Main Street service center plans to eventually have seven spaces available for psychedelic therapy

By Erick Bengel, Rogue Valley Times

Satya Inc., the first psilocybin manufacturer in Southern Oregon, became the region’s first psilocybin service center licensee Friday.

CEO Andreas Met and his wife, Jennifer Met — two of the company’s co-founders — are turning a former pain treatment clinic at 638 N. Main St. in Ashland into a service center called Satya Therapeutics. They plan a soft opening for the business the week of July 17.

The Mets run a psilocybin manufacturing operation — one of three in Oregon — in unincorporated Jackson County. They will use their own product in their service center.

Satya Inc., a Medford-based company, is among five service center licensees currently listed in the Oregon Health Authority’s psilocybin services directory.

In 2020, Oregon voters approved the growth, sale and use of psilocybin — the psychedelic that makes “magic mushrooms” magical — for therapeutic use through Measure 109. The state was the first to legalize the drug. The ballot measure passed in Jackson County 51.19% to 48.81%.

This year, the state began issuing licenses to manufacturers who cultivate psilocybin; laboratories that test its potency; service centers where clients 21 and older will consume the drug in a clinical setting; and facilitators who will administer it.

Satya Therapeutics will have seven spaces to conduct facilitation, though it will be some time before they’re all used, Andreas Met said.

“A service center is like a hotel: You have rooms that people come in to be treated, and you have facilitators that come and treat them,” he said.

Facilitators must have 120 hours of training — 60 online, 60 in person — plus 40 hours of practicum.

Ideally, the aspiring facilitator would be working with people who had ingested psilocybin. But because facilitation programs existed before service centers did, trainees could not legally do a psilocybin-based practicum. The state created alternative methods, such working with people practicing holotropic breathing to reach other states of consciousness, to do the practicum.

The Mets are training to become facilitators and plan to open up their service center to their training program so that they and their cohort can do their practicum with psilocybin in play.

“We’ll be the first service center in the state that actually is doing psilocybin-based practicum,” Andreas Met said.

They have also started working with Myco-Method, a facilitator training program of the spiritually oriented Saba Cooperative, Satya Inc. announced in a release.

Meanwhile, the Mets are seeking facilitators and have contacted those listed in the OHA directory. Oregon has just shy of 30 so far.

They will charge facilitators a starting rate of $250 a day to use the space.

Their target price will be $750 for a session, putting the service within reach of clients with low or moderate incomes.

“We’ll cater to everybody,” Andreas Met said, “but what we believe needs to happen is, we have to have this be a social and health equity program where people of all means of life can come and get services.”

If facilitators’ prices go over $750 — there will be an upward sliding scale — they’ll be asked to give a percentage of the difference in revenue to the service center.

“We’re making it accessible by having a price that is going to be certainly half, if not more than half, of what current rates are going to be,” he said.

Research has pointed to psilocybin’s potential as a treatment for depression, substance use disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, end-of-life anxiety and other psychological afflictions.

Under health authority guidelines, psilocybin treatment is considered a service, not medicine.

“It’s not something that medically has been proven to cure things, and it’s highly subjective and variable between individuals,” Andreas Met cautioned.

This means that he and others in the industry can’t make medical claims about the drug; they can only refer people to existing research.

“It may not work for anybody, or it may only work for a few people, or it may work for many people — there’s no guarantee,” he said.

“There’s this image being put out there that this is a wonder drug and will cure everybody of years of complex trauma or alcoholism,” he continued. “And it does do that with some people; it does make some people lose their fear of death after one session.

“But we can’t make those claims — and it would be dangerous to make those claims — because it sets up an expectation that could cause harm if it didn’t come true.”

Reach reporter Erick Bengel at [email protected] or 458-488-2031. This story first appeared in the Rogue Valley Times.