Most of these legislatures wrote an exception into the schedule in advance: language saying that a psilocybin product, once the federal government approves it, is treated differently from the mushroom compound it derives from. Not all took that route. Virginia’s two acts are uncodified and amend no schedule, instructing a board; California’s law never moves psilocybin off its own Schedule I; and three of the fourteen wrote nothing into any list, because they did not pass.

The drafters call them trigger laws. That is their word for it.

None of them legalises anything: read the operative clause of ten of the eleven enacted measures and you find a conditional with an empty subject.

The oldest psilocybin-specific measure is Nebraska’s, signed in February 2025, though the earliest of any kind is California’s, in force since the first day of 2024; the most recent took effect on 1 July 2026.

Only Arizona contemplated the approval never arriving, writing a provision 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 debated, amended and passed judgment on psilocybin’s legal status, and the law that decides what happens to a person caught holding psilocybin mushrooms is unchanged in all fourteen; North Dakota alone moved anything, and only one manufactured composition.

That ledger spans four rungs of our register, and every one of those positions was set by some other law, which is the finding underneath the finding.

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; Georgia, which prohibits psilocybin outright, signed its own on 11 May 2026. These measures sit at right angles to the argument the country has actually been having.

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, and they failed in three different ways.

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. On sequencing, she wrote that 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.” But 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. The current Iowa Code contains no such provision.

Virginia, twice. A Virginia bill naming the same compound passed both chambers in 2025 and was vetoed on 24 March that year, on reasoning close to Reynolds’s: it was “premature to the appropriate FDA approval and DEA drug scheduling.” The Senate sustained the veto on 2 April. A year later Virginia passed two more, drafted differently, and both were signed.

Kansas and Hawaii. Kansas House Bill 2218 took a favourable committee report in January 2026, was passed over on 18 February, and was stricken from the calendar the next day under Rule 1507, which provides that a bill stricken this way “shall be considered as killed.” The legislature adjourned in April without reviving it. Hawaii’s Senate Bill 3199 carried the mechanism through three versions and died in conference.

A caution for anyone checking Kansas. The legislature’s own bill page still renders a status badge reading “On General Orders in House” directly above a history table recording the bill stricken; the history is what counts.

They take four mechanical shapes, and the differences decide what would actually happen on approval day.

Self-executing. Eight of the eleven enacted measures operate by their own terms: the exception is already written into the schedule, approval fills in the blank, and nobody has to do anything.

Delegated, on a clock. Virginia’s two acts 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. That is a statutory interval inside an instrument, not a countdown, and it begins running from a publication that has not occurred. They are also the narrowest of the fourteen: they reach a formulation “designed to be administered by a health care professional in a health care setting.”

Already done. North Dakota’s provision took effect in March 2025 and operates today.

Not a rescheduling at all. California’s law, the earliest, 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. Its language covers every Schedule I substance; psilocybin is swept in without being named.

The trigger conditions differ too: three fire on an FDA approval alone, four name the Drug Enforcement Administration expressly, and Hawaii’s measure keys on a breakthrough-therapy designation, which is not an approval.

West Virginia’s breaks the pattern differently, because it 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.

Mississippi’s automatic scheduling holds only until the state schedules are amended or the next regular session of the legislature ends, whichever is earlier, so it runs out on the calendar whether or not anyone acts.

What follows is inference. The record above it is not.

Eight of the eleven enacted measures do not refer to psilocybin generally; they refer to “crystalline polymorph psilocybin”, a manufactured form. Two of the fourteen go further and name a product: North Dakota’s code 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.

North Dakota is the receipt: in one chapter of that state’s code, psilocybin and psilocyn sit in Schedule I, and the crystalline polymorph, named as COMP360, sits in Schedule IV.

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

The relevant record is public. 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.” That draft sits on the legislature’s own server, and 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. If one template explained the category, the category would look uniform, and it does not.

Two of the eleven, Utah’s and California’s, use no such phrase and reach Schedule I substances generally. Virginia’s two acts use none either, and go the other way: where the rest narrow by chemistry, Virginia narrows by clinical setting. Virginia is the sharpest case against the one-template explanation, since its narrow, compound-naming bill was vetoed 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. Whatever the psilocybin language is, Georgia did not treat it as a one-compound favour.

The count. Fourteen states, from reading all fifty states’ own schedules on their own code hosts. A state is in when an instrument that by its terms governs psilocybin makes the state’s treatment of it turn on a future federal act, and a chamber or committee acted on it. Introduction and referral are not action, and on the looser rule Pennsylvania and Rhode Island would enter on bills that have never moved. Those bills are still alive in their sessions, which is why the summary above says no measure has advanced. That is a weaker claim than saying none is pending, and it is the one the record supports.

What we excluded. Nearly every state has a standing clause saying that if a substance is rescheduled federally, the state follows. That names no drug and long predates any psilocybin policy, and counting those would have produced an answer near fifty and a finding worth nothing. Deferring to Washington is not new: Oklahoma has excluded FDA-approved prescription drugs from its Schedule I since 2021. Nor is the drafting move new: Wisconsin wrote a substance-specific, federally-keyed accelerator years earlier for cannabidiol, and we make no claim about the size of that earlier wave. 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.

The control. If the exception were standard drafting, this category would be an artifact of which rows we happened to annotate. So we read all fifty for membership, then 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, whose clause is general, DEA-conditioned and reversible by its own pharmacy board. That is a different instrument, and a real qualification on how novel any of this is.

Florida is the clean case. Psilocybin and psilocyn sit bare at items 33 and 34 of its Schedule I; items 35, 36 and 37 each carry the words “except for any drug product approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration.” Same subsection, adjacent numbering, three items below psilocybin in the text a drafter amending it has open in front of them.

One state we could not read. Ohio’s code host refuses connections from every route we tried, so Ohio is recorded as could not determine. We do not know what its schedule says.

Where the published counts sit. This category has been written about, by a policy association, by trade publications and by law firms, some of it well before us. 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. Every row here was re-derived from the enacting state’s own text; no tracker was used as a source.

Our own defects. This exercise found ten in our 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 are uncorrected as this publishes. The corrections route is pending and will be published with the page.

The size of it. 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.

What this is not. 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.

• Instruments Each of the fourteen was read on the enacting state’s own legislative or code host.
• Register The Psilocybin Record jurisdiction register, one hundred jurisdictions, checked 11 September 2026.
• Veto documents Iowa’s veto letter and Virginia’s veto explanation, both from the legislature’s own document store.
• Testimony Committee testimony filed on the Kansas and Vermont legislatures’ own servers.