An Alaska psilocybin initiative faces its signature deadline Monday

The deadline to file signatures for an Alaska initiative legalizing psilocybin, DMT and mescaline is Monday, and nothing on the record says whether the sponsors have enough.

They paid for help. Natural Medicine AK reported a $100,010 payment to a signature-gathering firm last September, and its most recent filing, covering through April 7, shows $151,308 raised against $149,954 spent, leaving $1,354 on hand. It has reported no expenditures since.

The threshold is 34,099 valid signatures, 10 percent of the 340,981 votes cast in the 2024 general election. They have to come from at least 30 of Alaska's 40 house districts, and in each of those, equal at least 7 percent of that district's 2024 vote. The 365-day clock started Sept. 15, 2025.

Filing Monday would not put the measure on this year's ballot. The lieutenant governor has 60 days to say whether the petition was properly filed, which runs past the Nov. 3 election, and state law then ties a qualifying initiative to a sequence rather than a date: it appears at the first statewide election after a legislative session has convened, adjourned, and 120 days have passed. That points to 2027 at the earliest.

The words Alaskans signed under were not the state's first choice. On Aug. 13, 2025, an assistant attorney general signing for then-Attorney General Treg Taylor proposed a ballot title calling the substances hallucinogens. Two weeks later the lieutenant governor's office issued one calling them certain psychedelics, and that is the version printed in the booklets. The Department of Law had offered its language "for your consideration," and the lieutenant governor revised the title with the attorney general's assistance, which is how the statute is written to work.

The measure would decriminalize personal cultivation and possession for adults 21 and older, cap home growing at 12 by 12 feet out of public view, bar sales, create a Natural Medicine Control Board and a Traditional Use Council, and open licensing by July 1, 2028. The substances reach past the three usually named: psilocybin, psilocyn, DMT, mescaline excluding peyote, ibogaine and other approved plants and fungi.

The state certified the application on the same reasoning it used for the 2013 marijuana initiative, finding no controlling authority that made it unconstitutional despite the federal ban. "We see no significant distinction based on the type of Schedule 1 substance at the center of the initiative application," the opinion says. It notes that Oregon passed a psilocybin measure in 2020 and Colorado a similar one in 2022, and that neither drew a court challenge or federal action.

The same opinion flagged a problem with the summary voters read. It scores 35.76 on the readability formula state law prescribes, against a target of 60, which the opinion attributes to the measure's length and to unavoidable words like dimethyltryptamine.

The state's review covers only form and constitutionality, so the certification file contains no argument about whether legalizing these substances is a good idea. The three sponsors did not respond to questions before publication.