Study Finds Oregon's Legal Psilocybin Program Largely Safe
Research on nearly 350 people who used magic mushrooms at Oregon's licensed centers found most described the experience as beneficial with few serious adverse reactions.
A new study of Oregon's state-licensed psilocybin program, the first of its kind in the U.S., offers a largely favorable picture of the drug's real-world use outside a medical setting.
The research, based on almost 350 people who took psilocybin at state-licensed centers, is the most rigorous analysis yet of the regulated program. It was published Wednesday in the medical journal JAMA Network Open.
Most participants described their experience as beneficial, and more than half ranked it among the most meaningful experiences of their lives. Only a small number had what researchers classified as "serious adverse reactions."
"The data has swayed me," said Dr. Todd Korthuis, who led the research team at Oregon Health & Science University, adding that he was initially skeptical about dosing people with psilocybin outside a tightly controlled medical setting. "These results are very reassuring."
Oregon voters approved the nonmedical psilocybin model in 2020, allowing most adults over 21 to take the drug under a facilitator's supervision without a prescription. More than 20,000 people have gone through the program since it launched about three years ago, though the study sample was much smaller and skewed white, college-educated and higher-income.
Balázs Szigeti, a clinical data scientist at the University of California, San Francisco who was not involved in the study, said the number of adverse events was roughly what would be expected from other psychiatric interventions. "To see that the whole thing did not blow up in this regulated business environment is definitely good news for psilocybin," he said.
The most serious issues involved behavioral rather than physical health. One person was hospitalized after a violent reaction, and another sought emergency care for anxiety. One week after their session, three participants reported new thoughts of dying or suicide; that number doubled by the three-month mark.
Albert Garcia-Romeu, a psychiatry professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, cautioned that the small, self-selected study sample may not reflect everyone's experience, noting he has spoken with people from Oregon who struggled afterward. Korthuis said his team plans to track a larger sample through an ongoing research initiative.
This article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI), in accordance with our editorial policy.
