Between the Underground and the Statehouse: The Paradox of Psychedelic Legitimacy
When a new field moves from shadow into visibility, laws inevitably follow. The effort to regulate psychedelics in states like Colorado was born from good intentions: to protect participants, establish ethical standards, and create pathways for legitimate practice. Yet, as these structures take shape, a quiet paradox has emerged — one that reveals how easily regulation can both honor and distort the very integrity it aims to ensure.
From Legalization to Regulation — and the Gray Space Between
Technically, what’s happening in Colorado is not “legalization” but regulation: a tightly defined framework allowing certain people, with specific training, to offer facilitation under state license. Everyone else — including those offering preparation, integration, or sitting without claiming the title facilitator — remains in a legal gray zone, not penalized but not formally acknowledged either.
It’s a system designed for safety and oversight, and it’s a step forward. Yet in codifying who counts as “legitimate,” it has also unintentionally deepened a divide between the regulated and the experienced, between those sanctioned by the state and those whose authority comes from years of underground practice or scientific research.
The Irony of Exclusion
Perhaps the greatest irony of this moment lies with the researchers — the very people whose federally approved studies made regulation possible. Under DEA authorization and institutional review, they’ve spent years developing safety protocols, dosing models, and therapeutic frameworks that now form the backbone of state-level psychedelic policy.
And yet, despite being among the most closely monitored and rigorously trained professionals in the field, they are not automatically recognized as “facilitators” under new state systems. Instead, they must reapply, retrain, and re-credential to meet the definitions created in part from their own work.
This irony exposes a deeper truth: legitimacy is being defined by law, not lineage. And law, by nature, is always a few steps behind living wisdom.
The “Othering” of the Underground
Equally concerning is how the narrative of “legitimacy” can cast a shadow on underground practitioners — those who, for decades, safeguarded and refined these practices long before it was safe to do so publicly. Many of them guided sessions rooted in ceremonial, shamanic, or community-based traditions. They built their experience through apprenticeship, observation, and an embodied understanding of the human psyche under altered states.
Now, with regulation in place, some find themselves reframed as unethical — not because their work has changed, but because the definition of legitimacy has. They stand in a strange in-between: no longer criminalized, yet subtly “othered” by a system that equates ethics with licensure.
The irony is that many of these underground guides have already lived the very principles of harm reduction, humility, and respect that the new laws aim to enforce.
The Subtle Laws Beneath the Law
Beyond the visible regulations are subtler, unspoken “laws” — the social and spiritual hierarchies that emerge whenever systems professionalize. Titles confer status. Licensure implies authority. And yet, the true ethics of this work are found not in titles but in qualities: presence, attunement, humility, and the willingness to keep learning.
If the state defines who may practice, perhaps the community must define how we practice — not through exclusion, but through conversation across difference. Researchers, underground guides, clinicians, and ceremonialists all hold pieces of the same puzzle.
A mature field will require all of them.
Bridging the Divide
It would be easy to fall into polarization — the “licensed” versus the “illicit,” academia versus ceremony, law versus soul. But that misses the opportunity of this moment.
The true task ahead is to bridge worlds: to invite dialogue between research and ritual, between policy and lived wisdom, between those newly trained and those long seasoned by experience. If we can hold that tension without judgment, the field may yet evolve into something that honors both safety and spirit.
Because legitimacy, in its deepest sense, has never been about compliance — it’s about coherence: a shared alignment between law, ethics, and the heart.
Regulation may define permission, but integrity defines belonging.
Until we learn to honor both, this movement will remain divided — not by legality, but by understanding.
Author Note:
Dr. Christina Collins is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and emerging psychedelic ethics. She writes about maturity, legitimacy, and the integration of law and soul at Soul Speak Psychotherapy.
