Washington cities are decriminalizing magic mushrooms. Could a psychedelic ‘renaissance’ take hold statewide?

Statewide efforts to legalize psychedelic mushrooms in Washington have stalled due to conflicting visions, concerns about cost and equity, and worries that pharmaceutical companies will take control of a natural medicine that grows in abundance in the woods across the Northwest.

But beneath the fractured public debate, an underground network of advocates and activists is growing. Decriminalization efforts in cities and counties come at a moment when doctors and researchers are finding in clinical trials that psilocybin — the primary psychedelic compound in mushrooms — can help people who suffer from severe depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and addiction.

Meanwhile, a Washington doctor has filed a petition that is advancing through federal agencies to have psilocybin reclassified from a Schedule I to a Schedule II drug, which would allow for more controlled research and access. Dr. Sunil Aggarwal, a palliative care physician with the AIMS Institute in Seattle, may have an ally in Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has voiced support for legalizing psychedelics for mental health treatment.

All this begs the question: Is Washington state on the cusp of a “psychedelic renaissance”?

Dr. Charissa Fotinos, a family practice physician who specializes in addiction medicine, said she was caught off guard by the breadth of the psychedelic movement when she chaired the Washington Psilocybin Task Force in 2023.

“I had no idea the tendrils this thing has,” said Fotinos, deputy chief medical officer at the Washington Health Care Authority. “It really is mycelial. You see the little button, but the network is underground.”

The state task force — which included doctors, nurses, social workers, religious practitioners, veterans, psychologists, representatives from pharmaceutical labs, and state officials — had two objectives: update state lawmakers about the latest clinical research on psilocybin and evaluate what it would take to regulate clinical use of psilocybin in Washington.

Based on that mission, Fotinos thought the focus of the group’s meetings would be on the mounting evidence that supervised use of psilocybin is an effective treatment for depression, anxiety, drug addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“My eyes were opened,” she said. “I thought it was just, ‘Does it work for this clinical condition?’ It’s so much bigger than that.”

Psychedelic societies

As interest in mushrooms and their role in mental health and spirituality has grown, psychedelic societies have spread across the country. The Global Psychedelic Society lists almost 300 groups around the world, including 172 in the U.S. and 10 in Washington state.

Psychedelic societies believe in the powers of “entheogens” — psychoactive substances that induce altered states of consciousness — to help people reconnect to each other, themselves, and the natural world. In addition to psychedelic mushrooms, entheogens include ayahuasca, a South American psychoactive; ibogaine, a traditional African psychedelic plant medicine; and mescaline-containing cacti that grow in northern Mexico and the Southwest — basically, plants and fungi that induce what are informally called “trips.”

RELATED: What's an 'entheogen'? Magic mushrooms are now a low priority in Olympia

Psychedelic societies have missions similar to the national grassroots nonprofit Decriminalize Nature that started in Oakland, California, in 2019, the year Oakland became one of the first U.S. cities to decriminalize psilocybin.

At the core of the movement is the concept of “grow, gather, and gift” — people should be able to cultivate, harvest, and share plants with medicinal and spiritual qualities without going through pharmaceutical companies or a regulatory or commercialized framework.

Erin Reading, the co-founder of the Port Townsend Psychedelic Society, was inspired by the decriminalization efforts in Oakland to push for policy changes in Washington state.

Reading is also on the board of directors of REACH Washington, a nonprofit that opposed state measures to legalize psilocybin in clinical settings because they didn’t include decriminalization. As an alternative, REACH promoted a statewide initiative to decriminalize entheogens, but that effort stalled due to lack of funding.

“I am all about community and community access, and people having access to these plants without having to pay a lot of money or have it to be in very specific contexts,” Reading said.

Like many psychedelic societies, the Port Townsend group has a calendar of educational classes and trainings to help people use psychedelics safely, gatherings where people can take mushrooms among a community of like-minded folks, and opportunities to advocate for decriminalization and equitable access.

“These substances do have risks, and those risks can be communicated through education,” Reading said. “A lot of the risks can be reduced through community support and other forms of support.”

Thanks in large part to the efforts of the psychedelic society, Port Townsend passed a resolution to decriminalize entheogens in December 2021. Five months later, Jefferson County approved a similar resolution.

“All these psychedelic societies that are popping up across the state, I think that is very encouraging, because that's where people… find access through making real relationships with people and building trust. Then if they do choose to journey with psychedelics, they have people they can ask questions of or ask for support if they need it,” Reading said.

Change from below

One of the key policy experts pushing for psychedelic legal reform in Washington state is Kody Zalewski, a Seattle-based analyst with Calyx Law who was also a member of the state’s psilocybin task force.

Zalewski sees himself as a facilitator. He searches for people like Reading who are passionate about the power of psychedelics and helps them organize and promote policy change.

Zalewski believes the best way to change laws around psychedelic substances in Washington state is from the bottom up.

“You need to reach a tipping point where there is enough momentum at the lower levels of government that are more pliable and easier to change,” he said. “Eventually, it trickles up the ladder.”

Zalewski is the co-director of a group called the Psychedelic Medicine Alliance of Washington, which helped pass a resolution in 2021 to deprioritize psychedelics-related arrests in Seattle. The alliance is in the early stages of campaigning for a similar measure in King County.

Tatiana Luz co-directs the alliance with Zalewski and runs a psychedelic group in Seattle called The Zome. Luz, a former outdoor guide, formed The Zome to bring like-minded people together to spend time in nature and talk about psychedelics while expanding their community.

Luz believes that, before the policy around psychedelics can change in Washington state, the culture must become more open to the idea of psychedelics. She sees her efforts as part of that cultural shift.

“Psychedelic experiences for me have been a vessel for healing, but it's also just been a place where I can really explore this wild phenomenon of being alive and being conscious and existing,” she said. “That's the one frontier that no one can access or control but yourself. I believe very deeply that it is something sacred and everyone should have the right to do that. Making these plants and fungi illegal is a violation of that right.”

From underground to mainstream

While underground psychedelic communities continue to grow, April Pride is working to bring the drugs into the mainstream.

Pride hosted three “Psychedelic Salons” this spring at Town Hall Seattle, where she talked with artists about the role psychedelics play in their creative process, interviewed doctors and researchers about the impact of psychedelic-assisted therapy on depression, and discussed spiritual healing for women with a psychedelic guide. She previously held a dozen similar salons at different locations in Seattle in 2023 and 2024.

Pride, a self-described “serial creative entrepreneur,” started a company called SetSet that bills itself as “the world’s first clinician-backed psychedelic education and integration community dedicated to women’s health and well-being.”

She hosts a podcast that covers subjects such as “10 tips for how to prepare for a trip with psychedelics” and “What happens during a psychedelic experience?” and also reviews mushroom strains.

SetSet sells various educational guides, including one for microdosing, taking approximately one-tenth of a standard psilocybin dose. The aim is to experience the drug’s therapeutic benefits without tripping.

Two years ago, Pride led weekly walks and museum visits in Seattle where people would microdose and experience art and nature, something she hopes to do again.

“What I'm finding is people don't want to take [psychedelic mushrooms]… in public and being around other people. They don't want to be altered, but they are open to microdosing with others, because they're a little scared to do it on their own,” Pride said. “But they do it once with somebody else, they feel better, and that kind of breaks the seal.”

A report by RAND, a nonprofit research organization, found that 8 million people used psilocybin in 2023. About half of those respondents said they had microdosed.

RELATED: More Americans are microdosing or tripping on magic mushrooms than ever

Pride believes microdosing increases neuroplasticity in the brain, forming alternate pathways so people can respond differently to daily stressors.

“It's like snow falling in those grooves,” she said. “When the same trigger occurs, you can laugh in a different way, you can be more patient with your children, not choose to drink when you're stressed out. That's why people can make different decisions, because they are increasing neuroplasticity. They're literally changing the way their brain is wired.”

Medical use

While little research has been done about the impact of microdosing on mental health, an increasing body of evidence suggests that macro-dosing (formerly called “dosing”) in combination with therapy can reduced anxiety, despair, and suicidal tendencies in patients suffering from depression, drug addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Dr. Nathan Sackett is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Washington and the founder and director of the UW Center for Novel Therapeutics in Addiction Psychiatry. The center has completed promising clinical trials that use psychedelic-assisted therapy to help people with addictions and other mental health problems.

A trial in 2024 headed by Dr. Anthony Back found that psilocybin use led to “a significant decrease in symptoms of depression” in doctors and nurses who were on the frontlines during the pandemic. The clinicians received therapy, experienced a supervised psychedelic trip, and then had a follow-up therapy session.

In the wake of that experience, 70% of participants changed their jobs.

“I think it gives people a moment where they suddenly can envision their future looking differently,” said Sackett, who was also a member of the Washington Psilocybin Task Force. “We’re so busy keeping the house of cards stable every day that it’s hard to imagine life looking differently. Having an intense experience like this that’s very emotionally rich in a therapeutic container can allow people this opportunity to fantasize about, ‘I don’t have to say this or keep this behavior, or keep this job, or keep this relationship. I can actually make some changes.’”

The center’s next psilocybin trial, which is actively recruiting members, is the first to look at whether psilocybin-assisted therapy can help people who suffer from both post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol use disorder. Participants include veterans and first responders.

Legal limits, alternate paths

One of the biggest challenges for doctors who study psilocybin is that it remains classified as a Schedule I drug in the U.S. under the Controlled Substances Act. That means magic mushrooms are in the same category as heroin, LSD, certain opioids, ecstasy, and cannabis — drugs the government considers to have high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use.

Dr. Sunil Aggarwal, an integrative rehabilitation and palliative care physician in Seattle, has tried several legal routes to change the way psilocybin is scheduled. After running into multiple roadblocks, he is finally seeing a potential path to reclassification.

After the Drug Enforcement Agency initially rejected his team’s petition to reschedule psilocybin, a court asked the agency to reconsider. Backed by that court request, the DEA accepted the petition in February.

The issue now moves to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration for medical and scientific evaluations. Both agencies come under the purview of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“It's still a new pathway, but I'm really excited that the DEA is recognizing that the evidence supports a thorough review of it,” Aggarwal said. “They haven't said that before.”

If psilocybin is rescheduled, Aggarwal hopes to give it to his seriously ill patients under the federal Right to Try Law. That law allows patients who have a life-threatening illness and who have exhausted other treatment options to take part in therapeutic trials of drugs that have not been approved by the FDA.

Aggarwal said psilocybin can have a transformative impact on patients diagnosed with a fatal disease, especially when they are relatively young.

“When you are in your 40s or 50s or at some stage of life where you were expecting to live a full life, it can be really crushing for some of our patients — lots of anxiety, worry, worsening pain, and a lack of ability to stay present,” Aggarwal said.

He said when patients take psilocybin, “those kinds of maladies and preoccupations can be lifted for sometimes a year or more and pretty quickly.”

Oregon: Model or warning?

Oregon has led the way in terms of psilocybin legalization and now serves as both a model for Washington and a warning of what the commercialization of psychedelic experiences could mean for access and equity. Oregon was the first state to decriminalize psilocybin and legalize its supervised use in licensed facilities in 2020.

But those supervised mushroom trips and the “sandwich services” of before and after therapy with a licensed provider can cost as much as $2,500, which puts psychedelic medicine out of reach for many people. The price to legally use in Oregon has spawned a psychedelic tourism industry that worries Washingtonians who believe mushrooms should remain a communal medicine accessible to all.

“My fear is that if a regulatory model passes, it'll be way harder to get to decriminalization, because just like with cannabis, moneyed interests get involved and start lobbying against people having the right to grow and get together and work outside of those systems,” Port Townsend’s Reading explained.

Efforts to create a system of licensed service centers and facilitators in Washington state failed to make it out of committee during the 2025 legislative session in Olympia. It was the fourth year in a row Sen. Jesse Salomon (D-Shoreline) has sponsored bills to legalize psilocybin.

He has succeeded in getting money to fund psilocybin research, including the ongoing clinical trial for alcohol use disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder at Sackett’s UW center. But efforts to create a statewide framework for legalization have consistently died in committee.

“I was really disappointed to not get a policy through this year,” Salomon said. “But I also think more legislators are becoming comfortable with the idea of doing something around this, or understanding how compelling it is, the more that they hear testimony from people.”

Salomon worries that psychedelic mushrooms could follow the path of cannabis legalization in Washington, where synthesized high-potency THC products have led to public health issues that are being largely discounted by the cannabis industry and its lobbyists.

“They've become just any other Mafia-type interest group. They just have shown no care about the negative effects. They're highly capitalistic, and I would not roll this out in the same way at all,” Salomon said. “What I don't want to see is just open recreational sales of this potentially high-impact, highly psychoactive psychedelic and people on a whim when they're drunk, ducking into the cannabis–psychedelic store and stuffing a whole bunch of mushrooms in their face.”

Fotinos, the former chair of the psilocybin task force, said members of that group had similar concerns about the monetization of psychedelics.

“There is also, honestly, a ton of money to be made here,” she said. “Folks want to invest in synthetic psilocybin production and market it. And the committee was very good at saying that is not what we want to do.”

While the state-level debate continues, the decriminalization movement is racking up wins. In addition to Seattle, Port Townsend, and Jefferson County, Olympia and Tacoma have passed resolutions deemphasizing psilocybin arrests and enforcement. Efforts are underway to pass similar measures in King County and Spokane.

The Port Townsend Psychedelic Society’s website says, “We’re on the cusp of a psychedelic renaissance.”

At this point, Reading said that statement is dated.

“We’re over the cusp,” she said. “We’re in it now.”

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was updated on Wednesday, May 14 to more clearly define what drugs are classified as Schedule 1.