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After Oregon voters created Oregon’s legal psychedelic medicine program, among the earliest and largest operations to emerge was InnerTrek.
Over three years at its large Central Eastside tower office, the company facilitated psychedelic group sessions for more than 1,200 clients, operations director Lisa Snyder says. These ranged from veterans, to study participants, to women’s groups, to trainees who sought to one day become psychedelic facilitators themselves.
Now, InnerTrek, a company run by Tom Eckert, a key figure in the development of Oregon’s psychedelic program, says it is letting its lease expire as it stops facilitating psilocybin sessions in the state. Instead, it says, it will lean into its initial identity as a training program tasked with educating new cohorts of facilitators from around the country. The Portland Business Journal first reported the closure.
The move comes at a time of great change in the national psychedelic landscape. The Trump administration is open to the therapeutic benefits of the drugs, and states like New Mexico and Colorado are launching programs of their own.
Oregon is no longer the only place in America to legally trip.
“The truth is, a lot of our students would prefer to go to Colorado than Oregon for their practicums,” Snyder says, citing the former state’s central location, which appeals to a trainee cohort that, she says, hails from an ever wider geographic range.
Now, she says InnerTrek, which runs one of more than 10 active psilocybin training programs approved by Oregon authorities, is leaning into education harder. It will run virtual classes remotely and then hold for a few in-person weekends “intensives” at the “Palais de Leon” short-term rental in Lake Oswego, the mansion tied to the ex-CEO of Dave’s Killer Bread. Meanwhile, Snyder says, InnerTrek will hold its periodic practical sessions, in which facilitators get actual experience leading psychedelic trips, in Golden, Colo.
But it will have no physical service center of its own. In her phone interview with WW, Snyder emphasized that the closure should not be seen as part of the broader story of psilocybin service centers in Oregon shuttering after struggling to break even while complying with state regulations.
Indeed, she says service centers—InnerTrek is currently one of 20 actively listed in Oregon’s database—do face heavy regulations and receive little support from agencies like Travel Oregon and Travel Portland that “want nothing to do with psilocybin.” And she says Oregon could make it easier to run leaner “microservice centers,” like Colorado does.
But Snyder insists the dynamic at play here is simpler. She has worked in the cannabis industry, she says, and operators simply come and go. “Our lease is done,” she says. “Imagine hosting thousands of psilocybin journeys for hours at a time. At some point in time, you’re going to be like, ‘I’m tapped out, and I’m going to tap someone else in.’”
