SUBHEADLINE
Fostering & Promoting The Interests & Welfare Of The Psychedelic Healing Ecosystem
The PBA is a private non-profit trade association representing the interests of businesses, individuals, and organizations in the growing psychedelic industry.
Our Mission
To empower psychedelic businesses to maximize their healing potential by ensuring the safety, efficacy, and accessibility of services being provided to the general public.
Our Values
Equity and inclusion for all individuals seeking psychedelic healing; respect for indigenous and traditional ceremonial wisdom; and a supportive business ecosystem that maximizes healing through psychedelics.
Experience Matters
As states like Oregon and Colorado open the doors to psychedelic-assisted therapy, PBA certification demonstrates that providers’ personal and professional experience meets the highest third-party-certified standards.
It takes more hours of training in Oregon to be a yoga teacher than a psilocybin services facilitator. Facilitators aren't legally required to have personally used psilocybin or other psychedelics.
The PBA was created to help clients find the best options and ensure the profession's integrity by ensuring psychedelic practitioners hold themselves to a higher standard of experience and care.
PBA Certification
The current western paradigm of mental health care is medicalized and pharmaceutical. There is no existing framework for the role of psychedelic-assisted therapy in the current model.
PBA certification reflects a reverence for ancient psychedelic ceremonial wisdom in the modern setting. Traditionally, psychedelic medicine people were required to practice years of training before earning the privilege of guiding others.
PBA’s independent, third-party certification reflects a deep and reverential relationship with psychedelic work as learned from our ancestors. This is the surest way to uphold the integrity of this ancient practice as it emerges into our modern culture.
A PBA-certified facilitator or service center will have demonstrated a higher level of experience with psychedelic therapy, both personally, as well in the capacity of a guide.
Additional PBA Benefits
Our Founders
Piper Lucas
Piper has been an Oregon resident for 18 years and has served the community in many different facets. She has served on environmental boards, planning boards, teaching high school kid’s yoga, coaching tennis, and providing architectural design and planning services.
One of her passions is elevating individual’s spiritual and mental health by implementing altered states of consciousness. She blends nature and ancient traditions to help others connect to themselves, their community, and their environments in a more meaningful way. She is an advocate for psilocybin and was manager of the campaign in Deschutes County for allowing psilocybin to be provided. She assisted county development departments across the state to figure out where best to place psilocybin services. She is currently enrolled in a psilocybin facilitator program in the state, and is opening a nature based service center in central Oregon.
Piper is a creator of sacred space through the traditional western tools of architecture and shamanic tools from cultures worldwide. She has been practicing architectural design for 18 years and has studied different plant medicines with different cultural lineages and teachers for 15 years. Piper weaves the concepts of intentional space and “set and setting” by creating spaces that evoke healing, creativity, and transformation.
Elaine Marshall
Elaine’s motto is “curiouser and curiouser,” as she is an enthusiastic explorer of life. She began her freelance writing career soon after college while also pursuing world travel, skydiving, living in the Yosemite caves among its big wall climbers, snowboarding, hitchhiking, and more. After an abrupt transition into fulltime motherhood, Elaine pursued extensive course work in functional medicine, becoming a ghostwriter, marketer, and content manager in the field.
Elaine has lived in Oregon for more than 20 years, discovering the psychedelic path during that time. She founded the Portland Psychedelic Society, which produced the city’s first psychedelic conference with keynote speaker Dennis McKenna. After moving to Central Oregon, she became involved in the successful campaign to prevent Deschutes County from opting out of the state’s psilocybin services measure, during which she founded the Central Oregon Psilocybin Society.
She is also the author and producer of the book and podcast, Psychedelic and MDMA Therapy for Veterans and First Responders, a collection of psychedelic transformation stories that is the first in a series.
Psychedelics continue to serve an integral role in Elaine’s life, and she is passionate about returning them to their rightful role as aides to human consciousness.
Greg Shanken
In 2021, Greg’s life dramatically transformed after he decided to stop using SSRIs and heal his depression and childhood trauma through psychedelic medicines. His journey helped him discover his passion and live his truth by serving the psychedelic healing ecosystem as a co-founder of the Psychedelic Business Association, an Ambassador for Proposition 122, which legalized natural psychedelic medicines in Colorado in 2022; a co-founder of the Colorado Psychedelic Society, and serving on the board of An Empathic Society, a non-profit organization that provides peer supported integration circles.
