114 Votes Weren't Enough: How Minnesota's Psilocybin Pilot Died in Conference

One hundred and fourteen to fifteen.

That was the Minnesota House on May 7, 2026. Representative Andy Smith’s amendment to add a psilocybin therapy pilot to the state’s health omnibus bill, SF 4612. Eighty-eight percent. Democrats and Republicans, voting together, to build a therapy program for adults 21 and older.

The bill went to a conference committee. The committee issued a “delete everything” report. The final version — all 1.9 megabytes of it — does not contain the word “psilocybin” once. Governor Walz signed it on May 26 as Chapter 127. A massive health omnibus. Zero psilocybin content. One narrower psilocybin study requirement did survive the session — in a different law. More on that below.

This isn’t a story about policy failing. The policy was sound. The clinical evidence was strong enough to earn a bipartisan floor vote most governors would envy. This is a story about process. Every level of the system — the city, the task force, the House floor — said yes. Eight conferees signed the pilot away without writing down why.

How Did Minnesota Get This Close?

In 2023, Minnesota created a Psychedelic Medicine Task Force. The legislature wanted experts to figure out what legal, regulated psychedelic therapy should look like in the state. Dr. Jessica Nielson, a University of Minnesota researcher who founded the Psychedelic Society of Minnesota (PSMN), chaired the effort. The Task Force delivered a comprehensive report. The blueprint was done.

That same year, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey signed Executive Order 2023-01. It made enforcement against entheogenic plants, including psilocybin, the city’s lowest law enforcement priority. Minneapolis didn’t legalize anything. It just said the city wasn’t spending resources arresting people for this. The pilot would have been statewide, but its biggest city had already signaled support.

The federal government was moving too. In April 2026, President Trump signed Executive Order 14401, allocating at least $50 million through ARPA-H to support states developing psychedelic therapy programs. The order also created priority-review vouchers at the FDA for psychedelic drugs with Breakthrough Therapy designation. Minnesota’s pilot could have qualified. If the bill had survived, the state might have had access to money, technical assistance, and data-sharing with federal agencies.

It did not survive.

What Would the Pilot Program Have Looked Like?

Here’s what Minnesota almost built.

The pilot would have been statewide, open to patients 21 and older, with screening and certification by a healthcare practitioner. Qualifying conditions would have been designated by the Office of Cannabis Management, the same agency that runs the state’s cannabis program. Up to 1,000 patients could have participated. The program called for an initial 20 to 50 registered facilitators — licensed mental-health professionals — a tight ratio designed to prioritize safety over scale.

Facilitator registration and patient enrollment were both set to begin July 1, 2028. Same day. More than two years after the vote. This was never a “psilocybin by next spring” bill. It was a two-year build. It died before ground was even broken.

The program wasn’t cheap. No insurance mandate was included, so costs would likely have been out-of-pocket, with reduced fees for low-income and disabled patients. That’s a real problem. It’s the same problem Oregon has. But at least the conversation about cost and access would have happened inside a real program with real patients, not in the abstract.

The local ecosystem was active. PSMN spent years on community education, harm reduction, and advocacy. Big Psych MPLS, an organization focused on social justice and sustainability in the plant medicine space, has been active since 2020. The people existed. The political will, on the House floor at least, existed.

This isn’t hypothetical policy analysis. This is a postmortem. Every one of these details shows how close Minnesota came.

How Did 114 Votes Become Zero Policy?

The Senate passed the health omnibus 34-32 on April 29. Narrow. Mostly party-line. And here’s the part almost everyone missed: that bill contained no psilocybin program. Every Senate version of the bill had none. Psilocybin entered the picture one way: the House floor amendment on May 7.

On that day, the House voted 114-15 to adopt Andy Smith’s amendment and add the pilot to the omnibus. Eighty-eight percent. On psychedelic medicine, the partisan divide vanished on the floor. Republicans and Democrats voted together to create a therapy program — for veterans, for people living with depression, for people looking for another option. All fifteen no votes were Republican. So were roughly forty-five of the yes votes.

The Senate refused to concur with the House amendments. So the bill went to conference committee: four senators and four representatives tasked with reconciling the two versions.

Senators Wiklund, Mann, Boldon, and Utke. Representatives Bierman, Reyer, Backer, and Nadeau. Eight conferees signed the report that removed the pilot. Conference meetings are open to the public under Minnesota’s joint rules. The report records the deal. It does not explain why the pilot was cut. No recorded vote on individual provisions. Just a “delete everything” report that emerged at 8 p.m. on Sunday, May 17, as a done deal.

Every psilocybin provision was gone from the health bill. Not a pilot. Not a line. But not quite nothing: a separate law passed the same session — Chapter 123 — requires the Office of Cannabis Management to report by January 15, 2027 on recommendations and the feasibility of therapeutic psilocybin use, and to keep assessing federal funding opportunities. The pilot died. A study requirement survived.

When the stripped bill came back for a final vote, the House passed it 108-26. Twenty-six members voted no. Whether any of them were protesting the lost pilot, the record doesn’t say.

Why did it get cut? The record doesn’t say. No recorded votes. No stated reasons. Here’s my read — analysis, not record: psilocybin was the cheapest thing to trade. Nobody’s constituency calls their office angry about a pilot program that doesn’t exist yet, and there are no psilocybin lobbying firms with deep pockets in St. Paul.

So it got cut. Not because the policy was wrong. Not because the votes weren’t there. For reasons nobody wrote down.

One hundred and fourteen legislators voted yes. Eight conferees decided it didn’t matter.

Who Was Supposed to Run It?

The House version didn’t just fund a study. It handed the whole program to the Office of Cannabis Management, the state agency still standing up Minnesota’s cannabis market. New statutes, sections 342.85 through 342.98, written from scratch. The office would have registered the facilitators. Enrolled the patients. Designated the qualifying conditions. A to-do list measured in years.

And that agency’s plate was already full. Minnesota legalized recreational cannabis in 2023, but the rollout has been slow. Licenses have taken longer than expected, and so have dispensary openings. Now imagine that same agency building a second regulated market from zero, this time for a Schedule I substance.

Even if the pilot had survived, the rollout would have been slow, bureaucratic, and frustrating. Passing the law isn’t the finish line. It’s the starting line. Minnesota couldn’t even get to the starting line.

What Can Minnesota Learn from Oregon?

If Minnesota needs a preview of what happens after the starting line, Oregon is providing one.

Oregon launched its psilocybin services program in 2023, the first state in the country to do so. By January 2026, about a third of its licensed service centers had closed, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sessions can cost thousands of dollars, and services are generally out of pocket. State dashboard data through late 2025 show clients skew white, 35 to 54, and — among those who reported income — $95,000 or more. Some jurisdictions have opted out entirely.

Colorado tried to learn from Oregon’s mistakes: lower facilitator licensing fees, a micro-healing center tier for lower-cost entry, and no local opt-outs. Whether any of that lowers the client’s actual bill is still unproven. Different model, same open question.

Both states are discovering the same thing: as currently built, these programs are expensive to run and expensive to use. Lower fees help operators, but the cost gets passed to the client. Minnesota would have faced the same economics. The pilot’s reduced-fee structure for low-income patients was a start, not a solution.

Even if the bill had passed, the hard work would have just begun. The difference is: Oregon and Colorado get to do that hard work. Minnesota doesn’t.

What’s Next for Psilocybin in Minnesota?

“Close” in the Midwest is still “not yet.” And “not yet” doesn’t get anyone therapy.

The Minnesota cannabis timeline offers a kind of hope without naivety. Cannabis legalization took multiple sessions, incremental progress, and years of frustration before it crossed the finish line. The psilocybin effort could follow the same arc. The coalition is still intact. The Task Force report doesn’t expire. The 114 legislators who voted yes are on the record. PSMN is still organizing. And the state gets a fresh input no matter what: OCM’s feasibility report is due January 15, 2027.

But the question this article can’t answer is the one that matters most: How do you make leadership prioritize broadly supported policy? How do you build enough public demand that a conference committee can’t quietly trade it away? One hundred and fourteen votes weren’t enough. What would be?

The 2027 session is the next test. The strategy has to change. Getting floor votes is step one. Getting leadership to commit before conference committee — to say publicly that psilocybin stays in the bill no matter what — is the real fight.

Minnesota came closer than anyone realizes. The question isn’t whether Minnesota passes psilocybin therapy. It’s when — and whether the process will let them.

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