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I was on a day bed deep in East Portland when the drugs took hold.
Inside my eye mask, I watched the steel superstructure of a new skyscraper rise, floor by floor into a night sky. The girders morphed into crystalline pipes. Polygons of every color raced through them, heading to some machine to be assembled—if I had to guess—into rainbows. The pipes became octopus tentacles, curling and unfurling to the dreamy music on my headphones. The tentacles became ferns. Lots of ferns.
The light show, projected on my eyelids by my fungi-drenched synapses, was just the beginning of my first legal trip on psychedelic mushrooms. During the next four hours, I would experience a suitcase-sized Whitman’s Sampler of human emotion, some of the chocolates filled with luscious vanilla cream and others with shit. And that was the point.
Unlike many trippers, I didn’t have revelations that sent me bolt upright looking for pen and paper. But I did have some insights that still held water a week later: There’s a fine line between fear and awe; we shouldn’t squander our trauma; and psilocybin can ease the rumination that comes with obsessive-compulsive disorder, at least temporarily.
I’ve been writing about Oregon’s legal psilocybin program for four years. I’ve examined its growing pains, nitpicked its fee structure, and documented its underground alternatives.
I’ve also done mushrooms, first in high school in Colorado and then in college. After a decadeslong hiatus, I returned to them after Michael Pollan made it safe to go back in the water with his bestselling book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, published in 2018. Rigorous clinical trials have shown that a single psilocybin experience can ease treatment-resistant depression and curb heavy drinking. Other studies suggest the compound can help with post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic pain.
But I’d never taken a legal trip, an option afforded by Ballot Measure 109, passed in November 2020. Oregonians made a big request of our state’s government when they made mushrooms legal. Psilocybin, found in over 200 species of mushrooms, is still considered a Schedule I drug, meaning the federal government sees “a high potential for abuse.”
After the measure passed, the Oregon Health Authority had to craft a system that would keep people safe and keep the feds at bay, demands that added bureaucracy and cost. Psilocybin mushrooms may be consumed only in “service centers,” which tend to look like your doctor’s office, if your doctor were Deepak Chopra.
Because they handle an illegal drug, the centers must have a 200-pound safe and an elaborate security system. They can’t be within 1,000 feet of a school. They must pay the state $10,000 a year to operate. Trippers must be supervised at all times by a facilitator who has completed at least 128 hours of education at an accredited training program.
All of these requirements conspire to push the price of a legal trip skyward. Prices at EPIC Healing Eugene, the first service center in the state to open, start at $2,500 for an individual trip. The Immersive Psilocybin Center in Slabtown starts at $1,300, a deal by comparison.
Such prices offend Oregonians who have bent over in Northwest cow pastures for decades looking for Psilocybe semilanceata—liberty caps—and tripping however they like. In the legal program, they see the Man stomping on their buzz, for money.
The result, believe it or not, is that Oregon’s legal psilocybin is a bit like Portland’s old ordinance on backyard chickens: Lots of people had birds, but very few people bothered to pay the licensing fee. Chances are, someone on your block has a couple of super-sterile plastic tubs in their basement with psychedelic mushrooms poking up out of a mix of coffee grounds and coconut husks, right now. Also likely: A facilitator in your neighborhood is leading underground trips at home or guiding out-of-towners at an Airbnb.
That’s what the legal industry is up against. Unable to compete, some certified service centers have already closed. Why do a legal trip when the underground can be so much cheaper?
One man hasn’t given up. Dr. Eric Lee, founder of the Space Psychedelic Clinic at Northeast 111th Avenue and Weidler Street, emailed in June to tell me he offered the lowest-priced state-sanctioned trip in Oregon: $900.
That includes about eight hours of one-on-one preparation with a facilitator, the session itself, and the integration afterward. It also includes a room rental at Space and up to 50 milligrams of psilocybin (about 6 to 8 grams of unprocessed mushrooms).
“This isn’t going to be a big moneymaker,” Lee says. “There are some things as a society that we shouldn’t maximize profit from, and mental health is one of them.”
Whatever Lee’s motivation, a cheap trip was news. But I got to thinking: Instead of writing about the cheapest trip in town, what if I took the cheapest trip in town? WW had once paid a writer to live on nothing but beer for a week. This was a bona fide clinical trial, by comparison. And if WW, a scrappy alt-weekly, was going to pay for a trip, I would have to fly economy.
My editor said yes. I set aside a Saturday in August and booked my voyage.
Lee’s first email came at the right time. I struggled through the worst health crisis of my life last year, after running myself down at work, fretting incessantly about the election, and then getting COVID. For two months, I could barely leave bed except to lie on the couch.
I’ll never know for sure, but I think COVID lingered, triggering my obsessive-compulsive disorder, which shows up like a swarm of horseflies in my head every few years. When the COVID didn’t lift, I began to obsess about being fatigued forever. Before it struck, I had been the guy who goes to the gym, bikes to work, bikes home, eats dinner, then plants dahlias in the dark with a headlamp after cleaning out the fish tank and mopping the kitchen (OCD has its merits).
I’ve had the disease all my life, but it went from bothersome to brutal after I took a malaria medication called Lariam during a five-month trip in Southeast Asia in 1991. Lariam was developed by the U.S. Army and marketed to the public two years before. All the German travelers we met said it was dangerous. I should have listened. There were class action lawsuits against Roche, the company that distributed the shit. One of them said Lariam caused “paranoia, hallucinations, and suicidal ideations,” and that the symptoms could be permanent.
I got the paranoia. I spent five months imagining that I’d contracted HIV from a jungle guide in Sumatra who hugged my scraped-up knee with his hands; that my wife got it from a pet monkey that bit her in a guesthouse in Malacca, Malaysia, or the needle a doctor there used to give her a tetanus shot after she fell in an open sewer.
Thanks to the combination of my brain chemistry and Lariam, I started contracting HIV from mundane things: a filthy toilet in Nepal, dried blood in a shower in Bangkok. And the panic followed me home. In New York, I contracted HIV from the subway monthly.
I finally got on medication about four years later, and things improved. I had kids, which was the best thing I could do because they gave me something real to worry about. But the second and last one went off to college two years ago, and my OCD started tearing up my mind like a golden retriever left for too long in a one-bedroom apartment.
Then, I got COVID, and collapsed. The relentless fatigue prompted what I believe was a monthlong panic attack that exhausted me even more. I called it The Darkness.
I tried everything. Talk therapy, an arsenal of antidepressants, a narcolepsy drug called modafinil, ashwagandha, adrenal supplements, probiotics, ketamine, Wim Hof breathing, visceral manipulation. I re-created confrontations with my alcoholic father to get rid of anger I was likely carrying. I did an eight-week intensive outpatient anxiety program.
Thankfully, my stalwart OCD therapist, Dr. Elyse Conterno, stuck with me, and I stuck with her Exposure and Response Prevention method, where you systematically confront the things that freak you out, then show your nervous system that you’re not in real danger and don’t need compulsions—like Googling “long covid duration”—to calm yourself down (which never, ever works for an OCD sufferer).
I’ve learned that ERP makes a real difference, but it’s not easy, and it takes time. There is evidence that psilocybin can alleviate OCD. Why not add it as an adjunct therapy? Why not make a guided trip a kind of capstone project after a year of healing?
Right around then, Dr. Lee emailed me.
I was intrigued and went out to visit. An Ohio native, Lee, 37, is a cheerful man with a sharp eye for style, and numbers. He earned his medical degree from the University of Toledo in 2015 and practiced for four years before starting Green Mind Physicians, a company that certified people for medical cannabis cards, online, in several states.
Three years ago, psilocybin helped him pull out of a dive, he says. Lee credits a specific trip in 2022: “I was at a low point in my life, and I had an important trip with a special group of friends. That feeling of acceptance and community was the inspiration for Space.” He sold Green Minds in 2023 (at a profit) and went to work on psilocybin.
Lee says he can charge less because he bought a building beyond the city center (and close to the airport) and remodeled it himself. He also credits his facilitators who are willing to work for less, but more often. Working as independent contractors, they take home about $600 of the $900 fee.
Lee wants to be the Marshalls of mushrooms because he thinks the price is just too damn high. He’s driving prices lower by offering group trips for up to six people at $475 a head. He even lets people pay in installments, with just $150 down.
“The impetus was to take care of Oregonians, and we’re not doing that with this cottage industry,” Lee says. “We’re only serving one kind of person: someone rich from out of state.”
Lee is also an entrepreneur who expects to stay in the black by hosting trips in volume. He has no interest in becoming a facilitator (not his strength, he says). He’d rather work on driving down costs so more people can afford psilocybin services.
A legal, guided trip is most often a scripted affair, driven by decades of research that began with LSD in—of all places—Weyburn, Saskatchewan, in 1953. Researchers at the hospital there were looking for treatments for schizophrenia and alcoholism. They were mindful of setting, which must be “comfortable and quiet,” they wrote later, with enough “chesterfields, cots or beds so that each person who has had the drug has a place to stretch out comfortably.”
Alfred Hubbard, a bootlegging Seattle inventor who became known as the Johnny Appleseed of LSD for introducing it to luminaries like Aldous Huxley, visited Saskatchewan and recommended music be included in the sessions. Bill Richards, a psychologist, likely compiled the first trip playlist while researching psychedelics at Spring Grove Hospital in Catonsville, Md.
“We were working with 33 rpm and turntables, and always trying to decide what record to play next,” Richards told a Johns Hopkins University publication in 2020. “We developed a certain intuitive list of favorites that just seemed to work well for people.”
Over time, Richards’ picks became the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Playlist, available on Spotify and YouTube. Much of the list is classical, with interludes of yogic chants, some Gypsy Kings, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Paul Horn, and Enya.
Leo Zeff, a Jungian psychologist in Oakland, Calif., appears to be the first clinician to recommend eye masks, which send trippers inward, where the real work gets done. Zeff guided more than 4,000 people on underground trips in the 1960s and 1970s.
My trip started with Lee recommending a facilitator, someone trained to sit with people and help them along if trouble arises. Lee connected me with Michele Koh Morollo, a former journalist with a master’s of science in psychology.
Michele grew up in Singapore and had to fly back to the drug-persecuting island nation in her pajamas while having a bad trip in Perth at 17. With real-world experience, the master’s degree, and 10 months of facilitator training, Michele knows the terrain.
We met on Zoom, and Michele told me how to prepare. The nuts and bolts: Don’t eat for three hours before, wear something comfortable, bring a snack, water and any medications you might need. Mushrooms can upset your stomach, so be prepared. The bigger picture: An eye-masked, headphoned trip isn’t always fun. It could get bumpy, depending on the size of my demons and how willing I was to face them. Tripping like this can be tantamount to strolling a dark cave with a paring knife and taunting the dragon to come out.
Most importantly, I set my intention for the trip. That was easy. After The Darkness and the OCD spasm that drove it, I wanted my thoughts to be less sticky. Way less sticky. I wanted to ruminate much less about COVID, HIV, climate change and Donald Trump.
A piece of advice Michele offers for afterward: Don’t do anything drastic right after. Don’t divorce your partner, quit your job, buy a Ferrari, or adopt a litter of bulldogs for at least 30 days.
Check, check and check. A few days later, my wife and son (home before starting a Ph.D.) drove me to the Space Psychedelic Clinic. Having a ride home is required by the state. We joked on the way that all of my son’s East Coast friends—who already think his family is weird because we compost—were going to love this woo-woo shit.
Michele and I made some small talk, mostly because I was nervous. All the prep made me feel like I was going someplace really bizarre, like Neptune, or Oklahoma City. During the week, I had gotten vibes like I was heading for an assisted suicide. In a way, I was. On truly heroic doses, a tripper’s ego can die, so they can’t distinguish between themselves and the rest of the universe.
Lee brought in a cup of tea with lemon, honey and a bunch of ground mushrooms. Lemon helps metabolize psilocybin, getting you to cruising altitude more quickly. It also masks the barnyard taste of the mushrooms.
Michele and I talked for a few more minutes. I felt as if I’d had a double espresso with a half ounce of absinthe. I laid down amid a pile of pillows on the bed. Michele led me through some deep breaths while I clenched and released my muscles. I began to feel light, like you do just as you crest the first hill on a roller coaster and before you descend.
I put on the eye mask and headphones, and Michele draped me in a blanket. I let her curate the music. She chose the Copenhagen Music Program for Psilocybin, developed by psychedelic researchers in Denmark, the U.S. and Norway. Like the Hopkins playlist, Copenhagen starts off easy with some classical, some lovely Nordic tracks, some Ludovico Einaudi, and—strangely, but it worked—“Hymn of the Cherubim” by the USSR Ministry of Culture Chamber Choir.
Michele checked in on me at some point early on. She told me later that the beginning is stressful for facilitators because it can become clear early on whether she’s going to spend the next five hours holding someone’s hand while they thrash and weep, plumbing the depths of the trauma that we all carry, or she’s going to get some reading done with one eye on her psychonaut. She was relieved when her check-in prompted goofy laughter, not shrieking dread.
One thing that sucks about being a person on mushrooms is that you have to pee. The first time I went, I got stuck in the bathroom, dazzled by a geometric print that sent polygons out of the frame toward me. By the third time, I was so into my inner journey that I rushed back, like someone in a theater afraid of missing too much of a good movie.
After about two hours, I felt hungry and asked about eating. Here, Michele gave me some of her best advice: Don’t do it. Food would take me out of the journey, halfway.
Soon after, a Hindu mantra came on my headphones: “Om Namah Shivaya” (it means “adoration to Lord Shiva,” I learned later). One stanza to the next, I felt as if I were being rolled flat under a giant marble, then carried on a litter to, like, the center of the universe. I pushed into some major exposure therapy. I thought about those months on the couch, when I was resigned to having COVID-induced chronic fatigue forever. I forced myself to revisit it.
After months of ERP, I had quit seeking reassurance from my wife and from the internet. But those are actions. Thoughts are another matter. I think psilocybin may have acted like a solvent, diluting my obsessive thoughts. On the trip, I watched them evaporate. I conjure that effect now to prevent a response when OCD grabs me by the neck.
So, was an expensive, legal trip worth it, as opposed to an underground one, which might have produced the same relief? I think it was, mostly because it put my mind at ease. The purity of the drugs is guaranteed at a service center. Facilitators are guaranteed to be trained, unlike in the underground, where they might be. And, though it was unlikely, I didn’t have to worry about cops bursting through the door looking for bootleg shrooms.
I also liked the fact that Michele made a living wage, even at Space’s bargain price. She has taken heat from facilitators in the underground who say she has sold out to the Man.
Sure, legal psilocybin is expensive, and the price favors the wealthy. But people like Lee and Andreas Met, co-founder, along with his wife, Jennifer, and daughter Isabella, of Satya Therapeutics in Ashland, are driving costs down. (Satya’s journeys start at $1,050.) Many service centers also offer financial aid.
After years of bird-dogging a system that has failed to pay for itself with fees, as promised, and of cataloging failed service centers and fraudulent training programs, this skeptic thinks Oregon should stay the course. There is value in the scripted, legal journey, no matter where it takes you.
