Ohio is training behavioral health clinicians, police, EMS, and emergency department staff to respond differently when psychedelic experiences turn into emergencies.
The call comes in like thousands of others: a man in a parking lot is frightened, disoriented, and pacing. A friend explains that he took psilocybin mushrooms a few hours ago and became convinced something is badly wrong. Within minutes, EMS, a mobile crisis team, or police will arrive. What happens next depends less on the substance taken than on whether the people responding understand what they are looking at.
Most psychedelic experiences pass without incident. But use is no longer rare. A study published this April in The American Journal of Psychiatry, drawing on the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, estimated that roughly 8 million Americans, about 2.8 percent of the population ages 12 and up, used psilocybin in the past year. Clinical trials of psilocybin and MDMA have pushed psychedelics into mainstream conversation, but the overwhelming majority of use happens outside any clinical or regulated setting, without screening, preparation, or support. When an experience becomes overwhelming, the people who respond are emergency department staff, crisis counselors, EMS crews, behavioral health clinicians, and police officers. Very few of them have ever received training specific to psychedelics.
That mismatch is a public health problem, and it will grow. As psychedelic use expands faster than regulated access, psychedelic-specific crisis training needs to become a standard part of preparation for the systems people actually call when something goes wrong.
In Ohio, that work has started.
Closing the gap
The Psychedelic Emergency, Acute, and Continuing-care Education (P.E.A.C.E.) program, developed by The Ohio State University’s Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education (CPDRE) with grant support from the Ohio Department of Behavioral Health, trains behavioral health clinicians, law enforcement officers, EMS personnel, and emergency department staff to respond safely and effectively when psychedelic experiences become crises.
The premise is not that responders lack skill. Most responders are already highly trained in crisis intervention. What’s often missing is education specific to psychedelic experiences: how they differ from psychiatric emergencies, how long they typically last, and what kinds of responses actually reduce harm.
Without that knowledge, responders tend to default to what they know: physical restraint, sedation, or arrest. Those interventions can escalate situations that calm, supportive care would have stabilized. A person several hours into a psilocybin experience is usually not having a psychiatric emergency. They are having a time-limited drug experience that will resolve, and the response they receive can shape the outcome medically, psychologically, and legally.
The question of police
Training law enforcement on psychedelics raises a fair question: should police be responding to drug crises at all? Reasonable people disagree. But in most communities, when someone calls 911 about a person in visible distress, police are dispatched whether or not they are the right resource for that moment. The practical choice is not between police and no police. It is between officers who can recognize psychedelic distress and respond without force, and officers who cannot.
Training is not an endorsement of arrest as a response to drug use. It works in the opposite direction: officers who understand that a frightening psilocybin experience typically resolves within hours are less likely to escalate, restrain, or criminalize the person in front of them.
Harm reduction, not endorsement
The program’s foundation is harm reduction, defined plainly: people are using these substances regardless of legality, and some of them will need help. Harm reduction in this context does not encourage use. It prioritizes the health, safety, dignity, and autonomy of the person in crisis, and it recognizes that most challenging psychedelic experiences respond to calm, trauma-informed support.
Meeting people with care rather than stigma isn’t just ethical. It’s clinically effective.
The training is a collaboration between CPDRE and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and builds on work that MAPS began with a similar training in Denver in 2024, adapted for Ohio’s systems and developed with behavioral health clinicians, researchers, peer support practitioners, and community advisors. Participants learn how psychedelics affect perception, cognition, and emotion; how to distinguish psychedelic distress from psychiatric emergency; de-escalation strategies; legal and ethical considerations; and post-crisis support. Scenario-based practice runs throughout, because a framework is only useful if a provider can reach for it in the middle of a crisis.
A goal to train thousands
P.E.A.C.E. delivered three live seminars in Columbus in 2026: behavioral health professionals in January, law enforcement in March, and EMS and emergency department staff in July.
Those rooms held dozens of people at a time. The larger reach comes next: each live seminar was recorded and combined with MAPS’s online foundational module into complete online trainings, now available to professionals across Ohio. Those interested in registering can visit cpdre.org/peace-program.
The program is also being formally evaluated, with assessments before and after each training measuring changes in knowledge, confidence, and stigma among participants.
Building on its success in Ohio, P.E.A.C.E. is preparing for national expansion, bringing specialized psychedelic crisis assessment and intervention training to behavioral health professionals, law enforcement, and emergency medical responders across the country.
The finding the program is built on is the one policymakers and health systems should sit with: most psychedelic crises are time-limited and respond best to supportive, non-coercive care. Every responder who knows that is one fewer unnecessary restraint, sedation, hospitalization, or arrest. The calls are already coming. The only question is whether the people who answer them arrive prepared.
Editor’s note: P.E.A.C.E. was developed by The Ohio State University’s Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education in partnership with MAPS, with grant support from the Ohio Department of Behavioral Health.
