“I’m Very Proud”: Yamhill County Chair On Vote To Allow Psilocybin Treatment Centers In A Rural Oregon County
The dust has settled after months of debate in city and county governments across Oregon, and it is now clear that nearly two million Oregonians will have access to psilocybin treatment where they live. Breakthrough Bulletin sat down with Lindsay Berschauer, a Republican, who serves as Chair of the Yamhill County Commission—one example of a more rural, somewhat more conservative county that chose to allow psilocybin production and treatment within its borders. Voters in Yamhill County voted 50.1% to support psilocybin therapy, a decision its commissioners ultimately chose to support. Here’s Berschauer in her own words:
How county leaders viewed psilocybin before public hearings began this summer:
“We proactively asked our county council to draft an outright ban and a two-year moratorium and had them in a holding pattern.”
“At this point, we were all struggling to get answers … We were laughing because we hardly knew how to say psilocybin let alone be able to describe exactly what it is and the process around it…. But it did start with a fear over what people were calling magic mushrooms, which was very concerning.”
“We wanted to hear from our planning commission, so we kicked it to them … a couple didn’t know what we were talking about—they had never heard of psilocybin either—and so I would say a bare majority of the planning commission favored the two-year moratorium because they didn’t have enough information yet.”
How public hearings helped county leaders come full circle on psilocybin treatment:
“It was a snowball thing—we kept receiving very common sense, practical testimony that changed our position … It was a lot of public feedback and really some surprising folks who weighed in. We had nurses who want to use alternative therapies, veterans who told us they’d been using this for a long time who said this works, folks from law enforcement and of course their concern is public safety and our sheriff said it’s not an issue. I checked with a couple of our city fire departments too and they said it’s not a problem.”
“Once we started asking for public testimony, one farmer in particular, a young farmer named James who owns an acre or two… and had never shown up to a county commission meeting before. He explained that there were things that he cannot farm, but that [psilocybin] was something he could farm and actually make a living for his family. That was very impactful.”
“One of the most impactful testimonies to me was a woman who owns with her husband a series of mental health care facilities outside of our county which focus on alternative mental healthcare treatment for various conditions. Her communication to me was shocking, this is a suburban white soccer mom in Wilsonville, this is a very affluent area in Oregon, saying ‘yes, I’m already training my people to be facilitators.’”
“One of the arguments that came forward that I didn’t really consider before was the void created by a two-year moratorium where you can have outside investors come in and control the service side of it and really position themselves to grab onto those licenses and sort of shut out are local, small farmers, and we’ve seen that happen before.”
The decision not to opt-out:
“I’m very proud of the decision and the time we took to make it. The context, so we have three commissioners, we’re a smaller county. The context of where we are individually politically matters too because it was pretty surprising that we came to a consensus and agreement on this issue … Commissioner Kulla would probably classify himself as more progressive. Commissioner Starrett and I are very fiscally conservative but also tend to be socially conservative too. It was definitely something that surprised me that we got to an agreement on, you wouldn’t have guessed this would be the outcome.”
“It became very clear that the majority of this board supports the right to manufacture what is considered a legal farm crop … our viewpoint is that if it is a legal crop in Oregon we are not going to put restrictions on it.”
“Ultimately, though, for the service centers, it came down to what are we actually getting from a two-year moratorium? And we couldn’t answer that question."
What she’s hearing from conservative leaders in other cities and counties:
“A lot of people read about what we did and I got a lot of calls from city councilors and other commissioners around the state and said, ‘I'm surprised you guys did that, we defaulted to the two year moratorium, we don’t know what this is.’ And so it made me feel even better about our decision because most people didn’t put the time in that we did, to study the issue, to reach out, we had numerous public reach outs, let us know how you feel about this. I understand that the easier thing would have been to kick the can down the road. But we wanted to make an informed decision.”
