Oregon’s legal psilocybin program gets taxpayer funds despite promise to pay its own way
Backers of Oregon’s psychedelic mushroom law made big promises when they pitched Measure 109 to voters in 2020. Oregonians would get access to a life-changing compound in a safe, legal setting, and, after a two-year startup period, it wouldn’t cost taxpayers a dime. Licensing fees paid by mushroom growers, testing labs, trip facilitators and service centers would cover the costs of a new bureaucracy within the Oregon Health Authority (OHA). Mason Marks, a professor at Florida State University College of Law and a senior fellow at Harvard Law School’s Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation says costs could go up because the Legislature passed Senate Bill 303 last session, requiring service centers to collect aggregate data on people seeking legal psilocybin experiences: age, race, ethnicity, income, gender identity, and reason for using psilocybin. In addition to creating privacy risks, Marks says, the law will add costs to running the program. “The data collection mandate proposed by SB 303 will cost the OHA additional money, pushing an essentially bankrupt program further into the red,” Marks said in testimony on the bill.
But two years have come and gone, and Oregon Psilocybin Services is nowhere near paying its own way. Fee revenue is anemic because too few people are seeking the various licenses… just four manufacturers, two testing labs, and eight service centers have been licensed. All three types of entities pay a one-time fee of $500 and then $10,000 a year to operate. Many more facilitators have been approved (88), but they pay only $150 up front and then $2,000 annually. So far this year, Psilocybin Services has raised just $318,419 in fees, OHA says… tallying the number of permits issued and multiplying by all the fees, we came up with a total of $342,425 since the program began licensing participants on Jan. 2, 2023. Backers of Measure 109 said the program would cost far more – $3.1 million a year – to run. To fill at least part of that gap, Oregon lawmakers appropriated $3.1 million from the taxpayer-supported general fund for the two-year period that started July 1. Oregon Health Authority is betting that shroom fee revenue will pick up as the biennium proceeds, making up the rest of the shortfall. OHA… asked for $6.6 million to fill the program’s budget gap for the fiscal biennium starting July 1 [2023], according to a 13-page “policy option package,” or POP, that’s now sitting in the Legislature (Salem budgets two years at a time). The request is a black eye for backers of Measure 109, who promised, after a two-year “development period” ending last December 2022, the program would cost $3.1 million a year, an amount that would be funded by fees and a 15% tax sales tax on psilocybin products.
Original Article (Willamette Week):
Oregon’s legal psilocybin program gets taxpayer funds despite promise to pay its own way
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