“So, DMT vapes have now been patented,” Graham Pechenik, a San Francisco-based registered patent attorney, tweeted earlier this month.
Only it wasn’t a celebratory tweet. The application was filed in July 2020, and although vaping DMT, a hallucinogenic tryptamine drug, has been around for more than 10 years, the patent was granted earlier this month. A simple Google search could have revealed that, argues Pechenik.
“This is how patent trolls function,” Pechenik tells The GrowthOp’s Sam Riches following his Twitter post that sparked online outrage.
Graham Pechenik is a registered patent attorney and the founder of Calyx Law. Photo provided.
And it doesn’t end here. As companies formulate new technology in the emerging psychedelic space, the race to protect and patent intellectual property is not going to be straightforward.
“There’s going to be a lot of applications that find their way through the patent office and end up claiming things that already have been done and are being done, and will give somebody the ability to get extortionate settlements, or try to, from companies working in this space,” Pechenik says.
In conversation with Riches, Pechenik on what the future holds and the slippery slope of ethics when protecting and patenting intellectual property.