The Enchanted State: how New Mexico legalized psilocybin therapy

How did it happen, and what are the lessons for other campaigns?

This is the first installment in an occasional series I’m going to write called Altered States, each one focused on how the psychedelic renaissance is shaping and being shaped by a particular state in the USA. First up, New Mexico! I’m making it free for a month but do subscribe if you can afford it, to support my work.

Last year, the attention of psychedelic philanthropists was on Massachusetts, and its ‘Yes to 4’ ballot to legalize possession of small amounts of psychedelics and approve supervised psychedelic sessions. Philanthropists connected to the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative spent something like $8 million on the ‘Yes to 4’ campaign, but it resulted in a ‘no’ in November, by 57-43%. The campaign ended in acrimony, with local psychedelic campaigners reporting New Approach and Heroic Hearts Project - two big out-of-town psychedelic organisations involved in the campaign - to the Massachusetts electoral commission for campaign financing irregularities.

Meanwhile, New Mexico, to the surprise of many, passed SB 219, a supervised psilocybin program in March 2025, becoming the third state to state-legalize psychedelics in some form, after Oregon in 2020 and Colorado in 2022. Adele Getty, co-founder of the Limina Foundation, a psychedelic NGO in Santa Fe, says: ‘What New Mexico did was a stealth-like event. SB 219 cost almost nothing except time, energy, and the ability to show up and connect human to human.’

So how did New Mexico do it? Who did it? What will its psilocybin program look like and what opportunities does it offer for those seeking mental health treatments, and those wanting to offer such treatments? What lessons does it provide for politicians and activists in other states preparing psychedelic legislation?

The Enchanted State

New Mexico, known as the Enchanted State, is in the south of the US next to the Mexican frontier - Ciudad Juaraz is just across the border - in between other psychedelic states like Texas, Arizona, Utah and Colorado. New Mexico became a US state in 1912, and is one of the US’ ‘minority-majority’ states, with over 50% of the population either Hispanic, Pueblo-Mexican or Navajo Indian. It’s the fifth-biggest state geographically, with only two million residents. There’s more money in the north, in Albuquerque and affluent-hippy Santa Fe, and less in the south. Its DC Senators and Congress members are all Democrat. It has a large military population, and one of the highest rates of veteran suicide. It is one of the main throughways for drugs from Mexico, home to Walter White of Breaking Bad, and has been badly affected by the opioid crisis.

The Enchanted State has a long psychedelic history. Meso-American use of magic mushrooms in the Rio Grande valley goes back centuries. The Bufo Alvarius toad, which secretes 5-meo-DMT, is found in the Sonora desert in New Mexico, although human use of that psychedelic is likely much more recent. New Mexico has a long-established Native American peyote church, and was home to the first legal ayahuasca church in the US - the UDV, which won a Supreme Court ruling to serve medicine in 2006. New Mexico is also home to the Taos art collective, home of wealthy patroness Mabel Dodge Luhan. She was hostess at the first ever psychedelic dinner party at her apartment in New York in 1914 - her guests took peyote and one had a bad trip and ran off into the streets of Manhattan. Three years later, Dodge moved to Taos and played hostess to figures like DH Lawrence and Aldous Huxley (who wrote his first mystic book, Ends and Means, in Taos). New Mexico has also been a pioneer of psychedelic research for many years - Rick Strassman worked at University of New Mexico when he researched DMT in the 1980s, while the Hefter Research Institute was founded in Santa Fe in 1993, at that time the only research centre dedicated to psychedelics.

How did SB 219 get passed?

The first effort to get psychedelic legislation passed in New Mexico was HB 393, spearheaded in 2023 by Rep. Christine Trujillo with support from the New Mexico Psychedelic Science Society (NMPSS).

Marisa de Baca is a metal-worker and psychotherapist of Mestizo ethnicity, who became interested in the potential of psychedelic therapy after reading Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind in 2018. She joined the NMPSS in 2020, just as it started trying to get an Oregon-style bill passed.

‘New Mexico is amazing as an activist because you can take legislators out to lunch and just talk with them’ - Marisa de Baca, NMPSS

De Baca tells me: ‘New Mexico is amazing as an activist because you can take legislators out to lunch and just talk with them. I was doing that and realized, ‘wow, maybe we have a chance’.’ The bill asked for $150,000 to set up an advisory board. It didn’t get through in the end - we couldn’t get the funding.’

The next year, state Senator Jeff Steinborn got a call from a constituent:

She asked me what the legislature was doing about psilocybin. She shared a personal story about her upbringing and the trauma she’d experienced, and how traditional anti-depressants had never worked for her, but microdosing psilocybin had.

Senator Steinborn looked into the issue, it ignited his interest, and he decided to introduce a ‘memorial bill’ in 2024, which is a bill stating the legislature’s intention to pursue a course of action - in this case, to bring another bill the following year to establish a psilocybin program. This time, the memorial bill passed unanimously, with support from both parties.

Marisa de Baca was watching the legislative session, and she remembers:

It was this beautiful moment in history. The chair said: ‘I feel like I'm on mushrooms right now, because I have never seen these senators come together on any issue, and they come together over psilocybin mushrooms’.

Senator Steinborn then started working on what would be State Bill 219, a Senate bill (as opposed to a citizen ballot like in Oregon and Colorado) to create a regulated-access psilocybin program. He had a lot of support from local activists, particularly an NGO called Sol Tryp, based out of Las Cruces in the south of New Mexico, which is run by a Doctor of Medical Science and ketamine therapist named Deborah Thorne. She tells me: ‘We spent so many hours and a lot of personal funds advocating, communicating to the public, attending legislative hearings.’

Senator Jeff Steinborn

The bill faced early questions like: how closely should the psilocybin program follow the precedent of marijuana, which New Mexico legalized for medical use in 2007 and for recreational use in 2021? Initially, Senator Steinborn considered a ‘psilocybin card’, similar to the cannabis card used in New Mexico for medical marijuana. However, the New Mexico Psychedelic Science Society argued against this, suggesting it would not get approved by the state governor, and the idea was dropped.

Eventually, Senator Steinborn built a winning team of cross-party political support, including Republican senator Craig Brandt, who is a veteran; as well as advocacy from local organisations like Soul Tryp, veteran organisations, and academic experts - especially Professor Lawrence Leeman, a psychedelic researcher at University of New Mexico. The bill also had some lobbying support from the Limina Foundation and from New Approach PAC, but not much, perhaps $2000 in total spend.

Senator Steinborn says:

It passed its first Senate committee unanimously, which blew us away. It was one of the most powerful legislative moments I've probably ever been a part of. There were combat veterans who showed up to the committee hearing and told their story, who had never been before a legislative hearing. And the feeling in that room was just so powerful. It transcended normal moments of persuasion. People who might have voted against us on the other side of the aisle, who are very socially conservative - their jaws just hit the table hearing these stories.

Adele Getty of Limina Foundation adds:

The role of veterans was a game changer. Two Republicans and one Democrat changed their minds in the last 36 hours of voting. One Republican, Senator Jay Block, who served in Afghanistan, actually wept as he voted, saying he was against drugs but after speaking with veterans he was voting in favor of therapeutic psychedelic medicine.

The bill was eventually approved by the Senate 33-4 and by Congress 56-9, and then approved by New Mexico governor Michelle Lujan Grisham in April 2025.

What’s it look like and how is it different to Oregon or Colorado?

Over 28 states in the US are considering or working on psychedelic legislation of some sort at the moment, and each state has choices to make - what substances to legalize or decriminalize, whether to support research or regulated access; whether to legalize or decriminalize personal possession or group ceremonies; and if regulated access is approved, is it for medical or recreational purposes, who facilitates the sessions, and what are their credentials?

In Oregon and Colorado, as in Massachusetts, many of these questions were decided by the campaign teams who put together the bills and then put them to a citizen’s vote. What’s unusual about SB 219 is that this was not a citizens ballot, it was a Senate bill put together during many conversations behind the scenes, and figures from the Department of Health, such as Dr Dominick Zurlo, were involved in those discussions prior to the bill passing. Dr Zurlo will now be in charge of developing the program over the next two years, with the help of an Advisory Board that will be appointed in September.

A lot is still to be decided, but it’s clear this will be a psilocybin medicine program for four diagnoses - PTSD, major depression, substance abuse disorder, and end-of life care (the last one isn’t, of course, a diagnosis, or if it is, it’s one we all face). It will use natural psilocybin mushrooms rather than synthetic psilocybin, partly to protect the program from complications if / when Compass or Usona get FDA approval for psilocybin for depression. Dr Zurlo tells me:

The FDA is looking at approval for synthetic psilocybin, and we don't want to interfere with that, so we're going to work on it solely from the standpoint of the natural mushroom. We don’t want to build up a program, with all these rules, requirements and regulations around it to ensure for health, safety and therapeutic use, and then the FDA says ‘we're going to approve it, and here are our guidelines and regulations’, and they somehow conflict with ours. That would mean that we have to go back and retool all of it.

Another big question for the Department of Health to decide - who exactly is a ‘licensed medical practitioner’? Will indigenous healers be included? Will licensed medical professionals be allowed to take part by their licensing boards? Will any training programs be grandfathered in? What extra training (if any) will licensed therapists or counsellors have to take to take part in the program? Dr Zurlo says the DoH is in discussion with various licensing boards to discuss these questions.

One difference to Colorado and Oregon is that New Mexico is trying to avoid the creation of special psychedelic ‘service centres’, which it is felt pushes up costs and bureaucracy unnecessarily (some providers in Oregon program have struggled to make a profit and been forced to close). Dr Zurlo says:

Even during the hearings for the bill, there was a discussion about how psilocybin is really going to be another tool in the toolbox for providers to be able to utilize. So we don't see a reason to restrict it to specific settings. If you have a treatment center right now that is using various modalities and medications, for example an addiction-recovery center that’s using Suboxone or Methadone, they could then potentially add psilocybin treatments utilizing existing facilities,

That could also mean therapists offering psilocybin in their therapy rooms, or even potentially patients taking psychedelics in guided sessions at their home - although this would raise security risks, like there being knives or guns nearby, or pets, or children. All of this is to be discussed over the next year or so before the program launches in 2027.

Perhaps the biggest question for the program is how much will the program cost the state and how much will it cost patients? Senator Steinborn says the state committed $1 million to fund the set-up of the program, as well as $1 million for an equity fund and $1 million for a research fund. After that, the program budget needs to be agreed on an annual basis. ‘I would expect it to continue to have a lot of support in the coming year with the legislature and executive branch’, he says.

The equity and research funds are something new in state psychedelic programs. Professor Lawrence Leeman of University of New Mexico is set to receive $500,000, together with the Psychedelic Mental Health Access Alliance (PMHA), for a pilot program to study group psilocybin therapy with various affinity groups - veterans and first responders, female victims of sexual health, and indigenous people, all with depression and / or PTSD. The pilot hopes to gather real world evidence in order to make state psilocybin treatments refundable through Medicaid.

Dara Menashi, co-founder of PMHA, says:

PMHA is working to support pilots that will generate the evidence for Medicaid coverage, which means focusing on studies with people who are covered by Medicaid — or people with low socioeconomic status (SES). In order to get Medicaid to cover PAT, not just the medicine, but the care models that are part of PAT including integration and preparation, we need to show that it is effective, necessary, safe and ultimately cost effective compared to other treatments. The first step in that process is to show that we can delivery it safely and effectively in real world settings — not just in clinical trials.

Larry Leeman of University of New Mexico says:

I don't see a way for Medicaid, which is a federal program, to pay for the use of a schedule one drug at this point in time. But it could pay for the preparation and integration sessions [because Medicaid pays for talking therapy for PTSD, depression and substance-use disorder].

Professor Lawrence Leeman, UNM

Lessons for other states

What can activists or politicians in other states who are preparing psychedelic legislation learn from New Mexico’s success? Senator Steinborn says:

Having appropriately-funded departments of health needs to be a priority. It's not enough to pass an initiative and then let the departments have to fight for scarce resources and have to do it on a shoestring.

He also says he feels the key to New Mexico’s success was having the right legislators and the right governor in place.

Another lesson is to focus on what can get passed - which in this case seems to be medical use with a focus on veterans. Graham Moore, a former staffer on the Yes for 4 campaign in Massachusetts, says that campaign failed because it included a provision for home-growing of psychedelic plants, which the campaign funders decided to include despite internal polling showing it would cost them the result.

Finally, successful campaigns need to build coalitions - cross-party political support, local activists, out-of-town funders and psychedelic NGOs, academics, veterans. And then it needs to keep the coalition together, which is not always easy.

I won’t go into the details to avoid unnecessary acrimony, but various local activists in New Mexico feel their contribution was not always appreciated - one local campaigner says they were told by a national psychedelic organisation once the campaign was successful: ‘Step aside, we’ll take it from here’. There’s also been some bad blood among local activist groups as well, some of whom feel their efforts were used by the SB 219 campaign without much in the way of thanks or involvement.

Psychedelic legalization campaigns seem prone to this sort of in-fighting - they involve high levels of passion, hours of free labour, grassroots suspicion of big-money outside interests, and conflicting visions of the psychedelic future. There have been some bitter fights in the past (Decriminalize Nature versus New Approach, for example), and the Massachusetts fall-out is just the latest example. In New Mexico, all the different interest groups worked towards the success of SB 219. Now, hopefully, local activists can work with wealthy psychedelic funders and organisations (like, say, Healing Advocacy Fund, PMHA, Heroic Hearts or the PSFC) in a way that draws on the wealth and expertise of the latter without side-lining grassroots groups. This is a tricky balancing act.

The Limina Foundation is organizing a big conference in September at the Lensic in Santa Fe - Enchanted State - to attract some of these national experts and funders to New Mexico, connect them to local players, and draw on their ideas and their funding. The event has already raised $100,000 to support the SB 219 program.

Sol Tryp, one of the local grassroots groups who played a key role in getting 219 passed

Risks and challenges

As in Oregon and Colorado, the program faces challenges. Will there be enough providers? In Oregon, many psychedelic start-ups (service centres, training schools) have had to close due to weaker than expected demand, and in Colorado, state authorities say far fewer organisations have signed up to be providers than they expected.

There’s also the question of safety, which Senator Steinborn says is the ‘most important thing you have to navigate’. In Oregon’s program, serious adverse events (ie hospitalizations) have so far been very rare - only 0.15% in over 8500 sessions. But that does not show the true incidence of adverse events, ie people feeling worse during and after the trip. How many people feel worse, or a lot worse, after a legal psychedelic session? There’s also the Open adverse events portal set up by OHSU, but Professor Todd Korthius of OHSU tells me that’s mainly second-hand reports from emergency room doctors, therapists and family members. So the truth is, at the moment we don’t really know how many people feel worse, or a lot worse, after a legal psychedelic session in Oregon or Colorado.

Finally, there’s the issue of how legal psychedelic programs boost demand both in the overground and the underground. Psychedelic usage in Colorado and Oregon rose significantly faster in the last three years than the US national average, and a lot of that usage is in the underground. We saw in Oregon how underground actors advertized as legal providers, and some legal providers also operated in the underground. So what can states do to limit harms in the grey or black market?

Oregon's wild psilocybin market

Dr Zurlo of the Department of Health says:

We have had the medical cannabis program since 2007, so we have a lot of experience with exactly that sort of situation. What we know is that a lot of education is key. We've been building up our health education team in order to be able to get information out there. We anticipate, over the next several months, to have a lot of materials to be able to help advertising or marketing campaigns. We've been talking with our communications team with regard to how to get those public health messages out there, to ensure that people are doing this in safe and therapeutic ways, and to ensure that people are going to know who is actually certified to be able to offer the therapeutic psilocybin.

What is really being born in the United States is a patchwork psychedelic market containing three or four competing markets - FDA-approved patented medicines at the federal level, legal programs at the state level, churches, and then the illegal or decriminalized underground of both underground ceremonies or personal use. Of these, personal use is likely to remain the biggest market by far. It will be interesting to see how commercial and community models compete, and what Big Pharma tries to do in the space (one of the biggest pharma companies, AbbieVie, just spent $1.2 billion buying psychedelic drug developer Gilgamesh’s psychedelic drug program). Marisa de Baca of New Mexico Psychedelic Science Society says:

Various interest groups, such as big pharma companies and capital market structures are moving in to try and take control and make their profit, as they do. The mushroom is kind of laughing at them, because you can’t really make money off of it, the way you do with other synthesized marketed drugs used for mental health. It’s also not a cash crop like cannabis for the larger-scale consumer models, like dispensaries. So as we roll it out, we’ll have to depend on more of a community model.

Each state is likely to be different, and in New Mexico, it will be interesting to look particularly at the group therapy trials with low-income groups, and the program for end-of-life psychedelic care. For me, group therapy raises questions about how people’s trips meld and interweave which push at the boundaries of materialist science.

Do you have a story about psychedelics in your state? Get in touch!

Who's driving the US decrim juggernaut?

Why decriminalization policies require public education on risks