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TV crews erected tripods. A din rose in the hallway beyond. The Oregon Health & Science University president and a man he described as one of the institution’s star researchers settled in behind the mic.
The news they had to share was this: Shrooms—at least when taken under the supervision of a licensed facilitator—can be pretty awesome. Life changing, even. Moreover, the drugs seem for most people to pose relatively little danger.
“I have been persuaded,” the researcher Dr. Todd Korthuis, the co-director of the Oregon Psychedelic Evaluation Nexus, said with a smile. “The data are very clear that the Oregon Psilocybin Services program in fact is safe. And that it achieves substantial benefits in terms of mental health and well-being and life satisfaction at three months.”
The data here comes from the most substantial review to date of Oregon’s first-in-the-nation legalized psilocybin program. More than 20,000 people have tripped through the program thus far. And the study, released this week in the journal JAMA Network Open, studied 346 of them, who took psilocybin at Oregon service centers between 2024 and 2026, collecting their testimonials in periodic check-ins one week, one month, and three months after their trip.
Roughly 2% reported the experience as harmful, while more than 90% reported benefits, with three in five ranking the trip among the 10 most meaningful experiences of their lives. The study said participants reported improved well being—and reduced depression, anxiety and symptoms of PTSD.
Future studies will assess longer time horizons, and this one has its limitations. But it adds to mounting evidence, including from prior clinical trials, of the therapeutic potential of psilocybin, the psychedelic component of magic mushrooms. And Korthuis, a longtime OHSU addiction researcher, says this first big study of the Oregon non-clinical program gives policymakers plenty to chew on: Counties in the state that opted not to allow psilocybin service centers within their jurisdiction now have less justification for holding out. And researchers and grant makers now have more reason to gather further, more rigorous data on how and for whom psilocybin may be worth a try.
Of course, what will be notable to many is probably less the findings in themselves—plenty of people, perhaps your uncle, could have told you anecdotally about the power of shrooms—than the fact that at long last, the medical community is starting to stamp its official imprimatur on a drug class it long shunned.
Indeed, years after Oregon started legalizing service centers after passing Ballot Measure 109, the scene at OHSU Wednesday embodied the transformation under way. The news conference took place in a conference room at the Knight Cancer Institute, which was surrounded by signs directing attendees of the “Psychedelic Innovation Summit.” OHSU President Shereef Elnahal led off the program with remarks, giving way to speakers on psychedelic research, the Oregon model, longitudinal studies, and a reception.
In the news event, held before the summit kicked off, Elnahal reflected on what took so long. He said that he himself mainly thought of psilocybin as a party drug until, while he was undersecretary at the Department of Veterans Affairs, researchers and military veterans—some of whom, facing severe mental health struggles, had to schlep to Mexico to take a course of the psychedelic Ibogaine—compelled him to see things otherwise.
He spoke of a military veteran made paranoid by undiagnosed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and how a clinical trial with MDMA changed his life. Of a woman who faced sexual trauma in the military—which a psychedelic clinical trial helped her transcend.
The stigma against psychedelics runs deep. Elnahal blamed the war on drugs: “one of the worst domestic policies this country has ever had, in my view.” Beyond its impact on minority communities, he said the decades-long policy approach meant little consideration and, crucially, government funding, went to exploring how psychedelics might aid people’s mental health.
“It’s not like we didn’t know that there was promise,” he said—pointing out that indigenous groups have used psychedelics and related drugs for centuries. What changed, he said, is that researchers had some humility, learned from these communities, and graduated from a “policy mindset that clearly hasn’t worked”—leading to a “realization that we need to fund this research.”
Still, despite increasingly permissive attitudes by the Biden and now the Trump administration, psilocybin remains a Schedule I drug—the most restricted class in federal guidelines. And even as other states, like Colorado, are rolling out psychedelic programs, it’s not like the still-nascent industry in Oregon is thriving. For many, the price of a legal trip, which is not something insurers will fund, remains far out of reach as Oregon service centers strain and close under the costs and bureaucratic red tape tied in part to the elaborate ongoing dance around federal law.
In other words, the day will not soon come when someone can easily take a trip courtesy of, say, the largely federally-funded Oregon Health Plan. But it’s not an impossibility, and health leaders are imagining the potential of a major new path for everyday people to legally improve their mental health.
“If in fact the effects that we’re seeing out of Todd’s study are durable and last years after—not just three months, six months—then we’re talking about an implication,” Elnahal says, “where people can go through a session, or a few sessions with a certain cost that dwarfs the cost of having to take a drug for the rest of your life.”
