Teresa Anne Volgenau did not cry when her oncologist confirmed that her cancer had returned, spread to her lymph nodes, and gotten dangerously close to her pancreas. It was a weekday in August 2023, and Volgenau, then a 50-year-old ballet teacher, actress, and artist, had recently returned to Westminster after two months in Colombia—a healing trip she’d taken to recover from her first battle with the disease, which claimed her uterus and ovaries and required a total bowel reconstruction.

Treatment began immediately at the UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora. Volgenau’s regimen included immunotherapy, though she stopped it early after the treatment shredded her thyroid, left her with gum damage, and caused her to lose enamel on her teeth. Still, she kept a positive attitude. She told friends she would win the “cancer Olympics” and insisted she was in a “romance with cancer,” implying she would love her disease to death. But by the time she entered a chemotherapy infusion bay at University Hospital in late fall 2023, Volgenau’s optimism had finally begun to wane.

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Cancer had been a lonely journey for her: She was single, without children. Her parents were divorced and elderly, and Volgenau didn’t think the pair could support her through the physical and psychological trauma that accompanied the extensive tests and invasive treatments. Friends who’d once been regulars in her life suddenly disappeared, uncertain what to say to a woman now living with Stage 3 cancer. As Volgenau waited to get what felt like her millionth dose of treatment, her nurse waded through a checklist of questions. How are you doing? Are you feeling sad? Are you feeling depressed? For the first time since her diagnosis, Volgenau was brutally honest: Yes, she admitted. I am struggling.

The nurse excused herself and reappeared a few minutes later with two University of Colorado Denver graduate students. They were at the hospital recruiting patients for a new federally funded clinical study to research whether psilocybin—the active ingredient found in so-called magic mushrooms—could offer cancer patients relief from anxiety and existential distress.

Read More: Magic Mushrooms Might Be the Next Frontier in Mental Health Care

The effort was being led by Jim Grigsby, a 75-year-old CU Denver neuroscience and neuropsychology professor who’d put together a team of medical doctors, psychologists, researchers, and other scientific professionals from throughout the UCHealth system. Though still in its early stages, the study was among the nation’s largest for psilocybin, a naturally occurring substance the U.S. government classifies as a Schedule I drug with no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Nonetheless, psilocybin studies at New York University, Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, and UCLA had recently shown tremendous promise. Psilocybin, the studies found, can offer rapid and lasting relief for treatment-resistant depression, post-traumatic stress, and addiction. The Colorado study would never cure Volgenau’s cancer, but a dose of the psychedelic might ease the psychological pain burdening her. “I’ll do it,” Volgenau told the graduate students.

In December 2023—after undergoing therapy sessions to assess her background and belief system—Volgenau arrived at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus for her dosing. She was anxious but excited. “I come from the generation that was so indoctrinated to be nervous of drugs,” Volgenau said when I spoke to her earlier this year. “But I was like, ‘This is plant medicine. This is a whole different ballgame.’ ” She was led to a private space at the medical center designed to look like a living room. It included a comfortable couch, two lounge chairs, a Turkish-style rug, and framed drawings of wildflowers on the walls. Volgenau brought some blankets from home, a sketch pad, and a journal in which she might write about her experience. Two facilitators assigned to sit with Volgenau recorded the event.

She was given a cup of water and a white pill, though no one in the room knew whether it contained psilocybin or a placebo. Asked to state her intentions, Volgenau read from notes she’d written the night before: “I am releasing all that no longer serves me,” she began. “I am fully receiving with grace and ease….”

Volgenau swallowed the pill. She placed a black mask over her eyes, slipped a pair of headphones over her ears, meditated, and laid on the couch. Then she waited.

Without knowing it, Volgenau had stepped into the heart of a psychedelic renaissance. Once relegated to the countercultural fringe—the stuff of tie-dyed daydreams and anti-establishment rhetoric—psilocybin in the Centennial State is becoming the focus of serious medical inquiry and entrepreneurial innovation. Colorado’s psychedelic movement has not only been supported by clinicians and policymakers, but it’s also increasingly embraced by private capital financiers, wellness gurus, wine moms, and tech bros. The shift reflects a broader acceptance of altered states that’s focused less on recreation and more on therapy for the overloaded, overworked, and overwhelmed.

Psilocybin works like this: When ingested, the drug transforms into an active compound called psilocin that binds primarily to serotonin 5-HT2A receptors. These are the brain’s molecular regulators—gates that, when opened, can dissolve ego, alter perception, and expose the mind to experiences that often feel profound. Put simply, psilocybin disrupts what’s known as the mind’s “default-mode network,” loosening it in a way that can upend how we view ourselves. In that malleable state, long-standing thought patterns—including depression, trauma, and addiction—can get nudged away, creating space for new insights. Psilocybin can also alter emotional connections to memories, changing the way people respond to them. The result is not simply relief from invasive thoughts, but a mental transformation.

Read More: A Scientific Look at Your Brain on Shrooms

The modern psychedelic movement began in 1954, when the writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley published The Doors of Perception, an account of a mescaline trip he took in Los Angeles. Huxley’s work reimagined psychedelics as a scalpel that sliced through the fog of existence, and his writing opened a cultural discussion that sparked public curiosity right as academics worldwide were beginning to explore LSD and magic mushrooms in clinical settings. Those early studies showed remarkable promise; some patients reported psychological relief after just one journey. A decade later, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary blurred boundaries between science and mysticism with psilocybin experiments designed to open what he considered a gateway to higher consciousness in himself and his subjects, which included prison inmates, undergraduates, and divinity students.

But as the counterculture swelled, so did political resistance. President Richard Nixon saw psychedelics as symbols of social decay and chemical catalysts for dissent. He eventually branded Leary “the most dangerous man in America” and launched a drug war in the 1970s that stifled psychedelic research for decades.

White man with white hair pulled back in a ponytail
Jim Grigsby helps lead CU Denver’s psilocybin research. Photo by Paul Miller

Around the same time, Grigsby had his first psychedelic experiences as a student at the University of Kansas, where he tried out to be the Jayhawks’ kicker but didn’t make the team. During one undergrad trip, Grigsby remembers his mind entering a “flow state” that seemed to connect to a deeper, less-self-conscious version of himself. Grigsby went to his university’s recreation center and began shooting free throws. “I couldn’t miss,” he told me.

I met Grigsby this past spring at his 12th-floor CU Denver office off Speer Boulevard, where the professor’s psilocybin research group had just been given a suite of rooms. The expansion seemed a tacit nod to the cancer study’s early popularity and the promise of more funding and research. So far, the team had conducted around 30 “dosing sessions” for Stage 3 and Stage 4 cancer patients at the medical center in Aurora, and Grigsby’s inbox overflowed with potential patients offering their minds for research.

Grigsby has sharp features, crystal blue eyes, and long white hair pulled into a ponytail that runs partway down his back. “People see me and say, ‘Oh, I get it,’ ” Grigsby joked of his interest in psychedelics. After college, he worked for a time as a cement-truck driver, then as a carpenter. But his free-throw-shooting memory lingered: He wanted to know how that transformative state might peel back the strains of everyday life.

In the mid-1970s, Grigsby moved to Canada and studied psychology as a graduate student at the University of Regina. His mentor was Duncan Blewett, an early psychedelics pioneer in the 1950s and ’60s. “Duncan told me, ‘This stuff is too important and too good to be suppressed forever,’  ” said Grigsby, who has a doctorate in psychology from the University of Colorado Boulder. “He said if I stuck around long enough, I’d probably get a chance to do research on it.”

Around the time Grigsby joined CU Denver’s psychology department, in 2006, he began reading new research that showed the promise psychedelics might bring to issues like post-traumatic stress and existential grief. By then, a few universities had navigated the complex federal regulatory process to study the drug, which included background checks for scientists, approval from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, and regular audits by the Food and Drug Administration. In 2015, writer Michael Pollan published “The Trip Treatment,” an article in the New Yorker that delved into the science and history of psychedelics and reframed the drugs as serious medical tools. It was an encouraging moment for Grigsby. “All of a sudden there was a thought that there’s something going on that looks intriguing,” he said, “and maybe I need to find out more about that.”

Soon after, Grigsby connected with Stacy Fischer, an internist and palliative-care physician at CU Anschutz Medical Campus. She’d already connected with Stephen Ross, a psychiatry professor featured in Pollan’s New Yorker story who was leading psilocybin studies among cancer patients at NYU. The trio agreed to team up for a new study on palliative care. In 2021, they prepared their fourth grant proposal. Eight months later, in July 2022, the group secured $2.1 million from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to fund their study. The financial backing marked the first time in the NCI’s then-87-year history that it supported psilocybin-based therapeutic research. Two hundred cancer patients would be studied as part of the joint, five-year CU-NYU project. With Grigsby as the project’s CU lead, work got underway in summer 2023.

Volgenau, the ballet teacher, was the 13th participant in Colorado. That December, about 30 minutes after taking her white pill, she was certain she’d gotten the 25-milligram dose of synthetic psilocybin. (Double-blind studies on psychedelics are difficult, because it’s often obvious who got a real dose.) Volgenau began to feel a little drunk. “I don’t like to feel like I’m not in control,” she said. “But I also knew where I was, and that I was safe.”

A facilitator checked Volgenau’s blood pressure and heart rate as soft, meditative music played over her headphones. Volgenau had always struggled to intentionally visualize images, something called aphantasia, but now she was seeing “crazy plastic figures on conveyor belts of chaos” moving “super-fast.” At one point, the music began making her nauseous. “It was like la-la, tinkle-tinkle music, but I was hearing circus music,” Volgenau remembered. During therapy sessions leading up to her dosing, Volgenau was encouraged to go with the moment and explore her mind. Time melted. She felt woozy, which made her recall waking up from previous cancer surgeries that had left scars from her pubic bone to her rib cage. She cried, and then began to sob. She started giggling. She pulled up her blanket to cover her mouth, as if she were embarrassed. At some point, she began convulsing, which felt to her like years of blocked energy straining to leave her body. “My journey was a huge purging for me,” Volgenau said.

She eventually needed a break. She took off her mask and was led down the hall to a bathroom. As Volgenau washed her hands, the countertop appeared like a wave in front of her. “I’m high as fuck,” she told her escort.

Even before Grigsby and his team began studying psilocybin, magic mushrooms were on a fast track toward cultural acceptance in Colorado. Denver residents voted to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms in 2019, making the city the nation’s first to ease psilocybin restrictions. A groundswell followed: Oakland and Santa Cruz, California, decriminalized mushrooms, followed by Washington, D.C.; Seattle; Detroit; and several cities in Massachusetts. Oregon voters legalized supervised psilocybin use in 2020. Two years later, Colorado voters approved Proposition 122, a ballot initiative similar to Oregon’s that allows people 21 and older to grow, possess, and share psychedelic substances. (They’re still illegal to sell for personal use.) It also created an eventual pathway for approved healing centers to bring supervised trips to the masses.

Colorado’s newly created Division of Natural Medicine began accepting applications this year and granted its first official license in late March. Eight days later, I walked to a LoDo office building, took an elevator to the third floor, and met the recipient: Elizabeth Cooke, owner of the Center Origin.

White woman with short black hair sits cross-legged on a couch
Elizabeth Cooke owns the Center Origin, the state’s first licensed psilocybin healing center. Photo by Paul Miller

Cooke co-founded Coda Signature, a popular cannabis edibles company that once made some of the state’s best-selling infused chocolates. She sold shares of Coda in 2019 and left her operational role around the same time Denver decriminalized psilocybin. COVID-19 hit the following year. “There was nothing to do,” she told me, “so I started developing businesses and verticals.” After initially looking into industrial hemp production, Cooke settled on magic mushrooms, which she’d consumed recreationally as a teen in Denver in the 1970s and later came to see as an important therapy. “I thought, This is really wonderful,” said Cooke, 61, who worked as a clinical social worker in New York City and later as a psychotherapist. In 2023, Cooke purchased a 1,025-square-foot space near 14th and Blake streets. She made the office available to a magic mushroom grower who taught classes to shroom gardeners interested in cultivating the fungi at home.

Today, she is researching a line of edibles that contain “functional mushrooms” (nonpsychedelics marketed for their supposed immunity-boosting and stress-reducing properties), but Cooke has bigger plans. Once she got her healing center’s license—“a pretty easy process” compared with cannabis, she said, that included a $1,000 nonrefundable application fee, a $5,000 licensing fee, and a criminal background check—Cooke partnered with a state-licensed facilitator who can guide several psychedelic journeys each week.

The Center Origin wasn’t open for business yet, but to show me how her operation would work, Cooke directed me to two therapy rooms on one side of her office, which were decorated in earthy grays, browns, and greens. She plopped me into one of her newly purchased zero-gravity chairs and told me to sink in and relax. “Great, isn’t it?” she said. There was contemporary art on the walls—zen-like swirls of color that looked like trippy eyeballs—a pullout couch in one room, and soft overhead lighting. I felt like taking a nap. Her new license was framed on a table behind a small desk in the entryway, where a future receptionist would greet clients. At the office’s far end, a wide window in a third therapy room overlooked LoDo. There was a large, open space with faux-wood floors and a small bookcase that included Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, Stanislav Grof’s Realms of the Human Unconscious, and James Fadiman’s The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide. The room smelled vaguely of eucalyptus.

Cooke anticipated the larger area would eventually host group psychedelic sessions, perhaps with as many as eight participants. Since getting the center’s license in March, Cooke said, she’d gotten at least 60 serious inquiries for her services—mostly from Colorado, but also from as far away as the United Kingdom. One woman wanted to take a psilocybin trip with her future spouse. “It used to be that you’d go to counseling before you got married,” Cooke told me. “But now they’re going to come and do journey work here.”

The Center Origin’s pamphlet said a single session would cost $2,000, but Cooke informed me the price had increased to $3,500. Two facilitators (one of whom would likely be a student studying for a state-issued license) would watch each client, and journeys could stretch up to six hours. A session would include a magic mushroom dose as high as 50 milligrams plus one post-trip integration with the licensed facilitator immediately afterward. Additional post-journey therapy would cost $125 for individuals and $20 for group sessions, which Cooke anticipated clients would probably want after such an intense experience. “How do you clean your toilet after seeing God?” she asked.

Cooke planned to offer discounts to veterans living with PTSD, survivors of domestic violence, and those willing to dose under a student facilitator. She hoped to direct people who couldn’t afford the full price to the Forward Fund, a group that provides financial assistance for psychedelic therapy.

At $3,500 for everyone else, I asked if she worried about pricing out workaday people—if her business model was set up to benefit the wealthy. Cooke frowned. “That’s very classist, in my opinion,” she said. Just because someone is rich, she added, “doesn’t mean they’re not in need of psychedelic treatment.”

Getting to that treatment phase, though, was proving difficult. Approved healing centers aren’t allowed to source their products from just anyone; they have to buy magic mushrooms from state-licensed growers, who have to get the shrooms tested at a state-licensed facility. (Psilocybin healing centers can’t legally sell the drug to clients and instead offer the product as a gift that’s part of paid, licensed therapy.) When I visited the Center Origin, at least 23 healing centers had applied for licenses, but only one supplier and one tester had been approved.

“That’s a huge problem for us,” said Jillian Gordon, whose Lakewood-based Go Within Collective was waiting for its license as of press time. Healing centers are essentially just leveraged startups, she said—psychedelics pioneers with steep financial risks and little control over the supply chain. Gordon wants proper testing “for heavy metals and contaminants,” but what if too few testing companies receive licenses and the shortage creates bottlenecks for healing centers? Or what if the limited number of state-approved growers produce inferior products or lose mushroom crops that can’t immediately be replaced? “It’s a catch-22,” Gordon, 37, said. “You’re already cutting off the only revenue stream [for an industry] that’s a giant question mark.”

Dominique Mendiola, the senior director of the Colorado Department of Revenue’s Marijuana Enforcement Division and Natural Medicine Division, says the state is working to approve suppliers and testers. Her office is also looking for ways to fast-track psilocybin-testing licenses for existing cannabis-testing laboratories in Colorado that want to apply. In the meantime, she said, applications for growers and testers will likely lag as entrepreneurs sit on the sidelines and size up the potential market for clinics. “There are only so many participants who will want these services,” Mendiola said. “It’s not endless.”

Figuring out the market is part of the fun, and consternation, for Cooke. As she waited for more licensed growers, she kept busy designing a booth for Psychedelic Science Conference ’25—scheduled for the Denver Convention Center this month—and by drafting a press release to advertise hers as the state’s first licensed center in the psilocybin era.

Cooke also was setting up calls with prospective clients, after which they’d be asked to fill out an online medical assessment form and then book a time to share their expectations for their journeys. Eventually, she would differentiate her clients, putting them in two groups: people looking for clinical relief and those on existential quests. “They’re asking big questions about God,” she said, “about all these things in life that we wonder about.”

As I reported this story, I also had a big question for myself. Namely, how could I stop being an asshole?

The past year had easily been the worst of my life. In the spring, my wife was laid off. In the summer, my closest childhood friend died by suicide, and I was sucked into his family’s blast zone for months. In the fall, my editor—and a friend of 17 years—was laid off. In the winter, 5280, the magazine to which I’d tethered my professional identity, was sold. In almost every way, my life’s scaffolding had collapsed. I found myself seething—resentful not just about the chaos, but also about how each unrelenting challenge left me feeling more vulnerable and powerless.

I was a raw nerve. Every petty inconvenience flared into indignation. I snapped at my wife for no reason. I distrusted my new editor, who’d shown only kindness and support. At work, I was barely holding things together. I had a reoccurring dream that I flipped over my desk. When family members gently suggested that I should prepare my résumé, I lashed out. “Robert is so angry,” my mother told my wife one night.

Seven years earlier, I’d cut processed sugar from my diet. I took pride in my discipline and in the clarity I got with my decision to live healthier. But one fall day, mired in negative thoughts, I ate five doughnuts in a single sitting. The next day, I ate an entire bag of chocolate-covered pretzels. I betrayed myself—my body, my discipline, the person I thought I was. I told myself I could quit sugar again, berating myself as I gained eight pounds and felt brain fog set in. I couldn’t stop. My willpower disappeared.

I had always been the positive person in every relationship, the one who urged others to focus on doing good work, keeping a good attitude, and controlling the controllable. As I slipped further into my own abyss of anger and anxiety, I couldn’t do the same for myself.

When I explained this to Vivian Shyu, a professor of cognitive neuropsychology who works on Grigsby’s team, she told me that a “macro” psilocybin dose and psychedelic-assisted therapy had helped others in my situation. The idea scared me. The only drug I used was caffeine. I didn’t even drink alcohol. I’d seen the ways substances destroyed some of my friends’ families—and, yet, I’d done so much research on psilocybin and the benefits of magic mushrooms that I’d suddenly become interested. Still, I worried a macro dose might change me too much, that it might alter my work or my relationship with my family. I didn’t want a psychological overhaul; I wanted a mental tweak that might help return me to my previous path.

This past year, the nonprofit RAND Corporation released a survey that showed 12 percent of its respondents had used psilocybin at some point in their lives—including an estimated eight million Americans in 2023. As part of my reporting, I’d read about microdosing—taking as little as one-twentieth of the macro dose people would consume in a licensed wellness clinic. The RAND survey said about four million people in the United States microdosed that year, which intrigued me even more. Rather than a cannonball into the pool, maybe I could ease into the shallow end? At the same time, I noted the lack of supporting evidence for microdosing in academic literature. The scientific journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, for example, published a 2024 review analyzing 15 studies on psychedelic microdosing and concluded that much of the existing research is methodologically flawed and too inconsistent to support firm conclusions about its benefits. “[T]he results from psilocybin studies should be taken with a grain of salt,” the authors wrote. Even more disconcerting: I saw how members of Grigsby’s team shifted in their seats or smirked when I brought up microdosing.

Other experts, though, have been believers for decades. Many Coloradans have been prescribing psilocybin for years; they’re not doctors or scientists or entrepreneurs, but rather holistic healers who operate outside the law to bring what they accept to be highly effective treatment to people in desperate need. Sometimes, that therapy is macro. Sometimes, it’s micro. Both work, they say. “I know it’s a life-altering journey, because I’ve experienced that life-altering journey,” a healer who treats patients in Colorado and New Mexico told me.

Dosing isn’t the only thing healers disagree with scientists about. Many longtime healers warned me that the scientific community (and mushroom entrepreneurs) were stripping mushrooms of their spiritual and cultural roots. “This is not Western medicine, and it was never intended to be used as that,” Jessica Press, a Denver-area lifestyle medicine coach, says. “As this moves to commercialization, I worry what that means for its connection to Indigenous people, and to the rest of us who will always hold this as sacred medicine.” That being said, she’s grateful that healing centers will expand access to psilocybin. “If that’s how they get to it,” she says, “then that’s a good thing.”

For me, even more important than the endorsement of the healers were those of people in my everyday life who I never would have imagined used magic mushrooms. When I brought up the idea of microdosing to a therapist friend in Denver, she confided that the clarity she’d found in one pill lasted for weeks. Another friend told me microdosing offered a “lift” that helped him concentrate at work and be more present with his wife at home. Yet another friend, who survived a battle with cancer, spoke with such reverence about her microdosing experiences that she said she might grow her own supply. These were not zealots. These were people I trusted—people like me who were simply looking for a softer landing.

One morning, I drove northwest from Denver to a ranch-style house where I met a woman I hoped could offer me some psychological freedom. The middle-aged holistic healer and wellness coach (who requested anonymity for this story) had been offering psychedelic therapies for eight years. She ran burning sage around my body as I stood in front of a mirror. Then she offered me a seat on a couch in her family room. I noticed a thin mattress and plumped pillows on the floor, where she led full-dose magic mushroom journeys. “So,” she said, “tell me why you’re here.”

The floodgates opened: wife, friend, job. Even more spilled out: My wife and I were about to be empty-nesters, and I knew the two of us would need to adjust to a life without our college-age children. Our parents were elderly, and I worried constantly about their health. Mostly, though, I talked about my anger and my helpless feelings, how I’d turned ugly to everyone around me.

We talked for nearly two hours. The session cost me $375. Afterward, the woman handed me 15 pills in a small, resealable package. The dried psilocybe cubensis mushrooms in their little capsules had been sourced from a registered nurse who grew them in her basement. The psilocybin was infused with lion’s mane and reishi mushrooms, to ward off nauseating effects. “I think these will do you some good,” she said. There were instructions: I would take one pill each day for four or five days, then I’d take two or three days off, then I’d take the pills again. Before I took a pill, she told me, I needed to offer an intention—a reason for bringing psilocybin into my life at that moment.

She told me to take my first microdose when I didn’t have plans. “You don’t know how you might react,” she said. The next afternoon, I was nervous and a little scared. I got a glass of water, tore open the package, and cupped a brownish-green pill in my right hand. “I want to be better to the people around me,” I whispered.

There’s a small forest a few hundred yards behind my house, and I figured that would be a good place to start my psychedelic journey. I always get a hit of dopamine when I’m outside with my two golden retrievers. Maybe that would aid the process. The sky was overcast—rain was coming in—which might help highlight the colors that surrounded me. The forest was familiar; cozy and comfortable. I stepped onto the dirt trail and prepared to enter another realm.

Nothing happened.

There was no epiphany when my dogs and I emerged wet from the woods. I plopped onto my couch and looked out the picture window in my family room. I turned on the television. Did the red Netflix “N” logo look redder? I wondered. “Total bust,” I wrote in my notebook.

I took my next pill before bedtime the following night. I was told psilocybin could enhance dreams, that it might tap into something during REM sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t remember anything. Maybe I was doing this wrong. I told my wife I’d purchased magic mushrooms, but I didn’t tell her I’d begun taking them, figuring that I could use her as my double-blind. After a couple of days, though, the secrecy didn’t seem necessary.

The third day, I took my pill on an empty stomach, thinking that might enhance something in my body. I did the same on the fourth day. Disappointed, I then took three days off.

And that’s when something happened. On the sixth day of my experiment, I realized I hadn’t eaten a single bite of processed sugar since that first pill. In fact, I hadn’t even thought about cookies or M&Ms or those Starbucks drinks with whipped cream on top. On my next four-day psilocybin cycle, I realized I was waking up earlier than usual, feeling rested and happy. I walked nearly 50 miles with my dogs that week. I lost three pounds. Most important, I felt better about myself.

I’d spoken to many people who’d taken full-size doses of psilocybin. When I asked what the experience was like, they had trouble articulating the feeling—the sights and sounds in that moment. At the end of my second microdosing cycle, I finally understood why. There was something going on inside my mind, but I couldn’t exactly say what it was. It was as if I could step outside myself, assess a situation, and then act—or not. It happened time and again. In mid-March, frustrated with an overly intrusive neighbor one afternoon, my brain failed to fall into its default defensive position, the one that was given to flashes of anger. Instead, everything in that moment seemed to pause as my brain caught up. “Not a big deal,” my mind told me. “Move on.”

“Have a great day!” I told my neighbor, waved, and walked away.

I didn’t care if this was a placebo effect. The strains of my work were ramping up. My son’s final high school semester was winding down. My daughter was heading off to a college internship and wouldn’t be home for summer for the first time in her life. My wife and I were about to experience a massive, life-altering autumn as empty-nesters. Still, I wasn’t anxious. Instead, I felt something I hadn’t felt in forever: grateful. Work was fun; my children were happy and successful; my wife and I put aside niggling differences.

About three weeks into my experience, I was driving with my wife when she turned to me from the passenger’s seat. There was something different about my attitude, she said. “Did you start taking those mushrooms?”

Federal funding for the CU-NYU psilocybin study will run out in 2027. By then, Grigsby hopes his team will have expanded its work into other areas—leading to more research into palliative care for everything from ALS to depression to how the drug might improve athletic performance (like it had for Grigsby’s flow-state free-throws 50 years earlier).

To do this, much of the money will have to come from private donors. Grigsby already enlisted the help of former state Senator Chris Romer, who was one of Colorado’s earliest political advocates for the legalization of medical marijuana and who has used his postpolitical life to advocate for healthy living alternatives that include plant-based medicines. Romer says the CU Denver psychedelic center likely will need up to $20 million for its programs, which he thinks is doable, though that’s far less than the $55 million in funding that Johns Hopkins has reported for its psychedelic research.

Part of Grigsby’s fundraising duties includes a summer visit with potential donors in Aspen, where he plans to detail CU Denver’s research so far. Regardless of the money that could become available, Grigsby is wary of pushing psilocybin as a magic mushroom bullet for America’s psychological needs. He doesn’t want underwriters if they’re only looking for someone who can endorse the drug. “So many people come to [psilocybin] with unrealistic expectations,” Grigsby told me. “People think they’re going to have a mystical experience, that God’s going to come down and slap them and wake them up. They think this is the ticket to something, without a lot of [additional therapy].” To Grigsby, the drug will never be a shortcut. “We’re happy to do research,” he continued, “but we can’t guarantee what the results will be, and we can’t guarantee that [funders] will like the results.”

The push for financing couldn’t have come at a stranger time. Some Republicans have shown an interest in psychedelics as of late, and Elon Musk has openly discussed using ketamine to treat his depression. At the same time, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has been an omnipresent threat to government-sponsored scientific research. Among the greatest hazards so far is the Trump administration’s promise to slash the National Institutes of Health budget from roughly $45 billion to around $27 billion. The cuts, critics say, could threaten current grants like the one given to Grigsby’s team.

At this moment, though, the professor found himself marveling at his moment of Kairos—that his work is reaching its apex at exactly the right time. “This is something bigger than me and more important than me, you know?” he told me. “I feel like I’m some clown who got lucky.”

The study’s participants, too, feel fortunate. When I talked to Volgenau early this spring, her cancer had been in remission for eight months. Now 52, she told me about the study’s facilitators. They had shown her other people’s scans, demonstrating how psilocybin had helped their brains spark in places that hadn’t previously fired. Volgenau could sense new pathways and connections forming in her own mind. “I feel cheesy saying it, but it’s so true for me,” she said. During her journey, Volgenau heard a voice: “Like, This is just a simulation,” she recalled. As she processed that moment over several months, she says the experience gave her a release. She no longer thought about reciprocity in her relationships. During Volgenau’s yearlong participation in the study, an NYU volunteer called occasionally and read from a list of prepared questions. The exercise seemed tedious at first but became a touchstone that helped her process feelings months later. “We’re so conditioned to move forward and be like, How am I doing right now? OK, what’s next?” she said. Allowing time to pass “was therapeutic for me. For me to go, ‘This is what I thought last time, but this is where I’m at right now, and I bet I’m going to have a different perspective in a few weeks.’ ”

She now considered the study part of a larger miracle in her life. Before her oncologist declared her cancer in remission for a second time, she was undergoing integration with her CU therapists and was also reading the book Letting Go by the spiritual teacher and psychiatrist David Hawkins. During this time, Volgenau said, she had an epiphany. “I realized I was working so hard to release cancer, to be free of the cancer, that I was actually holding the reins and keeping it close to me,” she said. “I was like, I’ve got to let go.”

And so she did. Volgenau told me she’d like to see her remission continue for at least two years. Whatever happened to her after that didn’t matter so much: Anything extra would simply be more time to teach ballet or to create art or to make new friends. She didn’t fear the end of her life, whenever that might be. “When my time is done, I’m done,” she said. “I’ve gotten very OK with that.”