In a second building on his property in Springfield, Oregon, Gared Hansen grows mushrooms containing psilocybin, a psychedelic compound that grows naturally in the environment. Hansen harvests the mushrooms after each flush sprouts from the bins and bags in which he plants them. Everything harvested within a 24-hour window counts as a harvest batch, which he sends to a certified lab to be tested. Once approved, Hansen, the owner of Uptown Fungus, packages the mushrooms and sells them to the handful of service centers that have opened in Oregon over the past few months.
“I try to grow to have a little bit more volume than my customers need, because new customers are popping up every couple of weeks,” says Hansen.
Psilocybin is a nascent legal market in Oregon—not even a year old. Psilocybin, however, is a mushroom component that has been regarded for its myriad influences—on spirituality, health, consciousness and more—for thousands of years. Federally, psilocybin is still classified as a Schedule One drug, but across the country, cities, states and communities are navigating what holistic psilocybin access can look like.
Indigenous cultures across the world have long had relationships with psychedelic plants and mushrooms, but legalizing psilocybin access is new to the US. In recent years, Oregon, and then Colorado, have been the only states in the US to legalize and decriminalize psilocybin, but several cities across the country have also passed decriminalization resolutions. Psilocybin was designated as a breakthrough therapy by the Food and Drug Administration for the first time in 2018, for its promising impact on treatment-resistant depression and other mental health conditions.
Tori Armbrust, owner of
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