Even before Grigsby and his team began studying psilocybin, magic mushrooms were on a fast track toward cultural acceptance in Colorado. Denver residents voted to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms in 2019, making the city the nation’s first to ease psilocybin restrictions. A groundswell followed: Oakland and Santa Cruz, California, decriminalized mushrooms, followed by Washington, D.C.; Seattle; Detroit; and several cities in Massachusetts. Oregon voters legalized supervised psilocybin use in 2020. Two years later, Colorado voters approved Proposition 122, a ballot initiative similar to Oregon’s that allows people 21 and older to grow, possess, and share psychedelic substances. (They’re still illegal to sell for personal use.) It also created an eventual pathway for approved healing centers to bring supervised trips to the masses.

Colorado’s newly created Division of Natural Medicine began accepting applications this year and granted its first official license in late March. Eight days later, I walked to a LoDo office building, took an elevator to the third floor, and met the recipient: Elizabeth Cooke, owner of the Center Origin.

Cooke co-founded Coda Signature, a popular cannabis edibles company that once made some of the state’s best-selling infused chocolates. She sold shares of Coda in 2019 and left her operational role around the same time Denver decriminalized psilocybin. COVID-19 hit the following year. “There was nothing to do,” she told me, “so I started developing businesses and verticals.” After initially looking into industrial hemp production, Cooke settled on magic mushrooms, which she’d consumed recreationally as a teen in Denver in the 1970s and later came to see as an important therapy. “I thought, This is really wonderful,” said Cooke, 61, who worked as a clinical social worker in New York City and later as a psychotherapist. In 2023, Cooke purchased a 1,025-square-foot space near 14th and Blake streets. She made the office available to a magic mushroom grower who taught classes to shroom gardeners interested in cultivating the fungi at home.

Today, she is researching a line of edibles that contain “functional mushrooms” (nonpsychedelics marketed for their supposed immunity-boosting and stress-reducing properties), but Cooke has bigger plans. Once she got her healing center’s license—“a pretty easy process” compared with cannabis, she said, that included a $1,000 nonrefundable application fee, a $5,000 licensing fee, and a criminal background check—Cooke partnered with a state-licensed facilitator who can guide several psychedelic journeys each week.

The Center Origin’s pamphlet said a single session would cost $2,000, but Cooke informed me the price had increased to $3,500. Two facilitators (one of whom would likely be a student studying for a state-issued license) would watch each client, and journeys could stretch up to six hours. A session would include a magic mushroom dose as high as 50 milligrams plus one post-trip integration with the licensed facilitator immediately afterward. Additional post-journey therapy would cost $125 for individuals and $20 for group sessions, which Cooke anticipated clients would probably want after such an intense experience. “How do you clean your toilet after seeing God?” she asked.

Getting to that treatment phase, though, was proving difficult. Approved healing centers aren’t allowed to source their products from just anyone; they have to buy magic mushrooms from state-licensed growers, who have to get the shrooms tested at a state-licensed facility. (Psilocybin healing centers can’t legally sell the drug to clients and instead offer the product as a gift that’s part of paid, licensed therapy.) When I visited the Center Origin, at least 23 healing centers had applied for licenses, but only one supplier and one tester had been approved.

“That’s a huge problem for us,” said Jillian Gordon, whose Lakewood-based Go Within Collective was waiting for its license as of press time. Healing centers are essentially just leveraged startups, she said—psychedelics pioneers with steep financial risks and little control over the supply chain. Gordon wants proper testing “for heavy metals and contaminants,” but what if too few testing companies receive licenses and the shortage creates bottlenecks for healing centers? Or what if the limited number of state-approved growers produce inferior products or lose mushroom crops that can’t immediately be replaced? “It’s a catch-22,” Gordon, 37, said. “You’re already cutting off the only revenue stream [for an industry] that’s a giant question mark.”