Backers of Colorado’s 2022 psilocybin measure reported $5.8 million in contributions, and opponents reported $51,000.

A committee total measures paperwork on one side and says nothing about how hard the other side tried.

Colorado’s campaign-finance register (opens in new tab) reports $5,807,698.30 of contributions across the two committees supporting the 2022 natural-medicine measure (opens in new tab), which passed, against $50,986.00 for the committee opposing it. Massachusetts reports $7,752,198.94 of receipts for the committee supporting Question 4 in 2024 against $137,072.50 opposing, and voters rejected that measure (opens in new tab).

Those two pairs are not one number. Colorado reports contributions and Massachusetts reports receipts, gathered over different windows, and no proportion between any two of these figures appears on this page.

Of the supporting committee’s own $5,789,588.30 in Colorado, which is a single committee and not the two-committee total above, $5,700,187.15 came from organizations against $89,401.15 from individuals, with $110.00 attributed to no class at all. Massachusetts itemises a wider window: of the $8,998,923.26 its register attributes to a contributor class, $4,746,492.26 came from organizations and $4,252,431.00 from individuals. That itemised total is not the $7,752,198.94 above counted twice; it is a different measure.

So one campaign was funded almost wholly by organizations and the other roughly half by people, and the word organizational does not carry across the pair. Two states is also a sample of two: Colorado’s shape will be read as typical because it is the more striking, and nothing in either register makes it typical of anything.

The organization that appears in both registers is written four ways, by whoever was filling in the form that day. Until somebody reconciles spellings like those by hand, the register cannot answer the question people actually ask of it, which is who gave what, and the attribution underneath the totals above is only as good as the typing.

This piece does not name that contributor, or any other, because naming the largest organizational giver in a state from a register that cannot reliably distinguish one giver from another would be asserting an identity the source does not establish.

Colorado’s lobbying register (opens in new tab) is the only one of the five this project holds that answers a query cleanly. On the 7 September 2026 read it carried 530 registrations naming a natural-medicine or psilocybin subject across four fiscal years, which fold down to 49 client organizations once the names are reconciled. Two hundred and ninety of those rows carry the declared position Monitoring, which is a lobbyist telling the state they are watching, and only eight of the 49 clients attach to the psilocybin value chain at all; the rest are hospitals, counties, cities, professional bodies and sheriffs.

Registration is not influence, and the register says so itself in the position field.

All of this is one state’s register. Oregon’s Measure 109 money and the federal lobbying half are both unread for this work, so nothing here describes a national picture of policy money.