The Cannabis EpiPen
Anebulo Pharmaceuticals’ Promising Results To Treat Acute Cannabis Intoxication
Once in my early twenties, a friend made pot brownies. I had never had a cannabis edible before and he was having a party, so I thought, hey why not try one. After thirty minutes, I felt nothing, so I had another one. This was a big mistake.
As I later found out the hard way, edibles can take 90 to 120 minutes to kick in and their effects vary depending on how much you recently ate and other factors. I had not given the first edible time to kick in and not only did I get very high, but kept getting HIGHER, but not in a good way. Very soon, I had “trouble” sitting on a couch and the rest of the party for me was a nightmare. I felt terrible and didn’t consume cannabis in any way for years afterwards.
I’m not the only one who has made this mistake, consumed too much cannabis, gotten too high or even had to go to the emergency room (thankfully I did not have to). And as cannabis usage increases as states legalize cannabis, there has been an increase in the number of people going to the hospital due to cannabis overdosing. The good news is that no one dies from a cannabis overdose. The bad news is that they may feel like they want to die. Symptoms include uncontrollable vomiting, visual and auditory hallucinations, panic, and anxiety.
And unfortunately, it is not just adults that are overdosing, it is kids as well. Cannabis edibles, especially gummies can look like regular candy and little kids can and have mistakenly consumed their parents’ cannabis gummies.
Complicated matters for doctors and nurses is that there is simply no way to treat people who have acute cannabinoid intoxication other than to wait. But a tiny biotech called Anebulo Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ANEB) is working to change this. They have a drug that just reported very positive trial results in helping people come down very quickly from being high.
The drug not only brought people down from being high, but significantly improved their alertness.
Why is this important and why is Anebulo interesting? Well, because Emergency Department visits in which people are testing positive for cannabis are rising quite rapidly and the market to treat people could be a very large total addressable market.
Now, let’s making something very clear about that 1.7 million people data point. These are people that are tagged as tested positive for cannabis in their blood stream. These are not people who came into the ER because they got too high. The number coming in for acute cannabinoid intoxication is probably a small fraction of that number. But I can imagine that for many illnesses you also want to make sure people are no longer high while you are treating them. Let’s assume for conservatism’s sake that the number is just 20% of that, or 340,000 people a year. At $500 (a wild guess on pricing on my part) a pop for the medication, this would mean a $170 million number in the US alone. And this is just from ER visits that say nothing of what doctors could prescribe for people who call into their local doctor.
Another way to estimate the market size is to estimate that when every state legalizes cannabis, that at least 20% of the country on a per capita basis will use cannabis. That is 66 million people. If 1% a year have an adverse reaction, that is 660,000 people, or a $330 million revenue opportunity.
This says nothing for other international markets that have legalized like Canada or Germany.
And pharmaceutical companies have been on the hunt for drugs that let them enter the cannabis market. Jazz Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: JAZZ) bought GW Pharma for $7.2 billion in 2021.
Compare the market size and the opportunity to Anebulo’s paltry $100 million market cap and you start to understand the potential.
One last point I would make is that Mitch Baruchowitz with Merida Capital whom I have interviewed before is a big early investor. He has been really focused on the medical side of cannabis and has continued to highlight how Anebulo is a unique Anebulo investment.
As for myself, I have a small speculative position as the company still has a long way to go, but this is an interesting way to invest alongside the growth in cannabis usage that should continue for a long time.
There should be more data this quarter, as the results were so good, the company is planning on continuing the study with an even lower dose of the drug and hopes to file its Investigational New Drug Application (IND), by year end.
And while the time to market is still far off and clinical trials are quite expensive and time consuming, Anebulo’s process should be much simpler as it is a one-time use drug and isn’t for continual use for complicated diseases like heart disease or diabetes.
But even with a lot of potential, be careful of the liquidity as insiders own 90% of the stock and it is quite illiquid, and the stock can move very, very quickly. And as always please do your own due diligence and know this is a microcap biotech stock. Still, this promising biotech could give investors quite high returns by bringing consumers back to earth.
For more information to do your own due diligence consider the trial results announcement and presentation: