With Weed Now Legal Across Ohio, Are Psychedelic Mushrooms Next?

After working in finance for almost two decades, Erik Vaughan entered the world of medical cannabis, working in Ohio grow laboratories and insurance services, while privately cheering on the pursuit of full legal status.

In 2022, Vaughan began wholly pursuing what he saw as the logical next step after Ohio legalized weed: Decriminalization, and eventual legalization of, psychoactive mushrooms in the state.

He founded Epiphany Mushroom Co., with his wife Stacey, in March of that year. Both a witness to the mysterious healing properties of psilocybin, the chemical compound that causes psychedelic effects in magic mushrooms, and its burgeoning legal status in the American West, Vaughan is banking on Ohio to follow suit.

Legal weed, he said, is only the beginning. As Epiphany will, sometime in the next decade, be reliant on Ohio loosening its laws around mushrooms that  it still treats as—like the DEA—schedule one narcotics. And see those brown and white fruiting spores, grown carefully in a white-walled lab, more so as salves for incurable anxiety.
"That's why you're starting to see bipartisan support on it, because the results are coming through from places like Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and NYU and Ohio State," Vaughan, 46, said from a table in his office on Akron's South Main Street. Around him are plush toys of amanita muscaria ("the Mario Bros mushroom"), bottles of Lion's Mane capsules, and posters with post-therapy resolutions.

"And this isn't coming just from some Grateful Dead concert," Vaughan added, with smiling aplomb. "This is coming from the doctor's office."

There is some credence to Vaughan's enthusiasm and business model. Since 2020, when Oregon voters chose to decriminalize psilocybin-rich mushrooms, researchers have jumped at the opportunity to study the fungi's lasting power for ameliorating PTSD, chronic depression, and even curbing addictions to alcohol and tobacco. In the past three years, related papers on the National Library of Medical Research have quadrupled.

Long consumed out of plastic Ziploc baggies or deep in suburban forests, magic mushrooms debuted as legal, therapeutic medicine in some 13 facilities across Oregon this summer. The operation is one half formalized shaman, another half deep therapy session: patients spend up to two months preparing mental notes for their "medicine day," when they'll ingest the fungi lying supine with a blindfold on.

Or, as Vaughan recalls his own session, or sessions, the dates of which he refused to disclose: "You take a large dose of psilocybin mushrooms, you sit on the couch and go inward for four hours to explore your consciousness."

And, like numerous reports from the hundreds this year that have seen Oregonian schroomtenders, Vaughan had his own reasons—and months of mental prep—for such therapy.

"I haven't had a drink in 2023," he said, emotional. "For me, it was that relationship with alcohol."

Because the federal government's grip around psilocybin studies was only loosened in the past few years, concrete data on magic mushroom's effects isn't well-documented. Due to most users still having to obtain, and ingest, shrooms in a closed-door fashion, evidence linking "overdoses" to heart attacks is cloudy at best, and, as Vaughan purports, an "indirect" cause of any deaths.

But the risk is there. Even in a controlled therapy setting, with trained psychologists acting as drug escorts, bad trips are common, as are protracted psychosis and freak outs, which can last for hours. One therapy taker's reaction was so awful, the New York Times reported, that she permanently "lost partial connection to reality."
A 2020 study analyzing 346 trip reports found a good helping of them signaled potential ER visits, along with generally positive "thinking distortions and perceptual alterations." (Rainbows and unicorns, one could imagine.)

And, of course, the ill-advised helping: "The use of multiple doses of psilocybin in the same session or its combination with other substances was linked to the occurrence of long-term negative outcomes," the researchers found, "while the use of mushrooms in single high doses was linked to medical emergencies.”

In Vaughan's mind, bad trips are often cherry picked for stories and cloud the often lifesaving effects psilocybin can have on trauma victims. Overeating is also why Vaughan is sponsoring a microdosing study at Ohio State, under the impression that large doses, the crown of medicine day, isn't for everyone. Also, one therapy session, like the kind Epiphany might have, could cost anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000.

Which could take a while, even as marijuana activists shift their focus. While some mycologists believe the country could sway toward legal shrooms as soon as the next "three to five years," Vaughan is assuming a more conservative estimate. It's why, as Epiphany begins furnishing its basement grow labs and fruiting rooms, its team will only be focused on sporing four legal mushrooms: Lion's Mane, Cordyceps, Reishi and Maitake.

City councils in Akron, Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati are not currently leaning towards decriminalization, which could, like it did for marijuana in Cleveland, take years. Most haven't even begun to address the topic, Vaughan suggested.

"So, I'm overjoyed that this is changing, but it is going to be a while," Vaughan said. "It's going to be a couple presidential elections before it changes here in Ohio. So, it's no time soon."

For now, half of Vaughan's interest—an obsession, one might say—is still illegal. Even picking one of the 14 magical mushrooms that grow naturally across Ohio could lead to a fine or a possible arrest. "Most people don't even know that," Don King, Epiphany's mycology expert better known as the Mushroom Hunter on social media, said.

Holding a block of Reishi in his hand, Vaughan agreed as he hurried to make a Zoom meeting with his team in Colorado. After all, he and Epiphany plan to have therapeutic services up and running there by early 2025.

"God, we're going to know so much more in ten years," he said. "And so much more than that in 20 years—if the government gets out of the way."

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