April Pride and the future of psychedelics

On November 7, the Seattle creative entrepreneur joined me for a Zoom sesh

On the cover of a social media post that excerpts the conversation I had with April Pride earlier this month, the creative entrepreneur sports a red cap that features the message, “Pretty girls test their drugs.” The images flits before your eyes for a fraction of a second, but tells you most of what you need to know about West Coast Sojourn’s latest conversation partner: She’s almost entirely about harm reduction, but with a smidge of wild humble brag thrown in.

April Pride is a designer, and a blind man can see it when she walks into a room. Beauty is a subjective quality and of course the damn thing fades, but this Sojourn guest is probably going to be able to wear that cap until she dies of old age.

Nine years ago, Pride came into the industry of cannabis with gorgeousness for sale. The attractive objects she created for her young accessories company allowed Pride to sell Vander Pop to Canopy Growth, for a big sum of cash that’s not been fully disclosed.

Next, the mother of two unexpectedly dropped the How to Do the Pot podcast, moving into the education space.

‘There was a real need to make sure that this information was getting out and that women had a better idea of how they could use cannabis in the specific ways that I know that they were searching for. The data point that came out a couple of years later was that women were still spending $200 before they found the right cannabis product.’

Concurrent with the pandemic was Pride’s move to another podcast (The High Guide) and a commitment to the psychedelics movement. As you’ll read below, our guest has created multiple brands since selling to Canopy, then the world’s biggest cannabis company. For the purposes of this talk, I was most concerned with SetSet, a clinician-guided psychedelics resource center for women, complete with microdosing protocols, trip integration resources, and, yes, podcasts.

I’d last talked to my guest early during the shutdown, in tandem with The Cannabis Cutie, on what was essentially an IG Live Parents’ Night. This was just a few months after Pride and I first met, in a Las Vegas suite. I cannot recall whether NBA Weed Leader Al Harrington stopped by before or after our chat.

Donnell Alexander: April Pride, welcome.

April Pride: Thank you for having me, Donnell. Do you know that was five years ago?

DA: Oh yeah. It was one of the last things that happened before the pandemic.

AP: That’s right. That’s how I remember.

DA: We were talking about your enterprise How to Do the Pot. Are you a serial entrepreneur? Is that what you are?

AP: Mmm-hmm. A serial creative entrepreneur.

DA: I’ve got this complicated question I want to ask you about being a creative entrepreneur. But first, let's go back to Vander Pop. Correct me if I’m off, but you pivoted at a with the sale to Tokyo Smoke. Was that because there was an educational component?

AP: We pivoted well before that exit.

So, we had a soft launch in November, 2015. And that was all about sexy stash products to store, smoke and share weed.

DA: Can you elaborate a little more on those products?

AP: We had stash bags that I wish I had with me. Stash bags with a banker’s lock, so your kids couldn’t get into it, and made in Rome at an Italian, family-owned leather goods factory that I visited. Really beautiful bags. You could just set it on top of the table as you walked into a party and you’re like, The party’s in the bag. Stash jars made out of black Miron glass, which is not “black”; it’s violet. As light passes through that violet glass, it filters out ultraviolet rays and actually increases the humidity. It doesn’t dry out your weed. I learned that trick from old timers. We created stash jars that were labeled with effect-based words like “Relax.” “Clean.” “Focus.” “Play.” “Sex.” Nine of them. And then, still my favorite grinder, the grinder card. We had those printed with different cool graphics.

We launched officially January, 2016 and by April 1 of that year, we had pivoted to focus on women who were curious about cannabis because my ex-husband—we were together at the time—he came home after he read my newsletter and he was just like, April, I think what you're sending is great. I just don't think you’re talking to me. I really think that you're talking to a female demographic. I thought about it. I was like, But half of our sales go to men on the website.

I had to pitch to an organization that was out of Oakland. They were affiliated with Oaksterdam. I can’t remember the name now, but I had to make a decision: What am I pitching? And what I was pitching, to your point, was education to women. So, the reason I sold six months later was because—guess what—there’s not a lot of cash in education. But there was a real need to make sure that this information was getting out and that women had a better idea of how they could use cannabis, in the specific ways that I know that they were searching for.

April Pride during our November Zoom conversation.

The data point that came out a couple of years later was that women were still spending $200 before they found the right cannabis product.

DA: So, it’s 2024. You've pivoted to psychedelics, but you're still in education. How does that industry compare to cannabis in 2016, in seeing the possibilities of a business there?

AP: I don’t know. I actually was just on a phone call before this, and there is proposed legislation in Colorado that would take down any website that provides information on psychedelics that, even though it’s educational, would be painting the drugs in a positive light.

Before we were supposed to launch on July 10, I had my website deactivated from the servers of Kajabi, a large platform, because we provide information that potentially cause harm.

Even though it’s clinician created. It’s created by providers, by physicians, mental health experts. It’s not me, right? I’m the person that’s finding these people and putting it together in an easily digestible package, but I’m not the person that’s telling you what to dose, when to dose and the rest of it. There is a need for this information and I don’t understand how providing information that’s in the name of harm reduction is being confused with aiding and abetting people’s illicit drug use. I think there’s plenty of that on Reddit. (Laughs)

DA: Two days after the election, how do you feel we might be experiencing things differently in the era after Joe Biden, the Trump era?

[Pause]

DA: It’s impossible to guess, I know that.

AP: Yeah. Well, we know that fear drives people. Ninety percent of decisions—that doesn't make logical sense. So, we have a nation that of addicts, whether it’s caffeine or nicotine. Or—

DA: Sugar.

AP: Technology. Or sugar, yeah. And we can go down the list of how sugar has a floor that the U.S. government needs. You will always be able to get sugar and the sugar companies will always be able to make money. And that’s crazy to me. Most people don't know about that. It’s really, really hard to fight an entrenched system. I think for the most part, the system is there to protect people. I wanna say that.

DA: You want to, go ahead. Feel free.

AP: I want to say that. But when you hear things like within the first four years after a a drug has been approved by the FDA, 30 percent of them are recalled because there have been enough adverse effects once it’s been in market and a large group of people have had the time to use it. It’s not quite turning out the way that the clinical trials [laughs] had predicted.

Despite how much the FDA jumped in and really wanted to review what was happening with Lycos and MDMA, I think that they’re designed for the pharma companies to win, to be able to get it to market. That certainly smells right when it comes to Spravato, which is the only FDA approved psychedelic drug. Which is ketamine. That’s an interesting clinical trial.

DA: What do you mean smells right?

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Ketamine is legal. It's a Schedule III controlled substance. It’s on a World Health Organization's list of essential medicines, because it's cheap and it doesn't require refrigeration. It really came into notoriety because it was used on the battlefields in Vietnam when you needed to amputate and you needed to perform massive surgery. Right there, it allowed people to dissociate and for physicians to do their jobs.

So, it’s safe. It has a very short half-life. You can use it on children. You can use it on animals. Pregnant women who have to have surgery are given ketamine, right? So in and of itself, it’s kind of a miracle. Unfortunately, it’s also highly addictive when it’s used without intention. Of all the quote psychedelics, psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, DMT, ayahua—let’s go through the list—ketamine, is the only one that’s actually not a classical psychedelic, but it’s categorized as one. And it’s the only one that is known to be highly, highly habit forming.

It’s the only one that the FDA has approved and it was approved, not in the form that you’re going to get if you go into the ER today. That’s called racemic ketamine. That’s when you've got two isomers, S ketamine and R ketamine. What Johnson & Johnson, which owns Janssen Pharmaceuticals—who owns the IP for Spravato—did was they took out the R-ketamine. S-ketamine is the only isomer that’s the active ingredient in that formulation. Over time, it’s [been] proven there isn't as much time between having suicidal ideation. It’s an inferior product.

DA: Wow, I didn't know that.

AP: And it’s a lot more expensive. It’s the only thing that is covered by insurance, and it costs $3,000 to do a round of treatment. Ketamine in and of itself is, like, less than $10 for a pretty standard dose.

DA: As we go back, how is the environment different for education in this sector than in cannabis? Because cannabis was tough too. I don’t know if there wasn’t, as you said, a lot of space for education.

AP: I’m not creating something that really has legs in terms of a business model. Education, there’s not a lot of cash there. My purpose in all of this is to explore the space and get to know it and find out where the opportunities are. And, frankly, I got into psychedelics for consumer protection because—after I sold my company to the largest cannabis company in the world—I had no idea that was not a priority.

DA: You sold to Canopy. Can you walk us through that?

AP: Yeah, so... Launch in January 2016, start focusing on women specifically April of that same year, went into talks with Tokyo Smoke on Halloween of 2016, and had sold by first of February, because again, there’s not really cash in educating the consumer.

But, there’s a lot of value for the consumer and for companies in the future who have an educated consumer, right? Especially if you’re the one that’s taking the lead on that and they can trust you as you bring them new products that they should try there: I don’t know anyone to ask, but I can ask April. I can go to the website, I can go to the podcast.

So it’s a long play, obviously.

So Canopy Growth purchased our bundled assets in September 2018. October 2018 is when Canada’s adult-use went into effect. Then I left and started the How to do the Pot podcast in 2019. I did that for two years and I saw that influencers on Instagram with “Canna” in their handle were talking about psilocybin and I was like, Oh, okay. Here we go again. I’m pretty curious about all of this.

I broke off from How to do the Pot and started a podcast called The High Guide, so that I could start exploring the psychedelic space as a brand creator. And since 2021 I’ve created six brands! [Giggles]

DA: Oh my goodness. Six brands. What kinds of brands?

AP: A podcast, which then I bundled into a new podcast. A deck of cards [Holds up SetSet-branded product] which are integration cards that you can play with friends under low dose. We have facilitators that work with MDMA that use them, but really I like to use them with under a gram of psilocybin. And a psilocybin brand that I cannot be associated with because then I can’t talk freely with SetSet. But I do own the trademark. It is distributed out of California and it choose the legacy operators that provided the medicine. So, I know it’s really quality, tested, good and I can send people there. Because that was the problem: I don’t know where to send you.

DA: So, you count Set Set among the brands that you created?

AP: Set Set, Of Like Minds, The High Guide, Ray Ray, Johnny, which I created with Raven Duckett, who's out of Oakland. That was originally a THC drink beverage but we pivoted because she had an idea years ago, like in 2018-17 for an AI bot that could answer questions as her clients were sending her questions when she was out on deliveries, you know, weed deliveries. We pitched that to everybody that made a lot of money in, in cannabis and we got no funding. But we still have the Johnny brand. I'm, I'm still holding out to find the right partner on that. It’s a beautiful brand.

DA: There's been, what, a 50, 60-year history of people enjoying psychedelics “recreationally.” And before the commercialization of psychedelics came, you didn't have a guaranteed guide. Some people knew guides, people they treated them as guides.

Some guides weren't trustworthy.

I’m curious to know how you think the experience that people are having in 2024 is different because they have help.

AP: I’m going to share with you something I just heard on a podcast. It was a three-part podcast that went live in August after the MDMA verdicts came down. And when I’m talking about the MDMA verdict, what I'm talking about is MAPS, which is a 40-year-old organization—it’s a nonprofit—has a for-profit pharmaceutical company called Lycos. And Lycos, for I think it’s like eight years they’ve been working on these clinical trials to get MDMA, which is the street name is Molly or Ecstasy approved for PTSD. The FDA last year said—or maybe it was the beginning of this year—said, We need another Phase Three clinical trial. They did that because not that they didn’t think that the benefits were there. It’s that they weren’t sold that the negative over time, that there could be negative results that weren’t being addressed.

That’s the background there. On Vox, who did this three-part series there was a woman who, after the trial, she did not do well for a year. So you talk beforehand with someone about how you feel about touch while you’re in an altered state. But you can’t really anticipate if you're going to—you make the decision before, yes or no. You can’t make the decision in the moment.

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Say you say, “I don’t want anyone to touch me.” Then you imbibe, you take the medicine and then you’re like, Oh no. Now I want to be touched. Well, the facilitator is like, No, we decided before, You said “no.”

Their deal was that there could be a pillow between her and the person, if she requested touch. So she just felt like it was all so weird. “I’m in this place where I really need to feel connected, yet I'm not really with people who I know.”

There was a lot of language around the people facilitating who are not only researchers, but their clinicians, saying, You have the ability to be part of history. If you have negative outcomes, maybe really think about how you rate those, because it can impact the good work we're trying to do there. There was a lot of stuff around this trial that was not good.

A year later, she decides to take MDMA on her own because she didn’t feel it was the medicine that was bringing her into this dark place. It was the setting. It was being in a clinical setting with people she didn’t know. She asked a friend and she went through the entire protocol that she learned through MAPS with a friend and she’s totally on the other side and she credits MDMA with doing it.

I have been chills talking about this, but it was because she did it on her own terms in a setting that felt safe for her. So, SetSet is here for the three out of four people who are trying to use all of this medicine on their own. We call it, “in the wild.”

“We don’t want you to be the only person that’s educated. We want the person that’s sitting with you to understand.”

DA: How does this play out? How do you do this?

AP: You get people [whose mindset is], “Okay, so now we're high. What do we do? How do we make the most of this? [Laughs] Just play a card game, right? Go for a walk in nature… but I can’t say that because you can get hit by a car, right? Careful about how we instruct people to spend their time in an altered state.

But the downloads that we provide are also available in audio. I’m an audio person. I want to listen to things. I’ve got a podcast. Kendra Bloom is a licensed therapist that created our education. She’s our director of programming. I read all of the things that she created. And now you can listen to it too. All of that preparation you would do before going into an experience or before you start microdosing.

For microdosing specifically, it’s really interesting. People say, “I can’t feel anything, so I just stopped it.” Well, you were doing it right though; you’re not supposed to feel anything. There’s but a coach will charge you $800 to tell you that.

So there’s consumer protection. I’m motivated by consumer protection, equity, right?Like, something you can grow in your closet is going to cost you thousands of dollars to figure out how to use. I don’t know. That doesn't feel right to me. And I don’t think that's what the medicine would want either.

I don’t want to be a facilitator. I don’t want to be a coach. That’s not where I see adding the most value. But I’m very, very early. Very early.

DA: The [psychedelics integration] consultant I was mentioning earlier was talking about her Eureka! moment. They’d been working in clinical pharmacology with people who’ve had head injuries and realized that the long-term medicine was really just putting a Band-Aid on something that was addressable.

And I wonder, because what 2015 or 2016 you had that assignment you were doing design: What was your Eureka! moment to get into the the Get High space?

AP: Good question. I had a fashion line and one of my clients had started working at Privateer Holdings, which is based here in Seattle. Privateer owns Leafly, which is one of the largest licensed producers in Canada. They have the 30-year agreement with the Marley family from Marley Naturals licensing deal with them. They own majority stake in Leafly. They’ve got big, gold-star brands, right? Assets in the space.

She’s the CEO’s executive assistant. And she was just like, I’m seeing everything, April. No one’s creating anything that looks cool. And I just couldn’t believe that in this space that all the creatives in LA and New York weren’t flocking to figure out how to work in the space.

And so I took her out to dinner and we both knew the guy that owned the restaurant. He asked what we were talking about. She said, I’m trying to convince her to launch a line of luxury cannabis accessories. And he said, I’ll give you your seed money if you do that. And he did.

DA: But you did need some convincing, right? Did you have a connection to the stuff beforehand? There’s a stigma. Your name kind of changes once you’re associated with cannabis.

AP: My children, they were young, they were like five-four and seven… five and eight, something like that. So, we watched the Bob Marley documentary, because I had seen it and I knew that he smoked like a big-ass spliff, right? And so I was just like, Okay. I’m gonna watch this with them. That moment’s gonna happen and I will see their reaction and that will help me figure out how I’m gonna frame this conversation with them. They’re little kids, I shouldn’t have to ask them permission for what I want to be when I grow up. But it’s worth having the conversation.

Of course, their father their father totally on board with it. He was like, For the social-equity issues alone, yes. Like, what can we do here. I had buy-in from the people I cared about and the only question… [laughs] The boys were like what is he smokin’?

“What is that?”

And so, Oh, that’s called cannabis. It was just this learning opportunity that I took advantage of. Then after the movie, a little bit later that day, I told them I have a chance to work in the space with the stuff that’s inside what Bob’s smoking and my older son, forever awesome:

Can you make a lot of money?

I was like, I don’t know, but maybe? As a creative to be able to say, “Maybe.” this doesn’t happen in your lifetime. That was exciting to think about—what could be—from a win, because I’ve been an entrepreneur for 15 years and I had sold a company before. But you know, you’re working by yourself, for nothing for a long time.

Now, fast forward. I’m the weed mom. I’m the ’shroom mom. My kid does not want to talk about that too. It’s not good. It’s not great. It’s fine.

DA: I hate to put you on this, but what do you mean? I was actually just going to ask you, how has it changed to go from being the weed mom to the psychedelics mom, at least in perception? One thing is ahead of the other in cultural acceptance.

AP: Which one do you think it is? [Laughter]

DA: I think weed's a little ahead, but I think it’s interesting that you think there’s a question in there.

AP: Oh yeah. I definitely think that peoplehave many fewer issues with psychedelics than they do with weed. I think that the stoner memes and conditioning that we’ve all been bombarded with over the last 50 decades—five decades-plus—has done its toll and people think less of weed smokers. Psychedelics somehow is tied to a more intellectual group of people because it came out of Stanford and Harvard.

I think that’s what's going on. But you can use both in ways that are not gonna help you reach your potential.

DA: You know, you did all that time in cannabis. I didn’t really get involved with the industry in terms of covering it till about 2017. And where it went pre-pandemic, where it is now, there’s a lot of movement or a lot of phases.

I wonder if there are lessons from your cannabis years that help you through this time and this new venture in psychedelics.

AP: So many, so many lessons. One, you really have to really have to think about the timing. I read something this summer that said that psychedelics—in terms of regulation and consumer acceptance—is where cannabis was in 2012 and it stopped me. I was like, that is not when I wanted to be in weed. That is not the right date, right?

What people don't know and what I did learn is it takes so much more money to market and to manage a brand in regulated spaces, because we just don’t have the same tools that a company selling socks would.

DA: Social media alone is a very different bird, that stuff. I’m going to ask, because we are running out of time: In 2016, there’d been an expectation that Hillary Clinton would win and that would help cannabis. It didn’t go that way. And Kamala Harris did talk a lot about equity and building businesses in cannabis. I feel like that was going to make things easier for psychedelics.

Do you feel like the arrival of the Trump White House will have any kind of impact on how drugs are dealt with?

AP: This is not the first time I thought about this question.

I read that he’s going to put Kennedy into some positions that could be beneficial for psychedelics, but I don’t think that Trump cares about them. It’s not that he’s going to go after people that are trying to research or he's going to squash any progress. I just don’t think he is going to put the power that he wields behind progressing it. It just won’t go as far as it could if we had had someone empower who was, um… curious about the potential of the medicine.

Massachusetts had a psychedelic legalization ballot measure on its ballot on Tuesday, and it didn’t pass. The thinking was that it was going to, that the organization behind it has put up 22 bills, and 19 of them have passed. They just don’t put anything on a ballot that doesn’t pass. So the fact that that didn't pass, coupled with a new president or executive branch is just going to delay any progress. And then the MAPS thing…

I have a friend I walked with last night. He’s a brand consultant. He worked at Microsoft and he teaches at University of Washington. But he’s also into this with all of us and I was like— I won't say his name—The medicine does not want to be part of this system.

It doesn't want to be part of the system.

That's why I have to not work with it probably anymore, because I have to work within the system. I feel really strongly that I can be a bridge.

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But I think it’s the underground that really has to help keep this available for people.

DA: I hate to go out on that note where you’re kind of revealing that you’re stepping back. Am I taking that the right way?

AP: It’s on a slow boil. That’s part of my job as a founder, to be able to read the timing This stuff isn’t going anywhere, but I can’t watch the pot slowly boil. I’ve been doing this for three and a half years, right? Everything’s teed up. I’m in the part of the space that feels good to me.

I would love to host events. That’s what I’m really good at. I have a monthly salon that’s moving over to Town Hall, which is a big venue here in Seattle at the first of the year. So things aren’t shifting entirely for me, but I am looking for consulting work in cannabis.

DA: Let me throw this out at you because it might sound like a crazy idea, but this is a crazy time. With the fact that Trump is Mr. Business, take-the-brakes-off-of-everything, can you ever see that having an effect that’s actually positive for these so-called illicit substances?

AP: Oh, if you can prove there’s cash in any of them, I mean, that’s what happened with cannabis, right? We can say that it was the veterans that led this mass legalization, but what really happened was that people with cash realized how much money would be made if we could just get the states to approve it.

DA: We need a John Boehner of psychedelics.

AP: We do. It’s Governor Rick, the guy that was the governor of Texas.

DA: Rick Perry?

AP: Yes.

DA: Oh my.

AP: Huge psychedelics fan.

DA: Maybe we need a better one than him. [Laughter] I’m just kidding. But hey, I’m so glad you came on. And next time I’m up in Seattle, I would love to check you out.

AP: I hope that happens. And I hope you do.