When you choose to participate in a psilocybin journey in Oregon, you are not just accessing a regulated service. You are entering an experience that depends on vulnerability, openness, and trust. What makes this work possible is not technology or oversight, but a sense of real safety—both physical and psychological.
This blog post focuses on one unresolved tension in Oregon’s psilocybin system: the insertion of the mandatory state data collection under Senate Bill 303 into a process that relies on privacy and consent. The issue is not whether data can ever be useful. It is whether requiring deeply personal disclosure as a condition of access undermines the very conditions that allow healing to occur.
Why Privacy Matters in Psilocybin Work
Psilocybin experiences can be quiet or intense, joyful or frightening, simple or overwhelming. People may cry, laugh, shake, sing, or reveal memories they have never said aloud. They may encounter grief, fear, shame, or meaning in ways that feel raw and exposed.
These moments require safety to unfold. When someone knows they are being categorized, recorded, or evaluated for a system beyond the room, that sense of safety is lessened. The body tightens. The mind pulls back. Trust erodes.
How much is healing diminished under surveillance?
In 2023, as the psilocybin industry in Oregon was just opening, the state legislature created a system under Senate Bill 303 that required intrusive personal data collection from people seeking psilocybin experiences.
A Parallel Path Was Also Taking Shape
While Senate Bill 303 was being debated in the legislature, a separate effort was beginning to take shape within Oregon’s academic community. Researchers at Oregon Health and Science University were developing what would later become the OPEN Project—a university-led study designed to examine psilocybin services as they are actually delivered in licensed settings.
At the time SB 303 passed, OPEN was still in formation. It would not become operational until more than a year later. But its design reflected a very different set of assumptions about consent, privacy, and how data collection should occur in vulnerable settings. That contrast matters, and the quality of the data being collected is completely different.
What Senate Bill 303 Actually Requires
Senate Bill 303 directs licensed psilocybin service centers to collect and maintain specific categories of information.
At the individual client level, the statute requires collection of race, ethnicity, preferred spoken language, preferred written language, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity, income, age, and county of residence. It also asks clients to reveal and record the reasons for which they request psilocybin services.
In addition, SB 303 requires service centers to compile operational data in aggregate. This includes the number of clients served, the number of individual and group administration sessions, the number of people denied services and the reasons for denial, the number and severity of adverse behavioral and medical reactions, the average number of sessions per client, the average number of clients per group session, and the average dose of psilocybin per administration session.
Clients are allowed to request that their individual information not be submitted to the state, but the statute prohibits service centers from discouraging clients from providing their private information on the form.
Notably, SB 303 does not require collection of subjective experience, therapeutic outcomes, mood changes, insight, meaning, or long-term effects. It does not ask whether psilocybin helped, harmed, or changed anything in a person’s life.
What the Law Authorizes
While SB 303 specifies required categories, it also grants the Oregon Health Authority authority to require additional information by rule if the agency determines the information would be beneficial to understanding outcomes of psilocybin services.
This provision is small, but consequential. It is the mechanism that allowed the scope of data collection to expand beyond what most people would expect from reading the statute alone. The legislature mandated categories. It did not mandate the depth, phrasing, or intrusiveness of the questions used to fill them.
How Categories Became Intrusive Questionnaires
During rulemaking, broad statutory categories were translated into a detailed client questionnaire. You can see it here. Each category was broken down into multiple subcategories, conditional follow-up questions, and highly specific disclosures.
Race and ethnicity became long lists of granular identifiers. Disability status expanded into repeated questions about hearing, vision, mobility, cognition, communication, mood, behavior, and functional capacity, often followed by questions about the age at which each condition began. Reasons for seeking services expanded into explicit prompts about sexual assault, domestic violence, combat trauma, colonization-related trauma, poverty, houselessness, brain injury, and undiagnosed mental or emotional health concerns.
This level of detail did not come from the statute itself. It emerged during implementation.
What began as a requirement to collect broad categories of information became, in practice, a requirement for clients to disclose a detailed map of their identity, health limitations, trauma exposure, and socioeconomic status as a condition of access.
The Illusion of Choice
The SB 303 process includes an opt-out option for submitting individual data to the state. In practice, this does not mean declining participation. The questionnaire must still be completed and retained in the client’s file, although the client can refuse to answer each question individually.
Access to legal psilocybin services is conditioned on engaging with the form.
This is not voluntary research participation. It is required disclosure tied to care.
What Actually Happened
Service center owners and facilitators did not passively accept SB 303. Before it was approved, they fought to stop it. They testified. They warned lawmakers that mandatory data collection tied to access would change the emotional tone of the work and drive some people away from legal care.
SB 303 passed anyway.
After passage, many of the same facilitators and service center owners stayed engaged. They joined Rules Advisory Committees and worked to limit what would be required, narrow the scope of questions, and strengthen privacy protections during implementation.
Concerns were raised clearly and repeatedly. Many participants proposed limiting the scope of the data and reducing the level of personal detail required. Those proposals were not incorporated in any meaningful way into the final requirements.
The result was not a failure of engagement. It was a decision to move forward despite the input of the people who would be collecting data from vulnerable clients.
The Real-World Impact
Some clients now refuse to answer certain questions, or all questions. Others decide not to pursue legal psilocybin at all. Many ask whether their information could be shared, subpoenaed, or used against them in the future. We live in a political climate where trans individuals are currently (2026) being targeted at the federal level, and where personal data can be weaponized. It is reasonable to ask how information collected today could be used tomorrow.
Service centers have been forced to absorb administrative, compliance, and cost burdens that do not improve care. Facilitators are asked to manage forms and systems that pull attention away from preparation, trust-building, and support.
Instead of strengthening confidence in the legal system, the legislative mandate has weakened it.
A Better Model Exists
That parallel effort mentioned earlier—the OPEN Project—has since become operational.
The OPEN Project is a long-term research study led by Oregon Health and Science University that examines what happens when people receive supported psilocybin services in licensed, regulated settings. Rather than focusing on research trials, OPEN studies real-world use, following participants over time to better understand patterns of safety, experience, and change.
People who participate in OPEN encounter the study as an invitation, not a requirement. Information about the project is shared separately from clinical intake, and participation has no effect on access to psilocybin services. Enrollment happens directly with the research team, not through service center paperwork.
Participants are compensated for their time through modest payments tied to completed surveys. Compensation does not depend on outcomes or disclosures and is intended to acknowledge the effort involved, not to persuade participation.
Before a single participant could be enrolled, OPEN was reviewed and approved by an Institutional Review Board. This review process exists to protect people, not data. The board evaluates recruitment methods, consent language, privacy protections, and risk management, with particular attention to research involving emotional openness or altered states.
Oversight continues after approval. Any changes to the study must be reviewed. Problems must be reported. The review board retains the authority to pause or stop the study if ethical standards are not met.
OPEN collects information because people choose to share it. Participation can be declined or withdrawn at any time without consequence. Privacy protections include a federal Certificate of Confidentiality and university-grade data security.
This is what ethical, real-world research looks like. It is careful, voluntary, transparent, and accountable. It shows that learning does not require coercion—and that care and knowledge do not have to be in conflict.
What matters most is this: your inner life deserves care, not extraction. There are ways to learn from psilocybin services that honor privacy, choice, and dignity, and OPEN shows that clearly. It exists to help the public understand what these experiences can offer, without asking people to trade their safety for access. As a client, you are allowed to care about how your information is handled. Wanting privacy is not resistance to healing. For many people, it is part of what makes healing possible.
