, an injection of an anesthetic into a group of nerves in the neck, which Irwin describes like “a computer reboot of your brain.”
“It resets a fight or flight mechanism that gets locked in some people who have PTSD, for example,” he says.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation is also offered. This is a non-invasive treatment for neurological conditions that works by stimulating the brain’s magnetic waves through an external magnetic field.
Irwin says there are thousands of behavioral health clinics that the company could eventually absorb and train to provide these treatments.
As other psychedelic compounds become approved by the FDA, Irwin Naturals expects to add them to their roster of service offerings.
“We have a big responsibility to set the bar of quality and make it as good as we can make it, because then the competition will copy us. And some of them will do better than us, and then that will force us to do even better. And it sort of starts from where we set the bar,” he concludes.
Discover Irwin’s current Ketamine Clinic locations
