How We Verify and Date Legal Information

Not legal advice

This library is for education. It is not legal advice and does not tell anyone what they may buy, sell, carry, grow or use. Psychedelic laws change, differ between countries, states and cities, and are sometimes unclear in how they apply to a plant, fungus or preparation. If a decision depends on the law, check the official source for your place and, where it matters, ask a qualified lawyer.

How we write a legal statement

Every legal statement in the Psychedelics & Psychoactive Research library follows these rules:

1. It names the place (country, state or agency).
2. It names the substance or organism exactly, for example "psilocybin," "peyote (the plant)," or "mushrooms listed in the Dutch Opium Act," not "psychedelics."
3. It names the activity (possessing, importing, selling, religious use, clinical use).
4. It names the official source and the date we read it: "read 2026-10-22."
5. It stays inside what the source says. If we did not read a country's law or regulator page, we write "not verified" instead of guessing.

What we will not say

• We never call a substance "legal everywhere" or "illegal everywhere."
• We do not infer legality from online availability, shipping offers or product labels.
• We keep apart four ideas that people often blur: decriminalization, a religious exemption, a supervised service and general medical approval. See decriminalization vs legalization, religious exemptions, supervised-service frameworks and what is and is not approved.
• We do not say what is allowed for a particular person in a particular situation.

What we prefer to read

We prefer the text of the law or the regulator's own page: for example the United States Code and Code of Federal Regulations, the Dutch statute database (wetten.overheid.nl), government.nl, U.S. customs and transport agencies, and the text of UN treaties published by UNODC. For court decisions we read the court's own opinion. We use peer-reviewed reviews only to describe a legal system where the law itself was not readable. Law-firm blogs, news stories, advocacy sites and forums are not used as sources for a legal fact.

In practice, some official sites cannot be read by our tools or were not reachable. When that matters, the page says what we could and could not read. Sources that gave us trouble for this release included the Dutch government's pages on mushrooms and truffles (none addressed them), so we left the Dutch truffle question as "not verified."

Dates

Each source citation shows the date we read it. Each page records the date its content was last updated. A "last updated" date means we re-read the sources, not that the law has not changed since. Where a statute database shows a version date, we give it: for example, the Dutch Opium Act version we read was shown as valid from 17 September 2026. [1]

What this release covers

This legal group explains how to read the law, not every country's law. It covers the wording differences between plants and compounds, and mushrooms and sclerotia, possession and supply, import, export and travel and religious exemptions. Country comparisons are in psychedelic legal status by country. The cannabis library has its own version of this page: how we verify cannabis legal information. For general safety and legal basics see Safety and Legal Basics for Specialty Topics.