An interview with New England’s newest “friendly neighborhood safety dealers” about the importance of psychedelics education
The psychedelic landscape in Massachusetts is shifting rapidly as grassroots leaders regroup following the failure of the Question 4 psychedelics ballot initiative last November. While key advocates—including Parents for Plant Medicine founder Jamie Morey, former Yes on 4 Educational Outreach Director Graham Moore, and U.S. Army veteran-turned-Q4-spokesperson CJ LoConte—have focused on reviving psychedelic policy efforts on Beacon Hill, others have turned their attention to harm-reduction education.
Among them is the Safer Psychedelics Association of New England (SPAN), a newly formed nonprofit dedicated to psychedelic education. Founded by Dr. Breanna Reeser and former Q4 campaign volunteer Jenny Chen Robertson, SPAN is quickly establishing itself as a key resource for both newcomers and experienced psychonauts. The group has a growing slate of public appearances scheduled for 2025, including Friday’s “Portal to: Plants and Other Medicines” at New Dia Cannabis Co., a panel at NECANN Boston next month on psychedelic policy, and a community partnership with the MAPS Psychedelic Science conference in Denver this summer.
To learn more about SPAN’s mission and approach, I sat down with Chen-Robertson and Reeser for a series of in-depth conversations. Below is a condensed and edited version of our discussion.
Gorsline: When and why did you first become interested in psychedelics?
Reeser: My background is in behavioral health. I started in healthcare, in physical health, and became very interested in behavior. I was curious about how we do things and how we can motivate people to do things that we want them to do—the psychology of behavior. I was also interested in why people don’t do what they’re supposed to do, even if they know it’s best. For example, we all have beliefs about how to improve ourselves, but we don’t typically have the behaviors to match those beliefs.
So, I did a PhD in integrated behavioral health, which is the intersection between physical and mental, emotional health and wellness, in part because my family has a history of chronic disease and chronic illness, psychosocial issues, and more. People often pursue a PhD in psychology because they’re trying to fix themselves, and that’s true for me as well.
As for my first foray in psychedelics—I was curious about them, and I wanted to be able to recommend them, so I started experimenting myself to see what was happening, while also fighting some of my own issues that had been coming up for me at the time. In 2017, I first tried psilocybin experimentally and then later more ceremonially for specific insights and guided sessions for healing, which I didn’t know that was a possibility until later on, after being exposed to indigenous wisdom.
The turning point for me was a year and a half ago when I lost my sister to an overdose. Up until that point, I had wanted to recommend psilocybin to her, and she had asked me to send her some, or to do it with her. But I was too afraid to because I didn’t know the risks. I had no education on it. I was afraid that I’m going to get in trouble with the law or she was going to get in trouble with the law, or something was going to happen. So in that learning period of time where I was trying to learn about it, she died.
Obviously in hindsight, I wish I would have just started learning about psychedelics sooner. I wish I would have had more resources, and I had known that there isn’t really a big risk with psilocybin specifically, that it’s not toxic, she’s not going to die if she takes it, and that there were avenues to do it legally, in safety. I didn’t know those things, and my sister died. So I think that becomes very specific for me in my journey on what drives me. I owe it to her legacy to continue making this medicine available for people in her stead that, you know, have struggled with these deep-seated psychosocial issues that lead to substance use and abuse.
Unfortunately, I think that most people still see psychedelic use as drug use, and they see it as deviation from morals and ethics, and there’s all this sort of demonizing on it. Which is why I want to help show that more people come to psychedelics to heal, to grow, to excavate darkness, to battle their PTSD, to become people again, to resurrect the life force inside of themselves, to be able to meet the demands and needs of our current very difficult culture systems.
So that’s what SPAN is working on: we’re working on destigmatizing use and shedding light on the reasons why people use it.
Chen Robertson: This is where Brea and I really connect our approach and our story. So similarly, my husband is battling depression, and continues to do so. Being in a relationship itself can be difficult, but what I really attribute to our marriage’s breakdown and his inability to communicate is the fact that a lot of these psychotropic pharmaceuticals are prescribed and are being used in a way that’s actually not healing or allowing people to access their emotions, to find a healing modality and work through the source of their depression or the forces that brought depression to their doorstep.
And so that’s where Brea’s passion and my passion really connects us, is that we want to destigmatize use. I have nothing against recreational use—which I want to be really clear about—my first foray into psychedelics was in college via recreational use, when I had a great time with my college roommate. She and I are still friends now, but you know, sometimes I wonder, would we still be friends [without psychedelics]?
Through learning more about psilocybin and researching it for my spouse, I came to realize that I had so much to heal myself, which really brought me to my knees, and eventually, I really had to realize I needed to work on myself, too. From there, I just kind of started to dismantle many of those intergenerational wounds and traumas, really looking at some of these really difficult social structures, this late-stage capitalism that we’re in, and really questioning, What’s healthy? We’re sold so many things now on what being healthy is, that I don’t really understand what a healthy psyche is. What a healthy mental state looks like anymore, because of all of the media that bombards us every day.
Above all else, SPAN isn’t trying to peddle anything sexy. We are peddling good old fashioned safety. And no one wants to talk about hard hats and safety vests when they’re working on a new project. Right now, I work in construction and real estate. Everyone wants to talk about, like, you know, going up to the penthouse floor and flying up there on the super fast elevator, but we’re just kind of taking our steps carefully and measuredly.
One of the biggest concerns surrounding psilocybin-assisted therapy is the high cost of treatment sessions. How do you think this issue can be addressed—be it legislatively, commercially, or otherwise—to make psychedelic medicine more accessible to a wider range of patients?
Chen Robertson: I’m an MBA. I studied business, business structures, business organizations, and economics. And I think that anything that you bring above ground to make it safer will ultimately incur a cost. Right now, there’s underground practitioners, and are they doing good work? Yeah, probably, I don’t know. I have no moral judgments on that, because I don’t know what’s happening, in any of those situations. But what I do know is that if someone is harmed in this situation, that person who is harmed doesn’t have recourse, nor do they have any protections, so what I am for is consumer protection.
I’m a real estate agent by trade, right, by occupation. If I do something wrong, if I swindle a client, they should have every right to report me to someone, and I should lose my license. But in the psychedelic underground, people do not have that protection. Don’t get me wrong, there are tons of underground practitioners that are ethical and that are doing the right thing. So while I don’t have the broader answer on what to do, I do know that there will be a cost incurred to provide protection, like you and I like driving on paved roads. When I’m walking down the streets in Boston, I like an overhead lamp to light my way. All of these things are paid for by tax dollars—and there’s a cost to safety.
Reeser: The only economic model we have is Oregon. It’s the first economic model. The second economic model we have is coming to New York, where they’ve proposed a permit model, which is going to be cheaper. The biggest cost prohibitive aspect of the Oregon model is the facility cost. It’s an astronomical facility cost. What we’ve thought about is having nonprofits come together to eat the cost of the facility, so that we’re not passing that on to the individual user, while ensuring that practitioners still get paid.
The second major cost is the cost of licensing itself. Being a licensed practitioner is insanely pricey for somebody coming out of a good program, and you really have to be willing to pay for it, but you also have to recertify every year, and it’s not a cheap recertification either. So I think that what we would want is a further integration into the medical mainstream, like certain medical uses being covered by insurance in the long run, which absolutely should be a no brainer for psilocybin specifically. Psilocybin is an easy one, with a really low propensity for physical harm and very comparatively low psychosocial harm associated with suicide, and most things psychosocial issues respond with very conservative mitigation within 24 hours. The data that exists overwhelmingly supports that, so it’s a matter of presenting that data in a digestible way.
The other thing that we’ve got to take into consideration is that a single use provides six months of relief—this isn’t something you’re doing every month or every day or every week or even every year. Here’s where I’d like to see it going: we already have this intensive outpatient model (IOP) for addiction treatment that uses methadone. Methadone is supposed to be a better option than heroin, and so when you have a heroin addiction, you go to an IOP every day and you get methadone. So why can’t we sub methadone out for psilocybin? Psilocybin is going to be highly, way more effective, and it’s going to be a smaller dose and it’s not going to be every single day. In the long run, I see psilocybin being rescheduled, and I see IOP as an option for when we go that direction.
While SPAN identifies as an apolitical organization, you also both volunteered for the failed Yes on 4 campaign last fall. In your opinion, what were some of the strengths and weaknesses of the Question 4 campaign’s strategy, and if you’d been in charge, what might you have done differently?
Chen Robertson: On a personal level, I supported the campaign, and one of the reasons I support a legalized model is the same reason that SPAN exists: education, ethics, and accountability. We provide education, we provide information in an ethical way. We want people to work with ethical facilitators and so forth. So along that same path is why I support a legalized framework—because in this space, as there is in any industry, there’s always going to be room for manipulation.
As for the Yes on 4 campaign’s strategy, it seemed to me it was built on a mental health-focused rhetoric, including the powers of psychedelics for mental health and the relief they can bring. But I think some of the challenges the campaign faced, it seemed to me, was just education. The measure itself was quite broad, and I don’t know that the general public really quite understood what that meant as it applied to them because of the breadth of the legislation of the proposed measure. As I was volunteering on the campaign, the feedback I consistently received was, While I support plant medicine, I cannot vote for this measure as it’s written. And I think that’s because there was a serious lack of education there to help people understand that it was not going to be a cannabis model and that people were never going into a dispensary and purchasing psychedelics—which seemed to be a concern for a lot of people.
Reeser: I think that they didn’t do a great job at finding out the consumer attitudes and perceptions and then speaking to those perceptions, attitudes, and potential concerns specifically. So, if you’re talking about campaign models, what we didn’t do is we didn’t go out and talk to people that were going to vote against us and find out why they are voting against us so that we could clear up some of the misinformation and misconceptions. If I had to sum it up in one sentence: the Yes on 4 campaign’s strategy was neither reactive nor proactive enough.
Aside from SPAN’s upcoming involvement with “Portal to: Plants and other Medicines,” NECANN Boston, and MAPS’ annual Psychedelic Science conference in Denver later this year, what’s next for SPAN’s educational and advocacy work?
Chen Robertson: Well, I think that we are really just sharing our name right now, which is really about branding and name recognition, and most importantly we want to make sure that folks in New England understand what we’re about and how we can help, especially given the recent wave of psychedelics legislation filed in January. So we’re interested in learning more about each of those bills and how we might be able to participate, provide good information, or be a resource for those who want real harm reduction education from SPAN.
In terms of events, we’re officially on board as a community partner for MAPS’ annual Psychedelic Science conference in Denver in June, but otherwise for now, we are taking a measured and careful approach to event planning because of the sensitive nature of psychedelics.
Reeser: One thing that we have been actively working on is getting a free training program going for first responders. Ultimately, we want to make things as low cost and potentially free as possible. And so our goal is to continue to work on a quality training that is webinar based and also in person. I think that there really is something about the shared energy of in person events that can be really beneficial, especially for these kinds of things.
Personally, I’d love to offer some free or low cost donation based training programs to all first responder groups in New England: firefighters, police officers, EMS workers, maybe even emergency room medical staff. … Beyond that, we’re hoping to and are happy to collaborate with organizations that share our similar values and approaches. While we’re apolitical, we will always help educate everyone and anyone that wants it. As long as we can partner and collaborate with organizations that share those same ethical values that we share, we’re happy to collaborate and work with them to get the word out.
