a The chain of luxury ketamine clinics called Field Trip began advancing business strategies at an accelerating pace late last year. Money was running out, clinics were half full, and the company’s vice president of clinical services was under intense pressure to launch an at-home ketamine service. It was a challenging assignment figuring out how to safely get depressed patients a sedative away from clinic supervision, but Elizabeth Wolfson said senior leaders gave her just a week or two to tell her to “get up.” shoot and do it”.
In the end, the new offering barely lasted a month before executives decided it wasn’t lucrative enough and added it to the pile of scrapped initiatives. In March, Field Trip, which once had a dozen clinics in the US and Canada and had ambitious plans to expand to 75 by next year, began closing clinics, leaving only four. In the same month, Ketamine Wellness Center, another chain with more than a dozen clinics in the US, went bankrupt.
The closures abruptly ended the battle to dominate the North American market for administering ketamine, a long-lasting anesthetic drug that has regained popularity as a treatment for major depression.
For both company insiders and those watching from the outside, the bubble was being primed to burst by business leaders too eager to grow. “They weren’t looking to buy a clinic so much as to buy a market,” says Ken Starr, a former ER doctor who said his California ketamine clinic was approached belatedly by KWC’s owner, Delic Holdings Corp. . 2020.
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