With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1498118
SOURCES: STATISTA, UBC, STATISTICS CANADA, MOBI, FRASER VALLEY REGIONAL DISTRICT, WESTERN MOUNTAIN BIKE TOURISM ASSOCIATION, IPSOS, THE CENTRE FOR ACTIVE TRANSPORTATION, SAANICH NEWS, GOVERNMENT OF B.C. G O F I G U R E 15% of British Columbians cycle at least weekly 6/15 of the Canadian cities that have seen the highest increases in commuting by bike are in B.C. DISTRICT OF NORTH VANCOUVER: 102% VANCOUVER: 88% KELOWNA: 47% SAANICH: 65% CITY OF NORTH VANCOUVER: 44% VICTORIA: 28% (Between the census years of 1996 and 2016) B.C. neighbourhoods with the highest shares of bike commuters: 12.4% NORTH END, KELOWNA 18% FAIRFIELD, VICTORIA 17.1% GRANDVIEW- WOODLAND, VANCOUVER Greater Victoria is 1st among large Canadian cities for regular cycling commuting, at 5.4% Canadian average: 1.2% 65% of Metro Vancou- verites live within 400 metres of a protected or speed-restricted/ low traffic bikeway Per-metre cost for Vancouver's Dunsmuir Street separated cycle line (2010): $1,132 For Victoria's Pandora Avenue separated lane (2016): $2,837 MAY/JUNE 2023 BCBUSINESS.CA 13 Heal Turn Vancouver-based Numinus is on the cutting edge of psychedelic treatment By Nathan Caddell H E A LT H T he exterior of 2555 Commercial Drive looks about as innocuous as a building can look. As you scan the grey facade sandwiched between two financial institu- tions on a Vancouver block that likely has a story or two to tell, you'd never know that the upstairs plays home to a com- pany that's innovating in one of the province's newest health and wellness frontiers. Up on the second floor, plants, comfortable couches and fancy tables and desks dot the colourful but not-too- distracting rooms where natu- ral therapy company Numinus strives to make an impact on health through the use of psy- chedelic medicine. It's a personal matter for co-founder and CEO Payton Nyquvest, who has dealt with chronic pain since birth, at one point so much so that he was getting hospitalized three to four times a week. A finance executive, Nyquvest had never had a psychedelic experience. "I was sort of out of options," he recalls. "One week with psy- chedelics and I never had any chronic pain symptoms again." In 2018, Nyquvest founded Numinus to help others ac- cess psychedelics to heal both body and mind. Since then, the variety of treatments avail- able for conditions like PTSD have boomed—the growing market for psychedelic-assisted therapy is estimated to be in the US$2.5-billion range. Numinus was the first com- pany to gain permission from Health Canada to grow and extract psilocybin for research. It also offers ketamine therapy, while substances like MDMA are available through a Health Can- ada program. After acquiring Utah-based Novamind last year, the company now has clinics across North America, from Arizona to Montreal, as well as a massive research facility on Vancouver Island. Numinus, which is publicly listed on the TSX (NUMI), posted first quarter revenues of $5.7 million earlier this year. It has some 350 employees. "As MDMA and psilocybin become available, these are very powerful tools," says Nyquvest. "A hammer is a tool— you can use it to build a house or hit yourself in the hand with it; it depends on who's using it. I think it's extremely important that, while there's this huge amount of interest in psychedelics, we stay rooted in what our best practices are, and how we make sure people are getting the training and the support they need." The goal is to think about it "almost like knee surgery," says Nyquvest. "It's an interven- tion, and with it, we need a lot of support. If someone was to go in for knee surgery, there's prehab and rehab that need to be done. You can go out and play basketball or whatever you were doing, but you're prob- ably going to blow your knee out again. Whether it's PTSD or MDD [major depressive disor- der], you can have these very cathartic life-changing experi- ences, but it takes work and it takes commitment. And that takes time as well." £ WHAT A TRIP Numinus is using psychedelic-assisted therapy to treat the mind and body