In an unassuming house in Northwest Portland, for the last two months, visitors have been among the first people in the country to use “magic” mushrooms under a legal state program.
Chariot looks like any other house in the neighborhood – a hundred years old, a stately Craftsman. But inside, the rooms have almost all been renovated to be quiet, calming spaces to experience the effects of psychedelic mushrooms.
Courtney Campbell who runs Chariot, is a trained psilocybin facilitator, though he hasn’t applied for his license yet and hasn’t done any facilitation yet, either. He’s too busy running the operation. Since they started operating this fall, Chariot has seen about 60 clients.
Chariot is one of 20 licensed service centers in the state and one of the centers that began seeing clients in Oregon in 2023.
As Oregon closes out the inaugural year of its first-in-the-nation legal psilocybin program, hundreds of Oregonians and visitors are finally accessing services in Portland and throughout the state.
According to informal data gathered by Healing Advocacy Fund, a nonprofit that advocates for legal psilocybin programs in Oregon and Colorado, at least 715 people have accessed services in Oregon since the program officially launched this year.
The Oregon Health Authority, which runs the psilocybin program, does not currently collect data from people participating in the program. That will change in 2025 when the Oregon Psilocybin Services section of the health authority will start to collect some aggregated data from service centers as required by Senate Bill 303, which passed in June.
While Oregonians passed the legal psilocybin framework in 2020, the law allowed the state to spend two years developing the system. Oregon released the first draft rules for the psilocybin program in February of 2022. In late 2022, the state started licensing facilitator training programs, and in January of 2023 began accepting applications for licenses for workers, facilitators, manufacturers, laboratories and service centers, as required by the new law.
Read more: Timeline of Oregon’s legal psilocybin program
By May, the Oregon Psilocybin Services began issuing licenses for psilocybin treatment centers. Later that month, Oregonians and visitors started accessing services.
Advocates of psilocybin say it can help people dealing with a host of issues, from trauma to addiction. And many are hoping that Oregon’s program allows for more extensive research into the therapeutic properties of the substance, which remains illegal at the federal level.
A video from Healing Advocacy Fund shows the experience of a woman going through the program, referred to as “KC.” KC is hoping to address childhood abuse that continues to disrupt her life.
After going through the initial meeting with a facilitator, the psilocybin experience and the post-psilocybin processing, KC was hopeful.
“For the first time,” she said in the video, “I see a spark of brightness and I’m really glad for that.”
For Campbell, it was his own experience with psilocybin that led him to get trained as a facilitator and then open Chariot. He was medicated for years for anxiety and depression, but in 2020 he began the process of getting off of his medication and then going on a psilocybin retreat in Jamaica.
By the end of it, he said, the group of strangers on the retreat with him were close friends. “By the end of it,” he said. “I was like, ‘I am a good person worthy of love.’”
“I don’t know what it does,” Campbell said. “But what I know is that it helped me with my depression and anxiety. It’s the only substance that makes me not want to do any other substance.”
The experience helped him so much, he said that when he came back he felt almost obligated to give other people the same experience. So he pivoted from filmmaking and with the help of his wife, also named Courtney Campbell, he launched Chariot.
Now he is doing just that. Campbell said most of the people coming through his doors were first-time psilocybin users and many were somewhat apprehensive.
Who is using the service is still becoming clear. Of the roughly 60 clients that Chariot has hosted, Campbell estimates about half are from out of state.
An early concern among those involved in Oregon’s psilocybin program was equity. Who would be able to access the services, which can cost $600 at the very lowest end and up into several thousand dollars?
The question remains a big one for the psilocybin industry. Senate Bill 303 seeks to at least quantify that issue by requiring psilocybin service centers and psilocybin service facilitators to collect data about who is accessing services and cost, as well as adverse events, to help monitor the safety and equity of the program.
For Angie Allbee, who manages Oregon Psilocybin Services, dealing with inequity in the system is one of her goals for 2024.
“As we continue working toward eliminating health inequities in Oregon,” Allbee said, “we look to the coming year as a time to deepen our commitment to equity and access, to community partnerships, and to safe, effective, and equitable psilocybin services.”
