As someone deeply involved in the cultivation and study of natural medicines, I’ve seen firsthand how transformative this field can be—especially for those who have explored other therapies without success. However, as we approach the one-year anniversary of the first regulated psilocybin journeys, it’s clear that many people are still unfamiliar with how this new model works. Getting the word out is essential.

A Brief History

In 2022, 53% of Colorado voters passed Proposition 122, the Natural Medicine Health Act. This legislation immediately decriminalized the personal use, possession, cultivation, and transport of natural medicines for adults 21 and older. It also established the Regulated Natural Medicine Access Program. Initially, “Natural Medicine” was defined to include DMT, ibogaine, mescaline (excluding peyote), psilocybin, and psilocyn, with the regulated program focusing primarily on psilocybin mushrooms.

In May 2023, the Governor signed Senate Bill 290 into law, creating the regulatory framework and authorizing the necessary oversight agencies. By January 2025, the Department of Revenue (DOR) began accepting applications for healing centers, cultivators, manufacturers, and testing facilities, while the Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA) opened applications for facilitators, training programs, and educators. By June 2025, the final piece was in place with the approval of the first testing laboratories, allowing the first regulated journeys to begin shortly thereafter.

The State of the Industry: Year One

Currently, there are 48 licensed healing centers across the state, with a strong concentration in the Front Range. The ecosystem includes 14 licensed cultivators and 8 product manufacturers, all supporting a network of 75 professional facilitators and 60 clinical facilitators.

Additionally, there are 628 “facilitators in training.” These individuals have completed their core coursework and are currently fulfilling the 40-hour consultation requirement necessary for full licensure. Importantly, these trainees are already authorized to administer medicine under the regulated framework.

While formal patient tracking is still in the early stages, we know at least 600 patients have engaged with the regulated model. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) is expected to launch a formal data-tracking program by the end of the year, pending a careful balance of operational needs and patient data privacy.

Regarding accessibility, while initial concerns suggested costs could reach $3,000 per journey, a few centers are now offering individual journeys starting at $1,250, with group sessions available for as low as $750.

The Unique Path of Personal Use

A defining feature of Colorado’s approach, compared to other states, is the robust personal use program. Colorado allows adults to cultivate and share natural medicines with friends and family, provided no remuneration occurs. This has made it easier to access high-quality, lab-tested medicine, and has allowed those working in the “underground” to benefit from the oversight of experienced cultivators and lab-verified potency reports—ensuring safer, more accurate dosing for patients.

Challenges Ahead

Despite our progress, the industry faces three primary hurdles:

1. Standardization: Dosing remains complex. Labeling varies widely across cultivators—some list total weight, others specify “Total Psilocin” or “Total Psilocybin” in milligrams.

2. Clinical Guidance: Training programs often lack specific guidance on how to adjust dosing for individual patient needs. Furthermore, much of the available research focuses on synthetic psilocybin, failing to account for the “entourage effect” produced by the various naturally occurring tryptamines in whole mushrooms.

3. Public Awareness: While the industry is growing, many healing centers have worked through their initial patient backlogs and now need to reach those who are unaware that these services are available.

A Proven Safety Record

If there is one thing the first year has demonstrated, it is the industry’s commitment to safety. Facilitators have been incredibly responsible, and there have been only two adverse health events requiring medical intervention across the entire state. Regulators continue to monitor these events closely, ensuring that patient and worker safety remains the foundation of this new field.

Will you help us spread awareness? If you know someone who might benefit from these journeys, please share this post with them.

Put yourself in the shoes of a facilitator. You’ve met with your patient a few times over video to discuss their goals for working with mushroom therapy, you’ve learned about their previous experiences with mushrooms and you’ve asked them to fill out a stack of forms. Now you’re sitting in a room together, ready to start their journey. They’ve held the mushrooms in their hand, and then swallowed the dose you carefully measured out. Now we wait for the journey to begin. 30 minutes go by, and your patient is patiently waiting to notice something. Another 30 minutes go by and you start to think through the scenarios, do they have an exceptionally high tolerance for psilocybin, did the patient forget to mention the SSRI they were taking, and then you think, what if the medicine isn’t as potent as the label claimed? It’s just as easy to imagine the opposite scenario where the patient is having such an intense experience that they are unable to remember what happened when it comes time to integrate.

Achieving accurate dosing remains a primary challenge in natural medicine due to the inherent variability in total psilocin content between individual mushrooms. Anecdotal reports from facilitators suggest that current potency labeling occasionally fails to align with patient reactions, leading to dosing experiences that are either stronger or weaker than anticipated.

At Mosaic Natural Medicine we submit 9 samples each time we test for potency to be able to quantify the uncertainty of the measured potency on the label, for example 23mg +/- 5 mg.

After completing the homogeneity testing of our Purple Mystic Mushrooms we were surprised to see that the potency changed over the lifecycle of the mycelium. Over a span of several weeks the potency increases and then declines before the substrate stops fruiting. We compared these results against the other mushrooms in our collection and determined the effect was specific to our Purple Mystic mushrooms.

The chart below compares Purple Mystic to Jack Frost. Jack Frost is consistent over multiple harvests while Purple Mystic increases significantly after the first 2 harvests.

Key Observations:

• Purple Mystic mushrooms were harvested from the same substrate over a 20 day period

• These mushrooms increased from an average potency of 3.1 mg/g on day 1 to 7.2 mg/g on day 18 before falling to 4.5 mg/g on day 20.

Note: Mosaic does not harvest by "flushes." We harvest as veils reach maturity to ensure a more consistent product. As a result we will sometimes harvest the same harvest lot in consecutive days, but the outcome is hopefully a more consistent product for our customer

Conclusion and Recommendations

The "Purple Mystic Potency Mystery" serves as a critical case study for the entire industry: in the world of natural medicine, consistency is not a passive trait, it is an active pursuit. Our findings show that relying on a single, isolated sample for compliance testing is a relic of the past that leaves facilitators and patients vulnerable to unpredictable outcomes.

To elevate the standard of care, we offer these recommendations:

• For Cultivators: Embrace "Lifecycle Awareness" Our data proves that potency is not static; it is a dynamic variable that can shift across the lifecycle of a harvest lot. We encourage cultivators to move beyond minimum compliance and adopt internal, voluntary homogeneity testing. By sampling across the entire duration of a harvest, you can identify your most reliable genetics that facilitators—and more importantly, patients—deserve.

• For Facilitators: Look Beyond the Label When selecting medicine, "potency" is only half the story; the other half is predictability. If you encounter a strain with wide variance, such as our Purple Mystic, we recommend sourcing it exclusively through licensed manufacturing channels. Homogenization, the process of milling and blending fruit into a uniform powder or tea, is the most effective way to eliminate the "lottery effect" of raw, whole-fruit dosing.

• For the Industry: The New Gold Standard At Mosaic Natural Medicine, we invite our peers to adopt a more rigorous approach to testing. By shifting our focus from what a single mushroom tests at, to how a harvest lot performs across its entire lifecycle, we can transform natural medicine into a predictable, reliable, and safer therapeutic tool.

If you have experienced inconsistent results, we encourage you to ask your cultivation partner: “Have you tested multiple samples across different harvest dates?” The answer to that question is the difference between a guess and a guarantee.

This analysis is only the beginning of our commitment to data-driven transparency, as we continue to map the complex variables of natural medicine. We are currently expanding our testing protocols to include additional strains and deeper lifecycle analytics, so we invite you to check back frequently for updated findings. At Mosaic Natural Medicine, we are dedicated to peeling back the layers of these mysteries to ensure that both facilitators and patients have the clarity they need for every journey. Together, we are setting a new, higher standard for the safety and reliability of natural medicine.