The Center Is Not the Hub: Why the Psilocybin Industry Must Evolve To Avoid Collapse

Licensees in Colorado are right now making key decisions in the development of its psilocybin industry. The regulatory framework has been created, licenses are being issued, and dozens of Healing Centers are opening their doors under the assumption that they are the primary home of the work. This assumption is not stated explicitly in the law, but it is embedded in the architecture of the rules: client records must be held by centers, administration must occur on center premises, and centers are positioned as the controlling gatekeepers of legal access. The framework does not say that facilitators must be employees, yet in its structure, it reflects a clinic-style model in which the physical facility—not the practitioner—is imagined as the locus of transformation.

CO regulators didn’t craft their structure whole cloth though. Instead, Colorado is following the model that regulators in Oregon created two years ago. The results from the last two years of work in Oregon should be instructive. Few Sergice Centers have survived their first year. Most are struggling to fill programs or bring in sufficient client volume to cover overhead. Not one center has successfully implemented the employment-based model regulators envisioned. Facilitators are not employees; they are gig workers, independent contractors, or fully independent practitioners forced to negotiate center access under terms that heavily favor the center. In some cases, facilitators are permitted to work with only the clients who come through the center’s own marketing pipeline. In others, they are allowed to bring clients only if those clients are absorbed into the center’s brand. And in many of the most commercially successful centers, access is limited to a small, curated group of facilitators approved not just for safety or compliance, but for alignment with branding, messaging, or personality.

Meanwhile, the facilitators are doing the majority of the labor. It is the facilitator—not the center operator—who meets with a client for hours of preparation sessions, completes all intake paperwork, plans the session format, constructs the relational safety container, and does the post-administration integration work. It is facilitators who are required to track subtle relational dynamics, manage interpersonal risk, and hold emotional intensity. When facilitators bring in their own clients, they are also doing all outreach, education, and relationship-building that enable the work to happen at all. Yet in the dominant model being adopted in Colorado, center operators retain control over where and when that work can occur, and in many cases, whether a facilitator may access center space at all. This is not an industry being shaped around the actual flow of labor. It is being shaped around a theoretical model that has already proven unstable.

Let’s try to learn from the past

Colorado is now repeating Oregon’s pattern without acknowledging Oregon’s outcomes. Regulators imagined a system in which centers would function like clinics or spa-like wellness facilities where facilitators would be hired, scheduled, and deployed. But the economics never supported that vision. Centers in Oregon have been unable to generate enough client volume to create salaried positions. Instead, facilitators are treated as peripheral service providers while also being expected to shoulder the majority of the work. The disconnect between regulatory imagination and operational reality has created an artificial bottleneck: the industry is conceptually ready to expand and to serve more clients, but economically constrained by a center-centric model that cannot support its own infrastructure.

Many center owners in Colorado are now adopting branding strategies that reinforce themselves as the core of the industry. They curate facilitator lists, limit access, and build marketing campaigns that position the center—not the facilitator—as the gateway to client experience. Some centers are actively discouraging facilitators from building their own practices, requiring facilitators to sign dubious non-compete contracts and warning of brand dilution or liability concerns. Yet these centers are not hiring facilitators as employees, nor are they assuming responsibility for client acquisition at a level that could make employment viable. In short, they are seeking the control of a clinic model without providing the stability of one.

Promoting a facilitator centric model

There is another path forward: a facilitator-centric model supported by a room-rental center infrastructure. Under this model, centers operate as sacred spaces licensed to host services, while facilitators are recognized as independent practitioners who bring in clients, build their own therapeutic or ceremonial frameworks, and rent compliant rooms in which to administer sessions. Centers earn revenue through rental fees and optional lead-sharing models rather than attempting to capture all economic value through client funneling. This approach mirrors the economic structure of many acupuncture practices, chiropractic clinics, psychotherapy offices, and wellness cooperatives. It is proven, sustainable, and aligned with the actual distribution of labor in the psilocybin field.

Room rental is a model that reflects the real conditions of this emerging industry. It allows centers to generate steady, predictable income while reducing their dependence on owning the client pipeline. It gives facilitators the autonomy needed to develop specialties, build meaningful client relationships, and cultivate long-term practice viability. It also opens the door for hundreds of licensed facilitators to enter the field in a meaningful way, rather than waiting to be selected by a handful of centers who currently decide who is “in” and who is not.

The counterargument is usually framed in terms of brand protection. Centers worry that renting rooms to too many facilitators will dilute their identity, create uneven client experiences, or compromise their reputation. This concern is understandable and worth addressing directly. A center that simply opens its doors to any facilitator without guidelines is not stewarding its space. But structured room-rental models can maintain brand integrity through shared policies, onboarding requirements, and ongoing quality agreements. Room rental does not erase standards—it decentralizes power while preserving compliance. It also ensures that centers no longer have to choose between economic survival and strict brand curation. They can define their physical space as a community resource rather than a closed ecosystem.

Oregon shows what happens when brand curation and center-centric control are prioritized over economic sustainability. The industry shrinks. Facilitators are left without viable income streams. Centers close. Those that survive do so through niche pricing or rely on the specific skills of their managers and executives to find clients and promote their brand. The result is a scarcity economy in which a few facilitators receive most of the opportunities, while the majority of trained professionals—many who invested tens of thousands of dollars in education—remain underutilized.

Colorado has a chance to make a different choice, but only if facilitators and center operators recognize that sustainability requires alignment with reality. The facilitators are the engine. They are the ones doing client acquisition, relationship building, narrative framing, emotional support, and session holding. They are also the group most invested in long-term practice development. A facilitator-centric model does not minimize the role of centers; it elevates it by placing centers in their clearest function: as licensed sanctuaries for legal access. When centers shift from being the brand to being the platform, the entire field becomes more expansive. New facilitators can enter. New forms of practice can evolve. Diversity increases. Innovation returns.

The economic implications are equally compelling. A center that rents four rooms at a reasonable rate can generate consistent revenue without needing to carry the overhead of full-time staff or marketing departments. Facilitators who bring their own clients will fill those rooms more consistently than a center trying to market to the general public, if for no other reason than that there are more individual humans reaching out into the ether for clients. This hybrid model even positions centers to eventually create salaried positions—fulfilling the regulatory imagination—after first building a financially stable foundation through room rental and facilitator partnerships.

A facilitator-centric model positions centers as essential infrastructure—places where legal access is grounded and standardized—while acknowledging that facilitators generate the relationships and practices that create sustainability for the field. The psilocybin field is not an extension of conventional medicine, nor is it a ceremonial monoculture. It is an emerging practice that requires infrastructure designed around relational labor, client autonomy, and practitioner agency.

A call to action

Oregon is sometimes described as a cautionary tale, but it may also be the first place where the industry can meaningfully evolve. The pressures that have strained Oregon’s centers—high fixed costs, inconsistent client flow, and the difficulty of maintaining exclusive facilitator networks—are the very conditions that create the opportunity for a facilitator-centric model to emerge. Oregon centers still have time to reorient themselves as platforms that empower the state’s many licensed practitioners, rather than continuing to function as narrow gateways. The next phase of the industry in Oregon will be defined not by who controls client access, but by who creates the conditions for facilitators to build viable practices that expand access to the public and stabilize the entire ecosystem.

But as we speak Colorado has the opportunity to define the future of their industry in a way that Oregon has yet to do. If Colorado follows Oregon’s historical center-centric path, the same outcomes will follow: closures, consolidation, exclusivity, and slow collapse. If Colorado embraces a facilitator-centric infrastructure supported by room-rental center models, it can create a replicable ecosystem that is economically sustainable, ethically defensible, and widely accessible.

The choice facing the industry now is simple: build a system around buildings, or build a system around practitioners. One model attempts to preserve control; the other creates capacity. Only one of these models has the potential to lift all boats.