Illegal, decriminalized, legal: what each word means
Decriminalized is not legal, and legal is not medical. Here is what separates them, and what each one does not cover.
Psilocybin law is written in categories, and the same word can carry a different legal meaning from one place to the next. The substances themselves also travel under common names that no statute uses. Each entry below describes what a word means as a name for a substance or as a category of law. None is a medical claim, and none is advice. For how a status is assigned, verified, and dated, see the methodology.
Illegal
Illegal is the register’s most common status, and it means the prohibition is in force and unmodified: no penalty has been removed, and no lawful route to obtain psilocybin has been opened. Illegal does not mean nothing is moving, because many of these records carry pending bills or study committees, and it does not mean research is impossible: trial permission is granted by a national regulator, and this status does not control it. What the prohibition carries varies widely between them.
Often confused with:Decriminalized
57 of 99 jurisdictions carry this status. See them all.
Decriminalized
Decriminalized means the penalty has been removed or reduced, not that the prohibition is gone. Possession or use is still prohibited by statute; what changed is the consequence, which may be a fine, a referral, or the lowest law-enforcement priority instead of a criminal charge. Decriminalization creates no lawful way to buy, sell, supply, import, or grow, and where a record is silent on cultivation the register treats that as unstated.
Often confused with:Legal / regulated accessGrowing your own
17 of 99 jurisdictions carry this status. See them all.
Mixed
Mixed is the term the register uses when one status word would misstate the law. It covers three situations: a prohibition narrowed by a court ruling or an administrative penalty; a statute whose text does not clearly reach psilocybin or the fungus carrying it; and a narrow medical or pilot program sitting on an otherwise unchanged prohibition. Mixed is not a midpoint between legal and illegal, and not a claim that the law is unsettled: the answer depends which part of the question is asked.
Often confused with:DecriminalizedMedical use
13 of 99 jurisdictions carry this status. See them all.
Medical use
Medical use means a jurisdiction has written a route into law that allows psilocybin under medical supervision or authorization, for purposes that instrument specifies. The term describes the regulatory classification and the rules governing it, and a route can be written into law without yet operating: this register dates each one to the instrument that created it. Medical use is not a statement about clinical results, and nothing on this site is medical advice.
Often confused with:Facilitated / supported accessLegal / regulated access
Related records
8 of 99 jurisdictions carry this status. See them all.
Legal / regulated access
Legal means some possession is lawful, and the register records two routes to that. A jurisdiction may permit access under government rules such as licensing, registration, or a supervised program, as Oregon and Colorado do. Or a substance may simply never have been written into the prohibition, which is why mushrooms are lawful in Jamaica and truffles in the Netherlands. What is permitted, and for whom, varies widely, and legal in one place does not mean legal in another.
Often confused with:DecriminalizedFacilitated / supported access
Related records
4 of 99 jurisdictions carry this status. See them all.
Magic mushrooms, shrooms
Common names for fungi that naturally contain psilocybin. Neither term is a legal category. Drug schedules name the compounds, psilocybin and psilocin, and sometimes the fungus that carries them, so the register follows the statutory language: the record for "magic mushrooms" in a place is the record for psilocybin in that place.
Psilocybin and psilocin
The two compounds named in most drug schedules. Psilocybin is the compound present in the fungus; psilocin is the closely related compound it converts to, and a law that lists one usually lists the other. Some laws name the compounds without naming the fungus that contains them, and that gap is where genuinely contested legal positions come from.
The rest of the vocabulary
Words the register uses to describe substances, instruments and dates. None of these is a status.
- Growing your own
- Decriminalization almost never covers cultivation. In many countries the statute that removes the penalty for possessing a small amount is a different provision from the one that covers growing, and growing usually stays in the criminal article, sometimes carrying the heaviest penalty in the law. Where a record does not say what cultivation carries, treat that as unstated rather than permitted. Seeds, spores, and growing kits are treated differently again, and a few laws reach them explicitly.
- Facilitated / supported access
- A supervised model, such as those in Oregon and Colorado, in which a trained facilitator is present during a session under a licensed program. It is a regulatory framework, not medical practice: a facilitator is not acting as a physician, and supported access is not the same as a medical prescription.
- Schedule I
- The most restrictive classification under the United States Controlled Substances Act, and the tier where psilocybin sits at the federal level. Substances in this schedule are subject to the tightest legal controls. State-level reforms operate underneath this federal classification, which is why a state program can exist while federal law is unchanged.
- Ballot measure
- A law or policy question put directly to voters, rather than passed by a legislature. Several psilocybin reforms, including Oregon Measure 109 and Colorado Proposition 122, were enacted this way. A ballot measure that passes still relies on later rulemaking to define how the program actually operates.
- Pending legislation
- A bill or measure that has been introduced but is not yet law. A pending status means change is proposed, not in effect. Until a bill is enacted and takes effect, the current law is whatever it was before, and that is the status the register reports.
- Effective date
- The date a law or program actually takes legal force, which is often later than the date it was passed or signed. The register dates every status to the law as it stands, so a reform can be enacted well before the date access or a penalty change becomes real.
A status is only as clear as the words behind it. These are ours, stated plainly.