The federal government does not appear ready to pick up the reins and guide the growing wave of psychedelic therapies evolving across the country.
So that leaves the states — led by Oregon and Colorado — to forge first-ever regulations that allow people to use psychedelics such as psilocybin, ibogaine and MDMA to treat mental health and addiction issues.
With some 22 states weighing legislation to deploy and study psychedelic-assisted therapies and Colorado and Oregon rolling out pioneering psychedelic regulatory systems, the U.S. is a policy laboratory testing widely different approaches to uncovering the healing potential in long-maligned psychedelics.
The role of states was a hot topic at the second Psychedelic Science conference in Denver last week, a five-day gathering of scientists, clinicians, entrepreneurs, analysts and psychedelic veterans. Hosted by the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, the event drew more than 8,000 people to what is billed as the largest psychedelic confab in the world.
While the federal government last year balked at giving final approval to the use of MDMA for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, the feds seem to be open to additional research and data coming from states that allow psychedelic-assisted therapies for all sorts of mental and behavioral health issues.
“I think these state programs are really going to be used to inform federal policy,” said Ismail Lourido Ali, the interim co-executive director and the head of policy for MAPS.
Rick Perry, a 15-year governor of Texas who served as the U.S. Secretary of Energy for a couple years in the first Trump administration, has joined the psychedelic movement. Now he’s chairman of the board of Americans for Ibogaine, traveling the country and asking state leaders to embrace the powerful psychedelic derived from the root bark of an African bush as a medicine to treat damaged war veterans.
Earlier this month Perry helped Texas Gov. Greg Abbot sign a bill directing $50 million toward clinical trials of ibogaine that could expedite federal approval of the drug as a medication for opioid addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
The lifelong conservative told a packed auditorium at the conference that a longtime political advisor told him a few years ago that he was throwing away 40 years of stalwart conservatism “on this hippy shit.”
“I said ‘I don’t think so.’ I’ve talked to enough people who have been treated. I have looked at the data. I’m convinced that this medicine is what they say it is. It is a cure for addiction. It is a cure for PTSD. It is a road to recovery,” Perry said. “And secondly, my reputation is not worth more than their lives.”
Research cleared in Utah
Last year Utah lawmakers unanimously approved a Republican bill that allows research hospitals to administer psilocybin and MDMA for mental health treatments.
Lawmakers in 22 states are studying legislation that would allow for some form of psychedelic medicine to treat a variety of behavioral and mental health issues.
But the federal government in the Controlled Substances Act lists most of the medicines promoted by states as treatments for a host of ailments as having “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.” The list of Schedule I substances banned in the U.S. includes ibogaine, LSD, marijuana, mescaline, peyote, psilocybin and a wide swath of chemical variations of dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. All those psychedelic substances are being researched today as possible treatments for some mental health issues.
A panel of lobbyists and attorneys advocating for reform of state laws around psychedelic medicines agreed that research gathered in Colorado, Oregon, Texas and Utah can help sway federal laws. Their talk, looking at what the next iteration of psychedelic state policy might look like, addressed the need to couple therapeutic use with decriminalization and how synthetic variations of natural medicines can play a role in therapeutic care and research.
“We are learning so much from Oregon and Colorado and I think that it’s hard to overstate how valuable that is,” said Jared Moffat, a policy director for a political action committee called New Approach, which has promoted campaigns to make psychedelic substances legal in several states. “A lot of state regulators are doing this work in the real world and it’s no longer hypothetical. So the lessons we are getting are really specific. You learn by doing … and I would hope that those lessons lead to future improvements across the country.”
Barine Majewska, a pioneering psychedelics attorney with Denver’s Vincent LLP firm, calls the dual track in Colorado — with both medical clinicians and licensed nonmedical facilitators — “the raw milk argument.” If you want to buy homogenized, safer milk, it’s ready at the grocery. If you want raw, unpasteurized milk, there are ways to research dairy providers and go get your own.
Consumer education with data collected by states, Majewska said, “can pull people out of the dogma” that surrounds psychedelics.
For example, in New York, proposed legislation around psilocybin would not only allow for psychedelic-assisted therapy, but individuals could possess and use the substance after taking a short education course.
“I think if you are going through a legislature without a ballot, you really have to be safety focused,” said Allison Hoots, an attorney and director of Sacred Plant Alliance, which supports the religious use of psychedelics. “Some of these substances are going to freak the legislators out, so if you can focus on what achieves safety but also gives people an opportunity to choose between recreational and regulated access … you can strike a balance between something that feels safe and regulated by the government but also empowers people to use it on their own.”
The panelists agreed that it can be a challenge for lawmakers to embrace therapeutic values alongside free personal use. That’s a path created in Colorado where natural medicines are available for personal use and for medical professionals providing structured, regulated care.
Decriminalization of psychedelics is key
Some form of decriminalization needs to accompany a state’s regulatory plan, advocates argue.
“Bringing this above ground is solving for a lot of the challenges we see in the underground,” said Heidi Pendergast, the director of the Healing Advocacy Fund in Oregon, a group that works with state regulators to craft natural medicine plans in Oregon and Colorado.
Pendergast, speaking on a panel discussing the lessons learned from both states, said the transition from theory to practice can be bumpy so states need to be ready for adjustments.
“This has never been done before so it’s going to take a lot of iteration and a lot of flexibility and a lot of nimbleness,” she said, pointing to the need to change regulations, shift community standards and expectations and prod legislative fixes.
Already in Colorado lawmakers have passed three bills in three years tweaking the natural medicine measure approved by voters in 2022. The latest bill — Senate Bill 297 — eases a couple requirements for facilitators while directing the state’s public health department to collect data around the health effects of natural medicine. (That bill also allowed the Colorado governor to pardon people imprisoned for crimes around natural medicines, which Gov. Jared Polis did on the first day of the Psychedelic Science 2025 conference.)
That data could reveal the benefits of psychedelic-assisted therapies and draw more people into services that can help them, said Ali with MAPS.
“I’m really committed to harmonizing the policy environment, which in my mind, means that if you have FDA-approved medical access, if you’ve got state-regulated access, you’ve got decriminalization and you’ve got spiritual practice, then you have all the valuable and important different frameworks for different kinds of people and for different needs,” he said. “And that’s where states can really play the most important role, developing all those different avenues.”