Mystery shoppers found Oregon's psilocybin centers screened callers carefully. The price was the problem.

Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Missouri posed as prospective clients and contacted Oregon's licensed psilocybin service centers to see how staff handled people who might not be safe candidates. The study was published online on August 27, 2026 in Health Affairs Scholar and appears in its October 2026 issue.¹

How the study worked

The team first reviewed each center's website, then made scripted phone calls. Callers played one of two people: someone with depression and a history of alcohol use disorder, or someone with a family history of psychosis.² They reached 15 of Oregon's 22 active centers by phone. Four of the 26 licensed centers had already closed, and seven couldn't be reached.²

What they found

• Staff routinely asked about psychiatric history, medications and other reasons someone might not be a good fit before discussing next steps.²
• Nearly every center flagged medications that shouldn't be combined with psilocybin.²
• No center told a caller taking antidepressants to stop without first talking to their doctor.²
• No center allowed take-home or unsupervised use.²
• The median cost of a session was $1,900, and no center accepted insurance.²

Follow-up interviews with staff pointed to high operating and licensing costs as the reason prices stay high, which makes services hard both to run and to afford.²

Why it matters

Oregon's model depends on screening to keep higher-risk people out of sessions, and this is one of the first independent checks of whether that happens in practice. News coverage of the study noted that its findings fit with a 2026 cohort study of 346 Oregon clients in which serious reactions were uncommon.^2,3 The study has limits: it relied on phone calls with two scripted scenarios, not observed sessions, and it couldn't reach every center. Cost remains the program's sharpest problem. Why Oregon dropped a plan to double license fees.