Eight states’ drug laws already describe a crystalline form of psilocybin that the FDA has not approved.

Most of these legislatures wrote an exception into their drug schedule in advance, saying that a psilocybin product, once the federal government approves it, is treated differently from the mushroom compound it derives from. The drafters call them trigger laws, and none of them legalises anything: the operative clause of ten of the eleven enacted measures is a conditional with an empty subject.

North Dakota is the one place where a psilocybin product sits anywhere but Schedule I, and its provision, in force since March 2025, is the only one in this category that has operated at all. The oldest psilocybin-specific measure is Nebraska’s, signed in February 2025, and the most recent took effect on 1 July 2026.

Only Arizona contemplated the approval never arriving, writing a provision (opens in new tab) that does not become effective unless the federal steps are in place on or before 1 January 2031.

Yes, in every one of these states, and federally. Fourteen legislatures acted on psilocybin’s legal status, and the law that decides what happens to a person caught holding psilocybin mushrooms is unchanged in all fourteen.

That table spans four rungs of our register, each set by some other law, and a state’s own psilocybin politics do not predict whether it has one of these measures: Colorado, which permits supervised adult use under a voter-approved programme, signed its provision on 31 March 2025, and Georgia, which prohibits psilocybin outright, signed its own on 11 May 2026.

If you live in Colorado, be careful with that sentence. Colorado has a regulated natural-medicine programme and Colorado has one of these scheduling provisions, and the two have nothing to do with each other. The programme is why psilocybin is available there under supervision; the provision is dormant, and would remain dormant if the programme did not exist.

Three of the fourteen never reached the statute book. In Iowa, House File 383 passed the House ninety-two to nothing and the Senate forty-seven to nothing before Governor Kim Reynolds vetoed it on 11 June 2025. Her letter (opens in new tab) said the bill “surrenders state authority to make an informed determination about classification to federal officials at the FDA,” and that “psilocybin should first be FDA approved and rescheduled by the DEA before the State of Iowa considers rescheduling.”

She also wrote that it “moves ahead of where our public health systems, regulatory frameworks, and law enforcement infrastructure are prepared to go at this time.” That second objection is about readiness, and it is the only place in this record where a decision-maker questions the change itself.

Kansas House Bill 2218 took a favourable committee report in January 2026, was passed over on 18 February, and was stricken from the calendar (opens in new tab) the next day under Rule 1507, which provides that a bill stricken this way “shall be considered as killed,” even though the legislature’s own bill page still shows a status badge reading “On General Orders in House”. Hawaii’s Senate Bill 3199 carried the mechanism through three versions and died in conference.

Most of the enacted measures are self-executing: the exception is already written into the schedule, and an approval would fill in the blank without anyone having to act.

Virginia’s two acts (opens in new tab) reschedule nothing themselves. They instruct the Board of Pharmacy to act at its next quarterly meeting following thirty days from publication of the federal order in the Federal Register, a statutory interval that begins running from a publication that has not occurred. They are also the narrowest of the fourteen, reaching a formulation “designed to be administered by a health care professional in a health care setting.”

California’s law has been in force since the first day of 2024, the earliest of any kind, and it never moves psilocybin off the state’s Schedule I. It provides that a clinician prescribing a federally approved product in compliance with federal law is in compliance with California law.

West Virginia’s act (opens in new tab) reaches “an organic psilocybin substance” alongside the manufactured one and reschedules nothing, making it lawful to prescribe, distribute and market the substance once the FDA approves it and the DEA reschedules it, neither of which has happened.

Everything above this point is record, and what follows is our inference from it.

Eight of the eleven enacted measures refer to “crystalline polymorph psilocybin”, a manufactured form. Two of the fourteen go further and name a product: North Dakota’s code (opens in new tab) writes COMP360 into the statutory text, and Iowa’s vetoed bill named “COMP 360” in text that never took effect. COMP360 is Compass Pathways’ psilocybin product, and it is not approved. The company said on 9 November 2026 that it had completed its application to the FDA.

Across states that share no border and no session calendar, the phrase recurs nearly word for word. It is evidence of a common source and no evidence at all of who drafted any particular bill, and the provenance question is not ours first: Psychedelic Alpha traced this same language in January 2025, twenty months before this piece.

A Compass Pathways government-affairs officer testified for the Kansas bill in February 2025 and told a Vermont Senate committee in February 2026: “I have submitted draft language to make a similar change with respect to synthetic psilocybin to my testimony for review and discussion.” The Kansas bill page records the measure as requested on the company’s behalf. None of that is improper and we are not suggesting it is: companies bring draft language to legislative committees under their own names, on the record, and a company with a drug in trials has an obvious interest in how states will schedule it.

The counter-case is that a single template would have produced a uniform category, and this one is not uniform. Two of the eleven, Utah’s and California’s, use no such phrase, and Virginia’s two acts narrow by clinical setting where the rest narrow by chemistry. Virginia’s narrow, compound-naming bill was vetoed in 2025 and the broad one that named nothing was signed a year later.

Georgia’s Act does the same thing twice, for two drugs. Alongside the psilocybin provision it defers an identical carve-out for “a drug containing lysergide tartrate”, which is LSD, on the identical trigger, so whatever the psilocybin language is, Georgia did not treat it as a one-compound favour.

We counted fourteen by reading all fifty states’ own schedules. A state is in when an instrument that by its terms governs psilocybin makes its treatment turn on a future federal act and a chamber or committee acted on it. Introduction and referral are not action; on a looser rule Pennsylvania and Rhode Island would enter on bills that have never moved and are still alive in their sessions, which is why the summary above says only that no measure has advanced: a bill that has never moved is still pending.

We excluded the standing clause nearly every state has, under which the state follows a federal rescheduling, because it names no drug and would have produced an answer near fifty. What is new is the substance-specific version, often naming a formulation, and in three states firing on FDA approval without waiting for the DEA.

To test whether the exception is simply standard drafting, we deep-read ten non-member states for the carve-out. Eight of the nine we could reach carry no such exception on psilocybin. The ninth is Oklahoma, which has excluded FDA-approved prescription drugs from its Schedule I since 2021 under a clause that is general, DEA-conditioned and reversible by its own pharmacy board, a different instrument and a real qualification on how novel any of this is. The tenth, Ohio, refused every route we tried, so it is recorded as could not determine.

Three published trackers disagree with each other, and with the statutes, about which states have these measures. We have not audited any tracker state by state and so publish no error rate, and no tracker was used as a source here.

The exercise also found ten defects in our own register. Three are coverage gaps: Colorado’s, California’s and Hawaii’s rows carried no trace of the mechanism. Two are wrong primary sources: our Mississippi row cited that state’s ibogaine act, our Iowa row the fiscal note for a different bill. All ten were uncorrected when this was published. Corrections go to corrections@psilocybinlegalization.com.

Fourteen states is a minority of a minority, the eleven that passed changed nothing on the day they passed, and three of the fourteen decided not to pass anything at all.

Nothing here is a treatment claim or medical advice. No psilocybin medicine has been approved by the FDA. Possession remains a criminal offence in most of these states and none of these measures changed that.