Psilocybin is no longer lurking in the statistical shadows. A UC San Diego–led research team says about 8 million Americans used psilocybin mushrooms in the past year, a number big enough that doctors and public health officials may need to start asking about it as routinely as they do about alcohol.
The estimate, drawn from the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, suggests roughly 2.8 percent of Americans ages 12 and older used psilocybin in the prior year. It is the first time the federal survey has asked psilocybin-specific questions, and it yielded the first nationally representative past-year snapshot of use. The analysis and its implications were published this month in The American Journal of Psychiatry.
National Estimate and What It Means
To get that figure, researchers examined responses from 58,633 people and calculated a 2.8 percent past-year prevalence, which translates to those 8 million estimated users nationwide. That gives policymakers, clinicians and researchers a concrete baseline for how common psilocybin use currently is.
As detailed in The American Journal of Psychiatry, earlier national surveys generally lumped psilocybin in with other hallucinogens or only asked whether someone had ever used it in their lifetime. That approach blurred present-day patterns, especially as clinical interest and looser local policies have pushed mushrooms further into the mainstream.
Who Is Using Psilocybin
The UC San Diego team found that use was far from evenly spread across the population. Younger adults led the way: people ages 18 to 25 had about 1.4 times the odds of past-year psilocybin use compared with adults ages 35 to 49. On the other end of the spectrum, adults over 50 had roughly one-third lower odds of use…