Legal cocaine is coming, this Canadian startup predicts

financialpost.com:

A startup just listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange with a business model based on a provocative prediction: legal cocaine is coming.

Safe Supply Streaming Co. is betting on a so-called third wave of policy changes that would decriminalize hard drugs, following similar measures making cannabis and psychedelics more mainstream. It plans to acquire companies that could benefit, such as fentanyl test-strip makers, addiction clinics and energy drinks containing coca leaf, according to chief executive Bill Panagiotakapoulos.

The company was valued at about $11.9 million as of Oct. 4’s close, based on its roughly 79 million shares, compared with a $20-million valuation in its most recent funding round. Safe Supply has pitched investors with estimates that legal cocaine in British Columbia, which recently decriminalized the drug, could be a US$3.2-billion market.

Safe Supply’s founders are pushing a sweeping vision for global decriminalization, by promoting laws that will treat the sale of drugs like any normal product, making them regulated, sold and taxed — based on the belief legalization would ease a drug crisis and stem overdose deaths.

In a pitch deck whose cover features a young man balancing on a tree branch above a nighttime urban skyline, Safe Supply portrays its business plan as a way to “build a better world and help bring a responsible end to the drug war.”

“We’re going to start to build an ecosystem, go out as a beachhead, garner a market cap as a public company and start to acquire all these businesses that the general public hasn’t clued in yet are narcotics businesses,” said Michael Astone, who serves on Safe Supply’s advisory board and is chief executive of ArcStone Securities & Investments, one of the