Pardon Me: Governor Polis's Psilocybin Pardons May Get Broader

When Governor Jared Polis took the stage at the Psychedelic Science 2025 conference in downtown Denver in June and announced new pardons for people convicted at the state level of possessing psilocybin or psilocin, Alexander Vucasovich felt a surge of relief. His moment of truth seemed to be at hand.

Earlier that month Polis had signed Senate Bill 25-297 into law, which gave the Colorado governor the authority to grant pardons for a class of defendants under Proposition 122, or the Natural Medicine Health Act.

This echoed pardons for marijuana possession convictions that Polis signed in 2020 for up to one ounce. In 2021, after state lawmakers increased Colorado's marijuana possession limit to two ounces, Polis pardoned those convictions, too, resulting in more than 4,000 convictions cleared for no longer being valid under current laws.

At the 2023 Psychedelic Science conference in downtown Denver two years earlier, Polis promised a crowd he would seek power from the legislature to grant a new class of pardons in accordance with Prop 122, which passed in 2022, decriminalizing a handful of natural psychedelics while also legalizing medical psilocybin use.

After Polis announced he was coming through on his promise from two years earlier, Vucasovich thought his 2006 conviction, a felony for possession of a Schedule 1 controlled substance, would soon be history. According to Vucasovich, he was popped after being found with marijuana and psilocybin mushrooms in a vehicle that was pulled over driving up Broadway in Denver in late 2005.

The Denver District Attorney had dismissed the other charges in exchange for the guilty plea to the mushroom charge, and Vucasovich was sentenced to two years of probation and a slew of fines.

Vucasovich says he was particularly interested in clearing his record because he has a long-term stalker — he declines to go into details — and wants a firearm for his personal protection, but he cannot legally own a gun with the psilocybin felony on his record. "This dude's been to prison for armed robbery, I'm sure he doesn't give a shit about the gun laws," Vucasovich tells Westword of his alleged stalker. "But I do."

When the governor had hinted at the mass pardon at the 2023 Psychedelic Science conference, a day Vucasovich had longingly been waiting for, "I was like, 'Oh, shit! Is this felony finally going to go?'" Vucasovich had followed SB 25-297's legislative run and knew the bill had been signed into law by the governor, granting Polis the authority to designate a class of persons to be pardoned.

"I bet he announces it at the psychedelic conference," Vucasovich remembers thinking. And for good reason.

The Monday before Polis's announcement, Vucasovich noticed that the Colorado Bureau of Investigation's (CBI) Natural Medicine Pardons page had launched early; he hoped he'd already been cleared. So he paid the $6 for a background check on himself with CBI, only to see the felony was still there.

When the mushroom pardons were announced on June 18, Polis's team noted in a press release that the state had only identified four convictions for psilocybin and psilocin possession to be pardoned. The press release didn't mention an age range for the pardons, but Polis's executive order limited the pardons to those 21 and over at the time of the offense. Vucasovich, now 40, was twenty years old at the time of his offense.

Polis's marijuana pardons in 2020 and 2021 had no specifications for an age limit on potential beneficiaries of the pardons. Vucasovich felt gut-punched, but he wasn't going to give up.

"I saw the news reports about it and I was like, 'Fuck yeah,'" Vucasovich remembers on the day the pardons were announced. "Nothing so far had any indication of the 21 and over restriction."

One reason there were just four individuals identified for psilocybin pardons is that people who are convicted of psilocybin or psilocin possession (or in Vucasovich's case, "psilocyn," another spelling for the psychedelic compound that metabolizes after psilocybin is ingested) are often in the court records management system with an official conviction for "drug possession," making it virtually impossible for the CBI to distinguish a mushroom case from a heroin possession case. Marijuana crimes are usually explicitly categorized as such, but not so with psilocybin.

Vucasovich filled out the form to seek a pardon on CBI's webpage anyway, ignoring the 21-and-over clause. He then reached out to CBI, which confirmed his worries about identifying eligible cases. "Essentially, with the conviction information we receive, it typically does not have the specific drug that was involved in the conviction," a CBI spokesman wrote to Vucasovich.

Still, there was a glimmer of hope in that admission: many mushroom pardoning cases probably weren't proactively identified by the CBI.

"I feel like there's probably four people per week that got arrested at Red Rocks over the summers for psilocybin possession," Vucasovich laughs. But the 21-and-over provision was still a roadblock.

Vucasovich contacted state Senator Matt Ball, a sponsor of SB 297. The bill language had no age limitations on its authorization of the governor's pardons. According to Ball, the bill was more fine-tuning of the Natural Medicine Health Act as more implementations happened this year, and the pardoning language was "a small part of the bill." But Ball told Vucasovich he'd bring up the age limitation with the governor's office in a future meeting.

The pardon limitations sound fair at face value: Under Prop 122, psilocybin and psilocin possession is legal for those 21 and over and illegal for minors, so Vucasovich's infraction would still have been a crime under current law due to his age. But the incongruence with the marijuana pardons, which had no age restrictions, still felt unfair.

When Ball spoke with Westword, he hadn't yet met with the governor's team to discuss the specifics of the pardon. Westword reached out to the governor's office for comment on the pardon disparity and received the following statement:

"Governor Polis is proud that Colorado has led the nation in giving pardons that align with state law and the will of Colorado voters. We worked hard to identify all cases where a pardon would be appropriate, but anyone who was not included and believes they should have been considered because they have a state-level psilocybin or psilocin conviction, should reach out to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and apply for a pardon."

A spokesperson at the governor's office confirmed they've received 12 additional applications for mushroom pardons and are vetting those right now. Although the governor's office did not address the issue of the executive order's age restriction, it encourages someone who was convicted as a minor of psilocybin possession to apply for a pardon through the CBI portal.

Vucasovich — and Westword, for that matter — couldn't seem to get a straight answer on his specific inquiry about the age restriction, but there could be movement behind the scenes. As last week was drawing to a close, Vucasovich was told by a Ball senior staffer that the senator had met with the governor's office, and "they let us know that they are open to considering pardon applications for those under the age of 21."

On top of that, Ball's office told Vucasovich that the governor's office is specifically "open to considering a pardon for your case." In a subsequent email, Vucasovich was told that his application for a pardon, filed in June, was under consideration for a natural medicine pardon, and not a standard individual pardon.

The email continued, "The Governor's office stated they are considering statewide psilocybin offenses for those under the age of 21, as well, despite the wording within the Executive Order and on the CBI website."

Westword reached out to the governor's office to confirm the potential widening of the pardon pool; a spokesperson didn't confirm an all-ages pool, but wrote, "we would encourage this individual [Vucasovich] to apply for clemency."

As for Vucasovich, he's been told that pardon applications take sixty to ninety days to review for eligibility, so he may not know the results of his quest until near the end of September. But his one-man campaign to make the psilocybin mass pardon equitable with the marijuana mass pardons may have achieved its goal.