Back in 2022, Colorado voters chose to decriminalize certain psychedelic plants and fungi and create pathways for mental health practitioners to offer psilocybin therapy. It has taken three years for the state to establish a regulatory framework, but starting in 2025 the Colorado Department of Revenue (CDR) and the Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA) began accepting license applications for natural medicine facilities and businesses.
Since then, the agencies have issued 124 licenses to individual facilitators and, according to the Department of Revenue’s website, one healing center — the Center Origin in Denver.
The Center Origin was founded by Elizabeth Cooke, a former psychotherapist and social worker, and Mikki Vogt, a licensed professional counselor who worked closely with both CDR and DORA to establish the regulatory framework for therapists in Colorado.
“I think this healing modality offers individuals an alternative way of looking at their life, their selves, and their experience,” says Vogt. “It provides a foundation for rewriting our beliefs about ourselves and others and the way we interact with the world, and can promote more positive thinking and a greater relationship with self.”
Psilocybin, the psychoactive compound found in psychedelic mushrooms, has the potential to treat people with anxiety, depression, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), including those who have not had success through other forms of medication or therapy. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse which is part of the National Institutes of Health, the risk of mental health problems resulting from consuming psychedelic mushrooms in a supervised clinical setting is low but is higher outside of clinical settings.
“As a therapeutic approach, [psychedelic therapy] expedites the process,” Vogt says. “Often we’ll hear people say, ‘I know something to be true, but emotionally I don’t believe it. Even though I know it, I just can’t get there.’ This is really the bridge between what we know and what we have a false sense of. We’re getting rid of that cognitive dissonance and stepping fully into the reality of who we are.”
Vogt says that other forms of therapy people are more familiar with, cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectic behavioral therapy, and eye movement desensitization & reprocessing (EMDR) are still helpful approaches when it comes to reframing trauma or pain, but for some patients, there is still an “underlying kind of negative tape that plays that we can’t seem to rid of.” Psilocybin treatments offer clients another way of reframing events and internal narratives.
The Center Origin, being the first licensed natural medicine healing center in Colorado, will soon be offering guided psychedelic healing journeys.
To be eligible, clients have to undergo a safety screening and two preparation sessions where they outline their intentions and work with the center to pair them with a clinical facilitator who will determine the best dosage.
In an interview with CBS News, Elizabeth Cooke said that their clients tend to fall into two categories. “One is people that just want a kind of more existential understanding. They want to explore big questions, spiritual questions, or they just want to reconnect to themselves their community their family, or to nature. So it can be that kind of a quest. Then there is the more clinical side of things with people that suffer from PTSD, depression, anxiety.”
For the sessions themselves, clients pick a music set and a fragrance to go along with the experience. After being given the agreed upon psilocybin dose, a clinical facilitator like Vogt will offer guided questions and use a supportive touch agreed upon in the preparation stage.
Clients are provided with a zero-gravity chair or a futon, blankets, eye masks, and headphones. Sessions can last between five to eight hours and will cost around $3,500.
In Oregon, which legalized psychedelic mushrooms before Colorado, psychedelic healing sessions run between $1,000 to $3,000 and are typically not covered by insurance.
To increase affordability, some healing centers plan to offer sliding-scale pay options, as well as discounts for veterans and those with low incomes.
An increasing number of studies have indicated that there are long-term benefits to psilocybin for treatment-resistant major depressive episodes. The Food and Drug Administration has classified the method as a breakthrough therapy and late-stage trials are underway.
In Colorado, for providers to become licensed they must undergo a robust training program that includes 40 hours of supervised in-person practice, 150 hours of coursework, 50 hours of consultation while providing services, and basic life support certification.
“I think the biggest thing I’d want people to know is that this is safe and it’s effective,” Vogt says. “When you’re doing this in a licensed healing center with a trained clinician, the room for error is very low and often it comes with more significant healing than we can get with any other modality. It’s significantly safer, with lower risk, than any pharmaceutical approach we have available to us.”
