Many users of Oregon’s new legal psilocybin clinics appear to come from out of state

Though data about clients at Oregon’s new legal psilocybin clinics is protected by privacy rules, it appears that many are coming from outside the state. Freelance journalist Grant Stringer talked to multiple clinic owners and clients in a story for the Oregon Capital Chronicle. We talk to him about what he learned.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. It’s now been about five months since the first psilocybin service centers in Oregon opened. As a reminder, these are the businesses where people can take the hallucinogenic drug in a supervised setting. They are a result of Oregon’s first in the nation voter-passed law. Data about clients at these centers is protected by privacy rules, but according to new reporting by the Portland-based freelance journalist Grant Stringer, the majority of people are coming from out of state. Stringer talked to multiple service center owners and clients in a story for the Oregon Capital Chronicle and he joins us now. Welcome to the show.

Grant Stringer: Hi, thanks for having me.

Miller: So what’s the range you heard for the percentage of clients who are coming from out of state?

Stringer: I spoke with two folks who run service centers in Ashland and they said that about 80% of folks - or more - seem to be coming from out of state. I also spoke with someone who runs a service center in Portland and he’s saying as many as 95% of people are coming from out of state or even internationally,

Miller: 95%. It was striking to me that even for the psilocybin centers in Ashland that most of their out-of-state clients are not coming from California, obviously just a handful of miles away. So, where are folks coming from?

Stringer: There are not that many Californians crossing the border, which was surprising to me as well. People are actually coming from all over the country. A lot of people are coming from the east coast. I heard Florida, New York and South Carolina, and also in the Midwest. Texas, Oklahoma, and folks who are flying in from Japan.

Miller: How did service center owners explain this?

Stringer: They pointed to a number of factors [and] three things really were common themes here. One is that this has gotten a huge amount of national press and there’s just a lot of buzz and excitement nationally about what Oregon is doing. We remain the only state in the country where you can do psilocybin legally right now, although Colorado is setting up its own system, so that’s going to change soon.

The other thing is that mental health issues are so pervasive in the States and we have vast swaths of the population now who have been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, [and] PTSD. Substance abuse disorders were on the rise during the pandemic. So people are really looking for ways to treat those conditions. And that is, in large part, why people seem to be coming from out of state.

The third thing I heard is that it is really expensive to do mushrooms legally in Oregon at the moment, and we have more of a casual culture of mushroom use here in Oregon that definitely doesn’t exist in other states. So what I heard was speculation that a lot of people just don’t want to spend the money. They’re kind of annoyed that it’s so expensive, and I’m talking about folks who are based in Oregon...

Miller: I wonder if that might also be the case for people in California or in Washington where it’s, I guess, just easier for people in these states to access mushrooms if they want them, than I imagine somebody in South Carolina or Florida.

You did note that one of the Portland centers is 10 minutes from the Portland International Airport and on their website they tout this and they say that their proximity makes it, “ideal for the psychedelic tourist.” So, are these centers also actively trying to attract people from far away?

Stringer: I don’t know if they’re actively trying to recruit people to come from out of state, but they’re certainly not turning anyone away. It’s really expensive to get a license for these facilities. It’s $10,000 annually, plus a whole lot more money for insurance and other regulatory obligations. So, they want clients and they’re happy to serve as many people as possible. But, it’s not only just craving entrepreneurship here, the people running these service centers and who are still taking these trips really believe in mushrooms and psilocybin, and they believe that it can heal people and that’s what I found.

Miller: Well, could you tell us the story of JC Harvey? He’s a client from Oklahoma who you talked to.

Stringer: JC is wonderful. He’s 35 years old. He’s from this town called Yukon Oklahoma, which is on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. He has a family and he has struggled with PTSD and really, really severe depression for about half of his life. And he said that that has just gotten worse and worse really, as the years have ticked by. He’s experienced tragedy, and he took the traditional route to try and treat his depression and other conditions, but he said just therapy didn’t really help him a whole lot. He was also on SSRI’s, which are a group of antidepressant medications. He was on Prozac and he said it just made him feel like a zombie. He’s gone on and off meds for a long time, he has attempted suicide, and last year he told me that he was really at the end of his line and was desperate.

So he found an article about psilocybin. He did a ton of research, which is really typical for people who don’t have any experience with psilocybin and want to treat something. He flew into Medford, drove to Ashland from there, and did psilocybin at Satya Therapeutics, which is a service center in Ashland. He was seeking treatment and he found it. The experience was really powerful for him, both in a positive way and a negative way - a profoundly negative way. Actually, most of the experience itself was terrifying to him. I mean, he lost all touch with reality. He didn’t even know who his facilitator was. He had forgotten that he had taken mushrooms. This was over the span of six hours and it felt like an eternity to him.

But when I talked to him it was a few weeks after the experience, and it really helped his depression. He actually said he had no symptoms at all and was really optimistic about the future for the first time in years. And as a kind of strange side effect, he told me that he used to drink huge amounts of soda. He was addicted to Dr. Pepper. And after using mushrooms, he was actually disgusted by the thought of drinking any soda, or sugar in general.

Miller: You know, it’s interesting, as you were describing his experience, it did remind me of a series of conversations we had in September with a woman who was in her 80′s, Vivian Anderson. The folks can listen to where, to me, the most striking similarity is the intensity of the experience, and the intense negative aspects, in many ways combined with what she saw as overall a beneficial experience. But the intensity in both of them, it seems, was overwhelming.

What other themes emerged in the conversations you had with other clients?

Stringer: Everyone I talked to had an overall positive experience and felt like they really benefited from psilocybin. One thing that emerged was that there is a question of dosing, and the industry is still trying to figure out how much to dose people. So I really want to make it clear that JC’s experience was super intense and that’s because he took the maximum dose that you can take in psilocybin. It really varies by the amount you take and the variety. He took by all estimates a massive dose. Others have micro-dosed and taken smaller doses. So their experiences can really be all across the board. And then I heard of really negative experiences too, although I didn’t talk with anyone who had one of those. And then there’s also a segment of clients who take mushrooms and don’t have much of an impact at all, whether it’s positive or negative.

Miller: How much do these service centers stay in touch with their clients after the post-psilocybin session, after the integration session?

Stringer: Like you said, there is a session after - it’s usually the next day or two after the psilocybin trip. And the idea is to try to incorporate the lessons that that person learned into their life, so it’s not a one-off, flash in the pan experience. But I’m not actually sure. I mean, the facilitators I spoke with said that they make an effort to stay in touch with people, but I don’t really know if that’s actually happening.

Miller: I want to turn to money. You mentioned it briefly as one of the reasons that you heard - that a lot of people are coming from out of state, people with means who don’t mind traveling, say 3,000 miles or more if they’re coming from Japan to have this experience. How much are people paying on average?

Stringer: I’ve heard of people paying upwards of $3,000 or more just for a single trip. That obviously doesn’t include the cost of flying over here, renting a car and putting yourself up in a hotel,

Miller: Which is thousands of dollars more, when you add all that up.

Stringer: Yeah, I spoke with one woman who flew in from South Carolina, and she said, all told the experience cost her $5,000 to $6,000. So it’s a huge amount of money. But the cost depends on which service center you go to, what your facilitators charge - which can really vary - and then also the cost of the mushrooms themselves, which isn’t that much. I think it’s like $50 to $100, depending on how much you take.

Miller: How many licensed service centers are there right now?

Stringer: There are almost 20. The department that oversees this in Oregon is the Oregon Health Authority, and they have been approving new service centers in a flurry.

Just since I started reporting the story, they approved five or six new ones..

Miller: Which I guess shows that the pipeline of all these different regulatory hurdles, more and more Oregonians are going through them and getting these businesses underway. Do you get the sense that there are enough customers for all these centers to stay afloat?

Stringer: Yeah, I would say of all of the problems and challenges of the industry right now, that is very low on the list. There is a huge interest in psilocybin, at least nationally, even if not many Oregonians themselves appear to be doing this in a legal, regulated setting. Most service centers seem to have waitlists. It can take customers a long time to get in and actually do the trip. The first service center in Oregon that opened is in Eugene. It’s called EPIC Healing Eugene. And they had a waitlist of 5,000 people in September. So there really is a huge interest in psilocybin.

Miller: A few weeks ago, and I imagine a lot of our listeners may remember this, it was national news when a long time commercial airline pilot was arrested at PDX after trying and nearly succeeding, terrifyingly, in crashing a plane full of passengers. The immediate headlines were that he had taken psilocybin recreationally before he boarded the plane. The story that eventually came out was more complicated. It turns out that he had been dealing with some serious untreated mental health issues and he took mushrooms with some friends two days before the flight. Experts say it’s highly unlikely that he would have still been experiencing a hallucinogenic trip. But the timing suggests that the mushrooms he did take before that contributed to some kind of long lasting break from reality. Has this story had any impact on the supervised scene?

Stringer: The short answer to that appears to be no, but it’s definitely part of the conversation. I spoke with one facilitator who is a licensed social worker and she said that clients have been asking her about it. I think this does speak to a bigger issue in Oregon’s psilocybin industry, which is that it’s open to everyone who’s 21 or older, but as part of the screening process, you’re not supposed to do psilocybin if you have a family history or personal history of conditions like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, because tripping can precipitate psychotic breaks from reality. And that’s something that the industry knows and is trying to prevent. But most people I talked to just chalked it up to a one-off tragedy and not really something that’s super relevant to the industry.

Miller: What else stood out to you as you were reporting this article?

Stringer: It’s fascinating to me for so many reasons, and I think that most people are really interested in how this industry is panning out. And the big thing that emerged for me is that the legal industry seems to be serving a totally different clientele from what I expected when Oregon voters legalized psilocybin. Like I said, people are coming from out of state, they appear to be using psilocybin for treatment. It really serves a different purpose than people who are trying to have fun, or gain some insight from using mushrooms, which is definitely the more traditional way that the people use psilocybin recreationally.

I talked to one person who flew in from Alaska and he had a lot of experience with psilocybin recreationally before he flew in, and he was like, yeah, this is totally different. And it can be very powerful and positive in this regulated setting, even if it does cost a ton of money. So he plans to fly in and try and do psilocybin at least annually, under the care of a facilitator.

Miller: Grant, thanks very much.

Stringer: Thanks. My pleasure.

Miller: Grant Stringer is a Portland-based freelance journalist.

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