The FDA issued warning letters to 14 online marketers of ketamine, and the DEA is investigating what officials call “bad actors” prescribing the powerful anesthetic remotely — concerns mounting over at-home misuse and deaths tied to unmonitored use.
The backstory is a familiar American shape: a genuine medical breakthrough (ketamine’s promise for depression), a delivery innovation (telehealth), and a business model that sprinted ahead of both. The telehealth gold rush just met the part of medicine where supervision was the entire point.
For the book, this is a category lesson rather than a ticker: regulatory risk concentrates where growth outran oversight. The telehealth names that survive this cycle will be the ones whose economics never depended on prescribing the un-supervisable.
A category lesson: regulatory risk concentrates exactly where growth outran oversight, and the warning-letter wave marks the spot. No position affected — our healthcare exposure (MRK, AMGN, REGN, UNH, XLV) lives in supervised, reimbursed medicine, which is the durable kind. Telehealth models whose economics depend on prescribing the un-supervisable are uninvestable at any multiple.