I’m going to say the thing most people in this field say quietly, in DMs, after loosening up at a conference, but almost never in writing. Most of us are operating outside the law. Not because we’re reckless. Because the law hasn’t caught up to what’s already happening in living rooms, backyards, and ceremonial spaces across this entire country.
I’m not here to talk you out of that reality or to pretend it doesn’t carry weight. I’m here to name it plainly, because plainness is the only honest starting point for a decision this consequential.
A note before we go further: this is educational content, not legal advice. Laws vary by state and by country, and they change over time. If you are making real decisions about how you practice, talk to a licensed attorney in your own jurisdiction. This piece will help you ask better questions. It will not answer them for you.
Do I need a license to be a psychedelic guide or facilitator?
In the overwhelming majority of the United States, there is no license that legally authorizes facilitating a psychedelic experience outside a clinical trial. Oregon and Colorado are the two exceptions, each with their own state-regulated psilocybin facilitator programs. Everywhere else, the substances most guides work with remain federally controlled, and state law rarely creates a lane for what independent facilitators are actually doing.
There’s one more pathway worth naming: federally recognized religious exemptions. Churches like the União do Vegetal and branches of Santo Daime won legal sacramental use of ayahuasca (the UDV at the Supreme Court in 2006) and the Native American Church holds a long-standing federal exemption for peyote. That protection was hard-won, through years of litigation, and it deserves acknowledgment.
What’s newer is a wave of modern practitioners founding their own entheogenic churches, communities with no roots in Brazilian, Indigenous, or peyote lineages, built here and now around psilocybin and other medicines. A 2025 directory counted more than 250 psychedelic churches operating in the US, and these newer, independent ones are the fastest-growing part of that number. Some are sincere spiritual communities. Some are using the word “sacrament” to shelter a practice that isn’t actually a religion, and that’s exactly where the legal and ethical risk lives. RFRA protects genuine and sincere religious exercise. It’s not a license you grant yourself.
That’s the direct legal answer for the US, and I want to sit with what it means underneath the words. It means the vast majority of people reading this are not operating inside a regulated system. Not because they haven’t tried. Because the system, as it currently exists, doesn’t have a door for them to walk through.
And if you practice outside the United States, your legal landscape is a different one entirely. Guides in this community work everywhere from countries where ceremony is traditional or decriminalized to places where the penalties are far harsher than anything described here, and nothing US-specific in this piece maps onto your situation. What does travel is the principle: know the actual legal status of your work where you practice, carry that risk with open eyes, and never pass it to a client through vagueness.
What legal risk am I actually taking on if I practice underground?
The risk ranges from controlled-substance possession or distribution charges to civil liability if a client is harmed during or after a session, and it is not hypothetical. Enforcement is inconsistent and geographically uneven, which makes the risk harder to calculate, not smaller. Anyone telling you it’s negligible is selling you something. Usually a training program.
And I’ll be honest with you, I’m struggling with the current industry narrative around this.
Look at what’s actually being sold. Programs that fly you internationally to sit with the medicine where it’s legal, then send you home to practice where it isn’t. Programs that train you to work discreetly, online, off the radar, the client sourcing their own medicine so your hands look clean. The “just start your own church” route, where you incorporate and hope RFRA covers a practice that was never really a religion.
These are loopholes. Every one of them.
And most of these programs will dangle the facilitation practice in front of you without naming, in the same breath, that what they’re teaching you to do is illegal in most places. It’s become trendy. People invest thousands of dollars and somehow forget the legal system hasn’t sanctioned any of this yet.
Does that mean it shouldn’t happen? No.
But it does mean the risk you take on the moment you practice what you just paid to learn belongs at the front of your mind, not the back.
Does being underground make me a bad actor?
No. Operating outside a licensing structure that doesn’t yet exist for you is not, by itself, an ethics violation.
It becomes one only when a guide uses the absence of oversight as an excuse to skip the things oversight would have required anyway: real screening, real consent, real scope-of-practice honesty, real accountability when something goes wrong.
This distinction matters more than almost anything else in this piece. The field conflates “unlicensed” with “unaccountable” constantly, and it’s a false equation. A guide practicing without a license who runs a rigorous intake, tells the truth about their training, and keeps real peer consultation is operating with more integrity than a licensed facilitator cutting every one of those corners.
It’s the same line that separates a sincere church from a convenient one. Not the paperwork. What’s happening underneath it.
The license was never the actual safeguard. The practice underneath it was.
So what do I actually do with this?
You make an informed decision, with real legal counsel, about how and where you practice. And you build the ethical infrastructure (consent, screening, peer accountability) regardless of what your legal status ends up being.
The absence of a license is not permission to lower your standard. If anything, it’s the reason to raise it. Because no external system is checking your work for you.
With all the new guides now part of the Psychedelic Guide Network, I think about this constantly. I don’t take lightly what it means to ask you to weigh legal risk against the good this work does. I won’t pretend that weighing is simple, and anyone who tells you it is, hasn’t actually done it.
What I can tell you is this: the guides who last are the ones who face the risk honestly instead of managing it with denial. The ones who build a practice sturdy enough to hold up regardless of what the law eventually decides, inside a community sturdy enough to hold them while they do.
That’s the work. Not the loophole. Not the license. The practice, and the people you’re accountable to while you build it.
If you’re ready to build that kind of practice, starting with real honesty about where you stand, the Ethical Biography is where that conversation begins.
