EUROPEAN technology entrepreneur and inventor Brayden Olson is betting big on Jamaica.

The Spiritus Inc founder believes the island has major potential to benefit from the globally expanding psychedelic marketplace.

To this end, Olson’s company — which developed and currently markets a proprietary ability to stabilise the compound psilocin in natural psychedelic mushrooms — is making a multimillion-dollar investment in both retail and research partnerships locally.

“We are a bold company and started with a bold vision, so I will make a bold statement, which is that when people are right about things that ultimately breakthrough in the biopharma space, the impact is Gross Domestic Product (GDP) level,” Olson declared in a recent interview.

Corey Tamble, head of production at Spiritus Inc, gives a tour of the research facility being established in St Andrew.

He pointed to the success of European health-care company Novo Nordisk and its popular diabetes care drug Ozempic as a prime example.

“Novo Nordisk has created so much economic value that its market capitalisation exceeds the total GDP in its home country Denmark [by] some years,” he said.

Having submitted a requested letter of introduction to the Ministry of Health and Wellness during the import permit process, and submitting a comprehensive plan in order to secure import incentives from the Ministry of Industry, Investment and Commerce who regulate this industry, Olson is in the midst of setting up production equipment in a St Andrew facility.

“We are about a week or so from becoming fully operational. It’s been a very long process to get to this point; we started our research here over a year ago,” he detailed of the plan now under way.

Industrial sterilisation and pharma-grade purity testing equipment tell the story of how seriously Spiritus takes safety and the opportunity at hand.

The 37-year-old entrepreneur and his team plan to undertake local research that can continue to position Jamaica as a global leader in the space, alongside launching the Spiritus stabilised mushroom product to market in Jamaica by end of month.

The primary target demographic is the tourist sector, through dispensaries and gift shops.

Spiritus received a waiver under the Ministry of Industry, Investment and Commerce’s Product Input Relief (PIR) that incentivises select overseas-based ventures, with local economic building potential, that are seeking to establish businesses in the island.

“We are very grateful to have the incentive as this will help us accelerate our efforts in supporting local research and student programmes. It’s a great way of fostering ventures like ours who want to come here,” he explained.

His breakthrough, which took three years to refine, started “with the premise that you could stabilise free-base psilocin, the compound naturally found in [magic] mushrooms”.

After dozens of trials and errors Spiritus Inc, working with Australian clinical research organisation Mayne Pharma, came to “eventually find something that was working that, in and of itself, was a miracle”.

Olson said the distinctive mark of success came in developing a stabilised product that was not only stable, but ultimately did not even require refrigeration. Typically, the psilocin compound degrades within two hours of exposure to light, heat or oxygen.

“We did our stability studies, and then we took it out of the refrigerator and we were floored. There were multiple, extremely talented formulation chemists on the project — and basically all of us were surprised that we had shelf-stabilised,” the entrepreneur said.

The third-party stability studies on the Spiritus product lasted for three months during which, according to Olson, “there is no observed degradation whatsoever, and we, therefore, anticipate further studies will show long-term stabilisation beyond a year”.

Business interest in Jamaica for Olson solidified based on the existing regulatory framework for the mushroom sector.

“In this dimension, Jamaica is ahead of the world,” he hailed, pointing to the island not initiating policies emerging from the Convention on Psychotropic Substances in 1971.

“Countries all over the world signed, and Jamaica did too, but when they came back they never ratified, so the island is this unique place where mushrooms [and the psilocybin in them] have been legal continuously,” he noted.

Other nations are playing catch-up at the moment, with Australia, the Czech Republic, and multiple US states legalising in the last few years. Canada is in the process of doing so, as are a slate of other countries.

“It’s a process that takes a lot of time to move through and change all these laws and protocols that happened before,” he rationalised, underscoring why the island is well-positioned for its exceptionalism.

As he steps on the gas pedal towards the pending launch date of the Jamaican-based Spiritus Health Limited, Olson said “the very first thing we did in coming here is that we reached out to all the local mushroom cultivators and providers in the space. I think the path forward is to work together”.

He reported that a number of collaborations have thus far been successful.

“We are exploring a variety of partnership structures because we want to foster the local companies who are already here, learn from each other, and help these local Jamaican leaders expand in and of themselves to become international players to take advantage of Jamaica’s unique position on the world stage happening right now,” he said.

Shontelle Pinch, the Negril-based founder of two local mushroom entities, Choose Happy Jamaica and Happy Cappies Women’s Health, trumpeted Olson and his team.

“Upon meeting Brayden, his group came in to be an extremely collaborative team that was trying to fill a gap in the world of psychedelics. When they approached my company it was more so to see where I needed support, and if I wanted to create different products that had the ability to have shelf stability to guarantee a delivery mechanism to clients who didn’t [want] it in a chocolate form or gummies, and maybe I wanted a tincture or anything else I wanted to formulate,” Pinch said.

She said she was interested because she was directly involved in the world of psychedelics.

“If you are looking at the therapeutic approach — and I wanted to get into supplement stores — the offer [from Spiritus] could be very attractive for that. From the time of meeting them, they have never tried to take over or eliminate the growth that we do; it was more of an addition to what we are already doing,” she said.

Meanwhile, for Ronice Harrison, the owner of Digitize Jamaica and delivery app Island Run, the freshly inked partnership is a win-win.

“We will be offering delivery in Kingston, Ocho Rios, Montego Bay, and Negril to start, with plans to add more parishes,” she explained of the courier service she founded in January 2025.

“They will be assisting us with the expansion of Island Run to allow us to provide those delivery services of Spiritus throughout Jamaica. We are also helping them with marketing and merchant acquisition, we are assisting with getting them into gift shops across Jamaica,” Harrison said.

Notwithstanding business interests, Olson shared that there is a more deeply personal reason behind his devotion to Spiritus, and seeing it succeed.

A childhood friend, “a very brilliant person but, like a lot of people in modern society, life got really hard and it led to serious depression and a suicide attempt that, fortunately, was not successful”.

He was reportedly prescribed standard, selective, serotonin reuptake inhibitors medication for depression but it worsened his state of mind.

“I saw him willing to try psychedelics, which he didn’t know anything about, and he told me the next day, he had his life back. He said he could hear music again, and is now pursuing his great passion for music with his band, living his life again,” Olson said.

Citing an article published in the Lancet Psychiatry, co-authored by the World Health Organization and Harvard Medical School, Olson restated that the findings said one out of every two people alive today will develop a mental health disorder in their lifetime.

“It’s a global health crisis that now exists, and maybe there is a synergy to this moment [ahead of the Spiritus launch] here and the global movement to legalise psychedelics that we don’t understand,” he said. “This research concerns psilocybin and psilocin generally, it does not evaluate or substantiate any health-related claim concerning our product. We disclaim any health benefits about our product. It’s simply a product for adults who choose to use it,” he added.

Researchers around the world are studying psilocybin and psilocin in clinical trials to determine whether these substances help alleviate depression, anxiety, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and other conditions.

“I think this crisis has become obvious to legislators around the world. We are seeing legislators, conservative and liberal, around the world scramble to legalise as fast as they can. This [psiolcybin/psilocin] has always been naturally available to us from mushroom species around the world and we restricted access, except in very few places like Jamaica, and the rest of the world is now coming around full circle and fast,” he said.