Q&A: Colorado issued its first psilocybin healing center license. Here’s what to expect.

DENVER — Coloradans 21 and older will soon have access to psilocybin therapy to treat PTSD, depression, and other mental health challenges. 

Psilocybin therapy, now legal in Colorado and Oregon, uses psychedelic mushrooms to treat a wide range of mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety, PTSD, and eating disorders. Research has shown that individuals who haven’t responded well to traditional treatments — such as talk therapy or antidepressants — often experience significant improvement with psilocybin therapy.

People will also be allowed to grow their own mushrooms at home for personal use.

The Department of Revenue and the Department of Regulatory Agencies — the two bodies overseeing licensing for psilocybin healing centers — began accepting applications from natural medicine businesses and facilitators December 31, 2024.

In March, the Department of Revenue issued its first healing center license to The Center Origin in Denver.

Rocky Mountain PBS spoke with Allison Robinette, the director of policy and regulatory affairs at the Department of Revenue Natural Medicine Division, and Amelia Myers, the department’s senior policy advisor, to learn more about what Coloradans can expect when seeking psilocybin therapy.

Allison Robinette: “Natural medicine business” is the umbrella term for the four different licensing types: healing centers, cultivation facilities, product manufacturing facilities and testing facilities. Healing centers are the only of the four open to the public.

Amelia Myers: Anyone over 21 can walk into a healing center in the same way they could walk into a bar or dispensary. Who can access natural medicine services, which includes the preparation session, administration and initiation with a licensed facilitator is determined by the patient and the facilitator to determine if this person is a good fit.

 

Any adult is open to explore a healing center and can meet with a facilitator and then that decision on whether to engage and have an administrative session is really determined by the facilitator, who is some kind of licensed mental health professional, and the patient. 

AR: As of now, no. Proposition 122, which was passed by voters in 2022, placed a clear prohibition on retail for personal use. People can grow their own supply and are free to gift that to other adults over 21, but the law prohibits sale. What you’re really paying for as a participant in a healing center is the therapy itself, not the product.

My sense, based on conversations with lawmakers, is that voters and lawmakers really wanted to treat this as a mental health modality and keep it constrained to the therapeutic model, rather than the commercial model like we see in the cannabis space.

But the legislature and the voters have power to reshape this in the future. So it’s not that we could never have dispensaries for mushrooms, but that isn’t how the current law is written.

AR: The legislature took up the issue in April 2023 after voters made their decision in November 2022. The legislature split responsibilities between the departments of revenue and regulatory agencies. We started our implementation work at the end of May 2023. We started with meeting with local jurisdictions, with community members, with law enforcement. We started our official rulemaking process from March to October of 2024. All of this geared us up to accepting applications at the beginning of December.

AM: In the regulated space, they'll be grown at a licensed cultivation facility. The facilities have a similar application process as healing centers. While they’re not required to be 1,0000 feet from a licensed childcare center by state laws, they do have to comply with local jurisdictions. What we've seen the last few months is local jurisdictions say any business must be 1,000 feet from a school and must be in certain zones.

Our work includes looking at what the local requirements are, if this cultivation facility is in the right zone, and if they are complying with those local requirements.

There will be a list of cultivation facilities and a licensing lookup tool on our website where you can see what kinds of licenses are issued where.

AR: Soon. Hopefully very soon. We have a handful, maybe a dozen, of cultivation applications. We’re really cognizant of the supply chain. We have a licensed healing center, but they can only access regulated natural medicine when we have a licensed cultivator approved to provide that natural medicine, which we don’t have right now. So, we’re very cognizant that we’re going to be issuing these licenses in a way that will really set everyone up for success and to be compliant.

AR: Licensed therapists who have to go through a certain training requirement that's been set by our partners at DORA and then get a license through DORA. It includes classroom training as well as practicum training, and there are some different licenses for facilitators. For example, a licensed psychiatrist could become what we’re calling a clinical facilitator, and essentially, they would be able to treat someone who has diagnosed PTSD or treatment-resistant depression. On the other hand, some facilitators who don’t have a secondary license or professional degree could still go through the training program and provide services to someone who’s looking for self-improvement therapy or just more general mental health services. We've seen a lot of that in Oregon.

AM: I think it could be a range. Our healing center licenses are divided into two different subtypes: one is what we’re calling a micro-healing center, we created this subtype of a license because we heard from a lot of working therapists now that they want to be able to offer natural medicine services to their existing patients or clients and they just want to incorporate this modality into what they’re already doing, so not what they’re only doing but just another therapy they can offer. Practicing therapists who want to offer this as a one-off as determined by patients.

We also know there's interest in folks opening up retreats, like mountain retreat settings or group settings. We've heard really fun ones.

Some folks have coffee shop ideas or want to give out free microdoses, so there's a range of things we've been seeing in this space.

We’ve also seen body workers interested in putting this into physical therapy practice, people interested in workout healing centers where people do a workout with their microdose. So it's really a range from the community and it’s been interesting to see the different interests.

AR: No natural medicine can leave the healing center with a participant. It must be consumed in the healing center with the facilitator present for a set amount of time. 

That's based on safety, we want to make sure that anyone who’s consuming and under the influence isn’t just allowed to walk out and into the world even though they might still be experiencing their journey, so that's really the model. Strictly consumed on site, there's a very narrow allowance that we and our partners at DORA have worked together on and it's called authorized locations, essentially saying that in narrow circumstances, a facilitator may go to a participant’s home with the natural medicine to do an in-home facilitation session, but there are rigorous standards and requirements for what that means. For example, end-of-life care. In that situation, the facilitator picks up the medicine from a licensed business, it’s in a child-resistant package, they take it to the patient’s home and any amount left over must be returned to the licensee for destruction.

We’re really trying to keep it in a closed loop.