We proved it can be done. Now we prove it’s worth covering.
Study Proposal · $400K – $1.2M · Three scoped tiers
03 The barrier
Oregon built legal access. It did not build affordable access.
Thirty-seven states have passed or are pushing psychedelic access legislation. Legality was the first gate. Price is the second one, and no state has cleared it. A program that only serves people who can write a four-figure check is not a public health program.
05 The study
A randomized, controlled effectiveness trial.
LIGPATD 2 keeps the delivery model that worked and adds what a feasibility study cannot provide: a control arm and a health-economics arm. Medicaid-eligible Oregon adults with major depression are randomized to immediate treatment or to a standard-of-care waitlist treated after the control window.
Screen & randomize
Intake, medical history, in-person screening visit and informed consent with the PI. Randomization to immediate treatment or standard-of-care waitlist.
Two preparation sessions
Group preparation in the assigned cohort of six, run online to remove the transportation barrier that disproportionately affects this population.
Two administration sessions
Six to eight hours each, all six participants dosed together, continuous monitoring by licensed facilitators. No take-home dosing.
Integration & follow-up
Group integration two to three days after each administration, then structured follow-up with the health-economics measures carried forward.
- Who. Oregon adults 21+ at or below 200% of the federal poverty level with a DSM-5 diagnosis of major depressive disorder. SSRIs permitted throughout, as in LIGPAT 1.
- Recruitment. Community mental health clinics and behavioral health providers across Oregon, plus direct referral from the Sheri Eckert Foundation’s Psilocybin Access Fund, whose waitlist now exceeds a thousand people.
- Representation. Dedicated treatment-and-control cohort pairs for Spanish speakers, BIPOC participants, and rural participants, facilitated by similarly identifying facilitators.
Outcome measures collected at baseline, after each treatment, and monthly through one year post-treatment. The one-year tail is what makes the economics arm possible and what hands data forward to a utilization analysis.
07 What it unlocks
Fast answers now, and a feed into the long-term evidence base.
The intervention is short. Data starts arriving while the trial is still running, which is the opposite of the usual psychedelic-research timeline. The one-year follow-up then produces exactly the kind of longitudinal record a healthcare-utilization analysis needs, so LIGPATD 2 strengthens ORCHID rather than competing with it.
Trial-concurrent results
Depression, anxiety, PTSD and quality-of-life outcomes read out cohort by cohort as groups complete, not in a single dump at the end.
The economics package
QALYs, cost per QALY and a budget impact analysis, framed for a state Medicaid board and for commercial payers evaluating a behavioral health benefit.
Feeds the utilization work
A consented, one-year-followed cohort with service dates is precisely the input an ORCHID-style claims analysis is built to consume.
Who acts on this
State Medicaid boards and legislators
Every state weighing public coverage runs into the fiscal case first. A trial that reports cost per QALY against standard care in a Medicaid-eligible population is the artifact that conversation requires.
The leverage
Private dollars that unlock public dollars
A funded, in-flight trial is a far stronger position from which to request state matching support than a proposal is. Philanthropy here is not the funding source of record, it is the thing that makes the public ask credible.
09 Where the money goes
The Tier 2 budget, line by line.
Three years, twelve cohorts, seventy-two participants. Roughly two-thirds of this budget is people: a principal investigator at half effort, a funded project coordinator, and the licensed co-facilitators who sit with every cohort for a full dosing day.
Figures are drawn from the line-item budget workbook prepared by the principal investigator. Tier 1 and Tier 3 are scoped from the corresponding grant versions of this protocol and from the PI’s own estimate of the minimum viable and decision-grade designs; both would be costed in full before submission.