Why we exist

In 2018, a psychedelic session changed my life. I was a former City Hall staffer carrying severe political burnout, and the burnout had led me into alcohol abuse. That one experience did not fix everything. It opened a door, and walking through it gave me my health back.

Since then I have dedicated my professional and volunteer life to advancing science-based psychedelic policy: locally, statewide, nationally, and internationally. So when people ask why the Portland Psychedelic Society Action Fund exists, my honest answer starts there. We exist to make it easier for people to have the kind of life changing experience I had. Safely, honestly, and without fear.

Progress is not guaranteed

The culture that created the Portland Psychedelic Society is the same culture that has made Oregon buck regressive trends for decades. Oregon was the first state to decriminalize cannabis. The first to make all of its beaches public. The first to legalize psilocybin therapy. The first to pass a statewide sanctuary protection, and the first to try a new and kinder approach to addiction.

It is tempting to believe progress here is inevitable. It is not. Progress is always hard fought and hard won, typically by a relatively small group of dedicated people, and without constant work, regressions happen. We have watched that too. That is why we built the Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization: to do the constant work.

The start

For years I served as director of the Plant Medicine Healing Alliance, a community group steered by roughly 25 advisors from the worlds of psychedelic policy, medicine, law, and organizing. Our mission was to craft and pass policies that protect home growing, group healing, and ceremonial and religious use of natural psychedelics. We supported the passage of a policy like this in Seattle. We supported cities and counties doing the same around the country. And we worked for years here in Portland, in partnership with Indigenous stakeholders among hundreds of others, honoring the request of the Native American Church to leave peyote out of these policies entirely.

Earlier this year, that work found its permanent home when PMHA merged into the Portland Psychedelic Society Action Fund.

The turning point

After several stalled attempts to engage the prior City Council, we spent a season preparing a grassroots ballot initiative instead. Then Portland adopted a new form of government, a new council took shape, and the door we had been knocking on opened again. We walked back through it.

The result is the Portland Psychedelic Health & Safety Act, drafted over years with feedback from hundreds of Portlanders: academics, legal experts, healers, doctors, teachers, harm reduction professionals, law enforcement, and people with deep personal experience with these medicines.

What the Act does

It makes personal, non-commercial cultivation, possession, and gifting of natural psychedelics among Portland's lowest law enforcement priorities. It keeps commercial sales prohibited. It leaves enforcement around fentanyl and other genuinely dangerous substances untouched, which is part of how it supports our police as they decide where limited resources should go.

Tens of thousands of Portlanders already have some relationship with these plants and fungi. This Act writes a norm our city already lives by into city code, so people can ask honest questions, seek real education, and consider whether these medicines have a role in their healing without wondering who is watching.

The advisory commission, honestly

Our stakeholder process produced a section that would have created a Psychedelic Advisory Commission, a standing body of experts in mental health, public health, and community advocacy. I loved that idea, and I still do. But this summer, most of our city councilors told us they preferred to advance the protections without establishing a new commission right now. We listened. The version of the Act moving forward focuses on the protections themselves, and we may bring an advisory body back to Council for its own vote at a later date. I want to be straightforward about that change, because straightforwardness is the whole brand. The commission was an idea we loved. The protections are the point.

September 9

The Act is scheduled for its First Reading before the full City Council on September 9. City staff remind us the date is subject to change, and I believe them, because I used to be city staff. If it moves, we will tell you.

What happens after Portland

Passing the Act is step one. From there, our goal is to take this framework statewide in Oregon, to keep improving how our state approaches psychedelics after Measures 109 and 110, and to support the people doing this same work in other states across the country. City by city, state by state.

With so much of this movement, we are simply getting back to where we once were: a society that can view and engage with the plants and fungi around us without fear of imprisonment, informed by experience and science instead of lore and propaganda.

If this resonates, read the Act, endorse it, and come be part of it. We are doing this.

Nate