Portland facility works to break down cultural barriers to psilocybin therapy

Inside a nondescript building on Northeast Broadway in Portland, Claudia Cuentas lights a stick of Palo Santo wood, which fills the room with a spicy, sweet scent that tickles the back of your throat.

She then grabs a shaker and performs a chant of gratitude to what she calls “the little children of the light.”

She’s singing about the psilocybin molecule, which has been a legal mode of healing in Oregon for over a year now.

Cuentas is a co-founder of the Cora Center, which opened earlier this year. It’s the first such facility in the state that is run by majority BIPOC and LGBTQ+ facilitators. It specializes in communal psilocybin sessions with clients from those groups. Cuentas says clients feel more at ease when they’re surrounded by people with similar backgrounds.

“To heal, we must relax. And to relax, we must feel safe. And to feel safe, we must trust,” Cuentas says.

Earning trust can be hard, especially in the marginalized communities that the Cora Center serves. BIPOC and LGBTQ+ clients can often feel extra hesitancy to take psilocybin because of racial trauma, a history with the war on drugs or the fact that it’s still illegal under federal law.

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Rebecca Martinez is a co-founder of the Cora Center, and the executive director of the Alma Institute, which trains and certifies facilitators from these groups. A Chicana raised in Portland, she says it can be helpful if a facilitator and participant share a background and history.

“I believe that can build rapport and trust between a facilitator and a participant,” Martinez says, “which opens up more space to be vulnerable, more space to maybe go deeper and uncover some of the things that mushrooms could help bring up.”

After Oregon voters approved Measure 109 in 2020, the state got to work drafting rules around the new legal psilocybin program. One of them is a requirement that every licensee submit a social equity plan, which specifically details how they will help certain communities that have been harmed by systemic inequities.

Martinez was on the subcommittee that came up with that rule, which she calls a win. But she says would-be clients of color might still be hesitant because of the cultural baggage psilocybin carries.

“Add 50 years of drug war and all of the stigma that psilocybin mushrooms still carry because they’re associated with crime and with white hippie culture,“ Martinez says. “Particularly Black communities, but a lot of communities of color, don’t want to be associated with [that] because they’ve been so harmed by the drug war.”

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The state of Oregon recognizes those hurdles. Angela Allbee, manager of the Oregon Psilocybin Services section, says, “We understand that many people belong to intersecting communities that experience discrimination and disadvantage, specifically when working within systems and institutions. It is our priority to reduce harm to communities and make inclusivity a standard of practice rather than an exception.”

Adrian Padilla went through a group psilocybin session at the Cora Center last June. He’s a Puerto Rican American who was trying to work through some sexual trauma he experienced as a kid.

He says he benefited greatly from what the center calls culturally attuned care, meaning he was surrounded by fellow brown faces, speaking Spanish.

“Being a brown person here in Portland, the experience is different from a white person. And I often feel like I’m sharing white spaces,” Padilla says. “And so for me to have a place where we are the majority feels safe.”

Just getting into a position to provide that care can be extremely expensive. It costs up to $10,000 to go through the licensed training program to become a facilitator, and those costs get passed on to clients.

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There is help available, however.

Sam Chapman is the former executive director of the Healing Advocacy Fund, which gives scholarships to would-be facilitators of color. Chapman says, “We, along with other organizations, have deployed hundreds of thousands of dollars into grant scholarships for various diversities of populations that say, ‘I want to go back and serve my population, but I can’t afford it and I just need some assistance in being able to get through the program.’”

It’s too early to know if the state’s goals of increasing access to psilocybin services are paying off, but more data is coming. State law mandates the collection and sharing of information about clients based on their race, ethnicity, language, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity. We should get those numbers in the first quarter of next year.

Back at the Cora Center, Claudia Cuentas sits alongside a kind of altar she uses when leading group sessions. It’s a traditional mesa, with herbs, toys and other items that have meaning for a psilocybin journey.

Cuentas is a Peruvian immigrant, with roots in the Aymara and Quechua people of South America. She recognizes the difficulty of bringing her ancestors’ healing practices into a modern legal framework, but she embraces the push to bring them to everyone.

“I had to make a decision. Do I go and be part of this movement, or do I fight the movement?” Cuentas says. “As somebody that has been working for the last 20 years with my teachers to honor what they passed on to me, I will be part of the movement and try to educate from the inside.”

OPB‘s “Superabundant” dove deep into the history of psilocybin and psilocybin-assisted therapy in Oregon in 2023. Watch the short documentary in the video player below.