Colorado’s first licensed healing center: 5 Questions for The Center Origin co-founder and clinical director Mikki Vogt
Vogt discusses the genesis of The Center Origin and the process of getting licensed.
After Mikki Vogt facilitated a psilocybin session in September 2020, she called her mom on the way home. Crying happy tears, she told her mom it was the most professional and personally affirming experience she’d ever had. “This is it! I’ve found my purpose,” she said.
Vogt, a licensed professional counselor, had worked in mental health in Denver for more than a decade, providing counseling for people in jail and the formerly incarcerated then in community health working with people who had severe, pervasive mental illness. Eventually, Vogt felt burnt out, so she began transitioning into private practice as a counselor — and then COVID hit. As the world locked down, she noticed how the isolation and loneliness led many people to develop anxiety and depression, as well as maladaptive habits such as drinking too much alcohol. Vogt had a personal relationship to psilocybin mushrooms already, and had trip sat for friends for years, so she felt that perhaps psychedelic facilitation was the way forward.
When Coloradoan passed the Natural Medicine Health Act in 2022, Vogt saw an opportunity to build up the state’s psychedelics industry. She attended all of the listening sessions held by Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Agencies, the agency responsible for implementing the state’s natural medicine program, and helped draft a guide for facilitators performing safety screenings for potential clients. Last year, Vogt met Elizabeth Cooke at a psychedelics symposium in Aspen. Cooke is a cannabis entrepreneur who opened a wellness center called The Center Origin in 2023, which has now received the state’s first license to offer psilocybin sessions. The Microdose spoke with Vogt about how she and Cooke started The Center Origin, and the process of getting licensed.
First of all, congratulations on being the first center to be licensed! Have you gotten interest from clients?
Yes! As word has gotten out that our license application was approved, we’ve had a lot of inquiries and interest, and we now have a waitlist.
What was the process of applying for licensure like?
Since last June, we’ve been preparing and making sure that our space complied with all the requirements. Those rules have been evolving and so we were also making changes as they were being released. In January, we were ready to submit the full application, but we were delayed because one of the things we were waiting for was my clinical facilitator license — by Colorado’s rules, at least one owner of a facility has to be a facilitator. That came in on Wednesday, and so we submitted our center application to the Department of Revenue. By Friday, they called us saying we were approved.
What things have you had to change along the way?
The biggest one was to build out the required restricted access area. We had to bring in a contractor to knock down a wall, install security cameras and alarms in the controlled access area where we keep the psilocybin mushrooms, and then learn to use that surveillance system.
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What advice do you have to other people hoping to work in Colorado’s new psilocybin industry?
I’d really recommend they understand the different pathways to licensure, and to explore the different tiers of center types. For instance, if you’re a practitioner in solo practice, maybe you want to open a micro healing center, or you want to talk and network with healing centers to figure out which ones are aligned with your values and the way you like to serve clients.
The main pillars of this program are safety, compliance, accessibility, and equitability. I think it’s important for people to remember there should be no shortcuts - it’s in everyone’s best interest to be an advocate for the program and get on board with the way things are being rolled out right now. If there are parts of the program that don’t make sense, it’s better to go in with an air of support, acceptance, and curiosity. Ask questions, and maybe it can get changed. It also really helps to seek out guidance: go to the events law firms and the Healing Advocacy Fund are putting on, and find others who are doing similar work. If you’re in a network of providers and forming community, you hold yourself accountable to your colleagues and it’s so much more likely that you’ll be following best practices.
Try to be thorough with everything you’re submitting; it’s better to be over prepared and to submit more information than you need to than to be underprepared. And being patient helps too!
Speaking of being patient: how soon might you see your first client, and what needs to happen before that’s possible?
We’re hoping we’ll be able to see clients within the month. The main hold-up currently is the availability of medicine; we’re waiting for cultivators and labs to come online. I’ve been in touch with a few cultivators and one lab, and several have conditional approval but still need to submit some additional forms to fully comply with some recently updated requirements.
We also have a couple of things we want to ask the Department of Regulatory Agencies about, like how to assign clients data numbers for de-identification and what kind of database those will need to go into, as well as clarifying what kind of tracking of medicine we need to do.
This is going to be a work in progress for all of us; there will likely be more rule revisions to better support clients, facilitators, or businesses, so we all need to be willing to be fluid and roll with things as they come out. This is our first go around; there will be things to learn. Just as mushrooms teach us, this will be a transformative process.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
