The Mental Health Project is a Seattle Times initiative focused on covering mental and behavioral health issues. It is funded by Ballmer Group, a national organization focused on economic mobility for children and families. The Seattle Times maintains editorial control over work produced by this team.

The Seattle Times’ coverage of youth addiction treatment has been recognized for the way it sensitively navigated ethical considerations.

The 2025 Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics was given Wednesday to reporter Hannah Furfaro, photographer Ivy Ceballo and video journalist Lauren Frohne for the series “High Risk: Youth and addiction in Washington state.”

The series, published last year, covered the failures of local treatment systems to help youth addicted to substances like fentanyl. The stories described the struggles of a teen to get help for her addiction and highlighted the efforts of a small street-treatment team that works every day to help young people.

Many of the young people the journalists spoke with were in vulnerable situations, dealing with past trauma and the risk of relapse. The coverage was carefully coordinated to support the teens’ safety while also telling their stories.

The Shadid Award is given by the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is named for Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Anthony Shadid. The university says the award “honors the difficult ethical decisions journalists make when telling high-impact stories.”

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Kathryn McGarr, a UW-Madison School of Journalism professor, said they received a strong slate of entrants this year.

“The painstaking care that Ceballo, Furfaro and Frohne took with their piece exemplifies such excellent work in ethical decision-making throughout a long process,” McGarr said. “They made difficult choices along the way, ultimately presenting readers with nuanced portraits of their subjects and work that makes a difference to an underserved population.”

The “High Risk” series was part of The Seattle Times’ Mental Health Project, a community-funded initiative that supports a team of journalists covering mental and behavioral health in Washington state. For more of the team’s work, visit seattletimes.com/mental-health.

Lewelyn Dixon was on her way back to the Seattle area on Feb. 28 after visiting family in the Philippines when she was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and sent to the immigration detention facility in Tacoma.

Her lawyer Benjamin Osorio said she was detained because of a non-violent conviction from 2001, for embezzlement. At the time, she was sentenced to 30 days in a halfway house and a $6,400 fine; she received no jail or prison time, he told KUOW.

Dixon is a lab technician at UW Medicine and has a green card. She’s 64 years old and has lived in the U.S. since she was 14.

RELATED: The U.S. needs kidney doctors. The Trump administration deported one despite her valid visa

“She was probably operating under the understanding that, because she traveled before, she didn’t really have any issues,” Osorio added. “But… [now], we’re in sort of a maximum enforcement environment.”

Green card holders with certain kinds of criminal histories are deportable, but Osorio said his client does not meet those criteria.

Dixon will likely be held in detention till at least July 17, when she’s scheduled for an immigration judge to hear her case. Osorio said he has requested an earlier date, as well as parole, so she can get back to her job and her life in the Seattle area.

The University of Washington has frozen non-essential hiring and travel, effective immediately, amid federal and state funding uncertainty.

UW officials announced these “financial risk mitigation efforts” in a staff email late last week — and also warned of more budget cuts on the horizon.

“The current federal funding trajectory, while not completely clear, is nevertheless dire; and the state of Washington faces a significant budget shortfall,” UW President Ana Mari Cauce and Provost Tricia Serio wrote in the email. “Either of these conditions alone would be challenging, and together they are significant and material risks to our financial health.”

A growing list of universities across the country have put similar spending freezes in place, as President Donald Trump threatens to slash federal higher education funding.

On Friday, the Trump administration pulled $400 million of federal grants from Columbia University over claims the school failed to protect Jewish students from antisemitism.

Columbia and the UW were among 60 colleges and universities to receive a letter from the U.S. Department of Education on Monday, warning of possible enforcement actions if they do not fulfill their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to address antisemitism on campus.

Washington cities are decriminalizing magic mushrooms. Could a psychedelic ‘renaissance’ take hold statewide?

Statewide efforts to legalize psychedelic mushrooms in Washington have stalled due to conflicting visions, concerns about cost and equity, and worries that pharmaceutical companies will take control of a natural medicine that grows in abundance in the woods across the Northwest.

But beneath the fractured public debate, an underground network of advocates and activists is growing. Decriminalization efforts in cities and counties come at a moment when doctors and researchers are finding in clinical trials that psilocybin — the primary psychedelic compound in mushrooms — can help people who suffer from severe depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and addiction. Meanwhile, a Washington doctor has filed a petition that is advancing through federal agencies to have psilocybin reclassified from a Schedule I to a Schedule II drug, which would allow for more controlled research and access. Dr. Sunil Aggarwal, a palliative care physician with the AIMS Institute in Seattle, may have an ally in Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has voiced support for legalizing psychedelics for mental health treatment. All this begs the question: Is Washington state on the cusp of a “psychedelic renaissance”?

Dr. Charissa Fotinos, a family practice physician who specializes in addiction medicine, said she was caught off guard by the breadth of the psychedelic movement when she chaired the Washington Psilocybin Task Force in 2023.

“I had no idea the tendrils this thing has,” said Fotinos, deputy chief medical officer at the Washington Health Care Authority. “It really is mycelial. You see the little button, but the network is underground.” The state task force — which included doctors, nurses, social workers, religious practitioners, veterans, psychologists, representatives from pharmaceutical labs, and state officials — had two objectives: update state lawmakers about the latest clinical research on psilocybin and evaluate what it would take to regulate clinical use of psilocybin in Washington. Based on that mission, Fotinos thought the focus of the group’s meetings would be on the mounting evidence that supervised use of psilocybin is an effective treatment for depression, anxiety, drug addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder. “My eyes were opened,” she said. “I thought it was just, ‘Does it work for this clinical condition?’ It’s so much bigger than that.”

KUOW Photo

Psychedelic societies

As interest in mushrooms and their role in mental health and spirituality has grown, psychedelic societies have spread across the country. The Global Psychedelic Society lists almost 300 groups around the world, including 172 in the U.S. and 10 in Washington state. Psychedelic societies believe in the powers of “entheogens” — psychoactive substances that induce altered states of consciousness — to help people reconnect to each other, themselves, and the natural world. In addition to psychedelic mushrooms, entheogens include ayahuasca, a South American psychoactive; ibogaine, a traditional African psychedelic plant medicine; and mescaline-containing cacti that grow in northern Mexico and the Southwest — basically, plants and fungi that induce what are informally called “trips.” RELATED: What’s an ‘entheogen’? Magic mushrooms are now a low priority in Olympia Psychedelic societies have missions similar to the national grassroots nonprofit Decriminalize Nature that started in Oakland, California, in 2019, the year Oakland became one of the first U.S. cities to decriminalize psilocybin.

At the core of the movement is the concept of “grow, gather, and gift” — people should be able to cultivate, harvest, and share plants with medicinal and spiritual qualities without going through pharmaceutical companies or a regulatory or commercialized framework.

Erin Reading, the co-founder of the Port Townsend Psychedelic Society, was inspired by the decriminalization efforts in Oakland to push for policy changes in Washington state. Reading is also on the board of directors of REACH Washington, a nonprofit that opposed state measures to legalize psilocybin in clinical settings because they didn’t include decriminalization. As an alternative, REACH promoted a statewide initiative to decriminalize entheogens, but that effort stalled due to lack of funding. “I am all about community and community access, and people having access to these plants without having to pay a lot of money or have it to be in very specific contexts,” Reading said. Like many psychedelic societies, the Port Townsend group has a calendar of educational classes and trainings to help people use psychedelics safely, gatherings where people can take mushrooms among a community of like-minded folks, and opportunities to advocate for decriminalization and equitable access. “These substances do have risks, and those risks can be communicated through education,” Reading said. “A lot of the risks can be reduced through community support and other forms of support.”

Thanks in large part to the efforts of the psychedelic society, Port Townsend passed a resolution to decriminalize entheogens in December 2021. Five months later, Jefferson County approved a similar resolution. “All these psychedelic societies that are popping up across the state, I think that is very encouraging, because that’s where people… find access through making real relationships with people and building trust. Then if they do choose to journey with psychedelics, they have people they can ask questions of or ask for support if they need it,” Reading said. Change from below One of the key policy experts pushing for psychedelic legal reform in Washington state is Kody Zalewski, a Seattle-based analyst with Calyx Law who was also a member of the state’s psilocybin task force. Zalewski sees himself as a facilitator. He searches for people like Reading who are passionate about the power of psychedelics and helps them organize and promote policy change.

Zalewski believes the best way to change laws around psychedelic substances in Washington state is from the bottom up. “You need to reach a tipping point where there is enough momentum at the lower levels of government that are more pliable and easier to change,” he said. “Eventually, it trickles up the ladder.” Zalewski is the co-director of a group called the Psychedelic Medicine Alliance of Washington, which helped pass a resolution in 2021 to deprioritize psychedelics-related arrests in Seattle. The alliance is in the early stages of campaigning for a similar measure in King County. Tatiana Luz co-directs the alliance with Zalewski and runs a psychedelic group in Seattle called The Zome. Luz, a former outdoor guide, formed The Zome to bring like-minded people together to spend time in nature and talk about psychedelics while expanding their community.

KUOW Photo/Megan Farmer

Luz believes that, before the policy around psychedelics can change in Washington state, the culture must become more open to the idea of psychedelics. She sees her efforts as part of that cultural shift. “Psychedelic experiences for me have been a vessel for healing, but it’s also just been a place where I can really explore this wild phenomenon of being alive and being conscious and existing,” she said. “That’s the one frontier that no one can access or control but yourself. I believe very deeply that it is something sacred and everyone should have the right to do that. Making these plants and fungi illegal is a violation of that right.” From underground to mainstream While underground psychedelic communities continue to grow, April Pride is working to bring the drugs into the mainstream. Pride hosted three “Psychedelic Salons” this spring at Town Hall Seattle, where she talked with artists about the role psychedelics play in their creative process, interviewed doctors and researchers about the impact of psychedelic-assisted therapy on depression, and discussed spiritual healing for women with a psychedelic guide. She previously held a dozen similar salons at different locations in Seattle in 2023 and 2024.

KUOW Photo/Megan Farmer

Pride, a self-described “serial creative entrepreneur,” started a company called SetSet that bills itself as “the world’s first clinician-backed psychedelic education and integration community dedicated to women’s health and well-being.” She hosts a podcast that covers subjects such as “10 tips for how to prepare for a trip with psychedelics” and “What happens during a psychedelic experience?” and also reviews mushroom strains. SetSet sells various educational guides, including one for microdosing, taking approximately one-tenth of a standard psilocybin dose. The aim is to experience the drug’s therapeutic benefits without tripping. Two years ago, Pride led weekly walks and museum visits in Seattle where people would microdose and experience art and nature, something she hopes to do again. “What I’m finding is people don’t want to take [psychedelic mushrooms]… in public and being around other people. They don’t want to be altered, but they are open to microdosing with others, because they’re a little scared to do it on their own,” Pride said. “But they do it once with somebody else, they feel better, and that kind of breaks the seal.” A report by RAND, a nonprofit research organization, found that 8 million people used psilocybin in 2023. About half of those respondents said they had microdosed. RELATED: More Americans are microdosing or tripping on magic mushrooms than ever Pride believes microdosing increases neuroplasticity in the brain, forming alternate pathways so people can respond differently to daily stressors. “It’s like snow falling in those grooves,” she said. “When the same trigger occurs, you can laugh in a different way, you can be more patient with your children, not choose to drink when you’re stressed out. That’s why people can make different decisions, because they are increasing neuroplasticity. They’re literally changing the way their brain is wired.” Medical use While little research has been done about the impact of microdosing on mental health, an increasing body of evidence suggests that macro-dosing (formerly called “dosing”) in combination with therapy can reduce anxiety, despair, and suicidal tendencies in patients suffering from depression, drug addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder. A trial in 2024 headed by Dr. Anthony Back, a UW Medicine oncologist and palliative-care specialist, found that psilocybin use led to “a significant decrease in symptoms of depression” in doctors and nurses who were on the frontlines during the pandemic. The clinicians received therapy, experienced a supervised psychedelic trip, and then had a follow-up therapy session.

In the wake of that experience, 70% of participants changed their jobs. “For doctors and nurses who feel burned out or disillusioned or disconnected from the patient care they want to provide, this study shows that psilocybin therapy is safe and can help these clinicians work through those feelings and get better,” said Back. Dr. Nathan Sackett is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Washington and the founder and director of the UW Center for Novel Therapeutics in Addiction Psychiatry. The center has completed promising clinical trials that use psychedelic-assisted therapy to help people with addictions and other mental health problems. “I think it gives people a moment where they suddenly can envision their future looking differently,” said Sackett, who was also a member of the Washington Psilocybin Task Force. “We’re so busy keeping the house of cards stable every day that it’s hard to imagine life looking differently. Having an intense experience like this that’s very emotionally rich in a therapeutic container can allow people this opportunity to fantasize about, ‘I don’t have to say this or keep this behavior, or keep this job, or keep this relationship. I can actually make some changes.’” The center’s next psilocybin trial, which is actively recruiting members, is the first to look at whether psilocybin-assisted therapy can help people who suffer from both post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol use disorder. Participants include veterans and first responders. Legal limits, alternate paths One of the biggest challenges for doctors who study psilocybin is that it remains classified as a Schedule I drug in the U.S. under the Controlled Substances Act. That means magic mushrooms are in the same category as heroin, LSD, certain opioids, ecstasy, and cannabis — drugs the government considers to have high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. Dr. Sunil Aggarwal, an integrative rehabilitation and palliative care physician in Seattle, has tried several legal routes to change the way psilocybin is scheduled. After running into multiple roadblocks, he is finally seeing a potential path to reclassification.

KUOW Photo/Megan Farmer

After the Drug Enforcement Agency initially rejected his team’s petition to reschedule psilocybin, a court asked the agency to reconsider. Backed by that court request, the DEA accepted the petition in February. The issue now moves to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration for medical and scientific evaluations. Both agencies come under the purview of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “It’s still a new pathway, but I’m really excited that the DEA is recognizing that the evidence supports a thorough review of it,” Aggarwal said. “They haven’t said that before.” If psilocybin is rescheduled, Aggarwal hopes to give it to his seriously ill patients under the federal Right to Try Law. That law allows patients who have a life-threatening illness and who have exhausted other treatment options to take part in therapeutic trials of drugs that have not been approved by the FDA. Aggarwal said psilocybin can have a transformative impact on patients diagnosed with a fatal disease, especially when they are relatively young. “When you are in your 40s or 50s or at some stage of life where you were expecting to live a full life, it can be really crushing for some of our patients — lots of anxiety, worry, worsening pain, and a lack of ability to stay present,” Aggarwal said. He said when patients take psilocybin, “those kinds of maladies and preoccupations can be lifted for sometimes a year or more and pretty quickly.” Oregon: Model or warning? Oregon has led the way in terms of psilocybin legalization and now serves as both a model for Washington and a warning of what the commercialization of psychedelic experiences could mean for access and equity. Oregon was the first state to decriminalize psilocybin and legalize its supervised use in licensed facilities in 2020. But those supervised mushroom trips and the “sandwich services” of before and after therapy with a licensed provider can cost as much as $2,500, which puts psychedelic medicine out of reach for many people. The price to legally use in Oregon has spawned a psychedelic tourism industry that worries Washingtonians who believe mushrooms should remain a communal medicine accessible to all. “My fear is that if a regulatory model passes, it’ll be way harder to get to decriminalization, because just like with cannabis, moneyed interests get involved and start lobbying against people having the right to grow and get together and work outside of those systems,” Port Townsend’s Reading explained. Efforts to create a system of licensed service centers and facilitators in Washington state failed to make it out of committee during the 2025 legislative session in Olympia. It was the fourth year in a row Sen. Jesse Salomon (D-Shoreline) has sponsored bills to legalize psilocybin. He has succeeded in getting money to fund psilocybin research, including the ongoing clinical trial for alcohol use disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder at Sackett’s UW center. But efforts to create a statewide framework for legalization have consistently died in committee.

Courtesy of Jesse Salomon

“Soul crushing.”

That’s how Dr. Jane Buckner, president of Seattle’s Benaroya Research Institute, described the current moment for scientists, who have seen federal research grants cut, scientific work scaled back and federal review of their research delayed.

In the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s administration, hundreds of active research grants have been canceled or threatened nationwide. Now, the administration might propose deep cuts to the Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health and other federal health agencies.

Buckner was speaking last month at Life Science Innovation Northwest, Seattle’s marquee gathering of the biotech industry. Most years, the two-day conference sees scientists, investors and others involved in the region’s $41 billion biotech industry dish about the latest discoveries and collaborations for treating diseases and improving health, while making deals, scoring jobs or just getting some good advice.

But this year conversations often turned to the federal cuts in research funding, stalled grant payments and deep reductions in staff at the FDA, NIH and other agencies that regulate and support medical research, as well as the committees that advise them.

Buckner added in an interview that researchers at her institution, universities and companies that turn discoveries into medicines in Seattle are feeling a “lot of anxiety” and that there is “no safe harbor” from the effects of the administration’s actions.

Dramatic shifts at the federal level fuel uncertainty in the industry. Venture capital flows, mergers and acquisitions have stalled, and the climate for initial public offerings has soured.

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“Things have kind of come to a halt,” said Aditya Jayanthi, a health care investment banker with JPMorgan. “We haven’t done an IPO on the biotech side in the last couple of months.”

Going public through an IPO can give young companies access to greater funding and provide their venture investors with a return, making those early investments worth the risk.

Jayanthi added that the “fundamentals” in the biotech industry “are solid” but “I think we just need to get out of this kind of, you know, time period that we’re in now.”

Mark McDade, a managing partner at Shanghai-based Qiming Venture Partners, said he hopes the delays in federal review of research projects caused by staffing cuts will be short lived, but leaders of biotech companies need to “be prepared for delayed decision-making” by those agencies overseeing their work.

The short answer for biotech startups, he added, is to have more “money in the bank” to last through the delays.

“But we’re not bailing on you guys,” he told the Life Science Innovation Northwest audience.

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Mitchell Gold, a venture partner at Frazier Life Sciences, echoed the otherwise general optimism of the panel’s speakers when he said of Washington state’s biotech and life sciences scene, “I think our secret sauce is that we have great scientists here.”

But most speakers acknowledged that those scientists and their research hopes are facing a tough road ahead.

“There’s a lot of concern within our community,” said Dr. Timothy Dellit, CEO of UW Medicine and dean of the medical school, “and I can’t (overstate) the personal toll for our research community, because it’s as if what you are working on is no longer valued.”

Dellit detailed the impact that cuts to federal grants and other changes are having on the University of Washington and its scientists and students, from decreasing graduate student enrollment by “over 25%” for the coming academic year to facing the prospect of substantial cuts to Medicaid.

On top of the roughly 20 grant terminations at UW, Dellit explained that substantial cuts to Medicaid program could cost UW Medicine even more: “We’re planning on $200 (million) to $300 million impact” from those proposed cuts. That loss of funding would also hurt students and research because “we use some of that clinical funding to help support our education and our research activities.”

Those funding challenges, reductions in graduate student enrollment and “seeing other countries increase their graduate student opportunities or their faculty hiring,” he said, will have lasting effects.

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“That’s our future, not only for academics, but it’s a future for pharmaceutical industries, future for biotech industry. I’m very worried about even the impacts that we’ve seen now in that pipeline that, ultimately, I think is going to take decades to recover,” he said.

Buckner, the head of Benaroya Research Institute, said the administration’s actions and proposed cuts are “really soul crushing for our scientists” and the institute as a whole.

Benaroya gets 73% of its funding from the NIH, Buckner said. That’s something she’s “always been proud of” because of how hard it has been to win NIH grants. “But that’s going to be a difficult thing for us to manage with major cuts.”

The administration’s final budget proposal could be released in the coming days and is only a recommendation to Congress, which would have to approve any cuts.

However, it isn’t just students, scientists and the companies they create who face risk under the federal cuts and funding delays.

According to the latest data from Life Science Washington, the trade association supporting the state’s biotech industry that organized the conference, the life sciences sector of Washington’s economy directly employs 47,800 workers and includes 1,180 companies across 139 cities.

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“It starts with the research,” Marc Cummings, CEO of Life Science Washington, said in an interview. But “I think most people don’t realize how many marketing jobs, how many manufacturing jobs, how many accounting jobs, how many law firms support the industry.”

That’s one message industry leaders and its many workers need to get out into a potentially uniformed public, he said.

In the conference’s opening conversation, Nobel laureate David Baker, who is the director of the Institute for Protein Design at UW, challenged “everyone in this room to tell everyone they know” what is happening to the research that leads to medical treatments.

For his part, he said, he hopes winning the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work using artificial intelligence to design proteins that fight diseases can help him get that message out to people who may not understand how America’s system of publicly funded research has led to its standing as the world’s leader for advancements in medical treatment. People who live in red states should be the priority, he said.

“You have to make your argument in a way that will appeal to 60% of Americans, because you’re not really trying to convince Democrats that this attack on science is bad,” Baker said. “My goal has always been to get on Fox News.”

Effectively communicating the importance of supporting scientific training and its connection to treating diseases is important, he said, because he’s thinks people outside of the scientific community don’t understand the effects that these cuts and policy changes are having on the nation’s research universities.

“It’s really, really bad right now,” Baker said. “I’m really worried about the effects on sort of this whole generation of young scientists.”