Vote Shrooms-Ayahuasca 2020
"Vote Shrooms-Ayahuasca 2020"
Rant #3(Opinion)
Originally February 1, 2020
On May 7, 2019, by the narrowest margin, the people of Denver voted "yes" on a controversial ballot initiative. Despite just 50.6% support at the polls, Initiative 301 passed, making Denver, Colorado the first city in the United States to decriminalize shrooms.
Yes, those shrooms: also known as magic mushrooms, more formally referred to as psychedelic mushrooms. This categorization represents over 200 species of fungi that contain psilocin or psilocybin, mostly in the genus Psilocybe. These mushrooms grow allover the United States and the world. And for the last 50 or so years, it has been a crime to buy, sell, grow or hold any of them.
I've said this for years, going back as far as 2007-08 as more and more states considered and then legalized marijuana first for medical uses, then for recreational: the 2010s would be the decade of cannabis. States would start to legalize it, one by one, and they did; the dominoing did not happen as forcefully as I had hoped, but it did happen. Then that decade would pass, so said my one of many, many tentative predictions, and the 2020s would bring the decade of psychedelia.
After marijuana became legal and accepted by a larger percentage of the population across the country, they would realize that the old laws banning it were silly at best and tyrannical at worst. And if weed wasn't so bad, then, what else was demonized unduly? This mood would combine with the bounty of emerging research on the medicinal properties of psychedelics to produce some states that would legalize some drugs from that broad class of substances. I was curious as to whether or not they would go through the phase that marijuana did with medical-only restrictions in many states before full-blown legalization. Given the multiplicity of legitimate uses for psychedelics in therapeutic settings, the medical route seemed like the most plausible.
Not all psychedelics would or will come off of Schedule 1 status. LSD or "acid," the poster drug of the cultural revolution in the late 1960s, would never, ever come back as a legitimate substance in our society; too much political baggage is associated with it. Also, because a number of substances produce effects extremely similar and only subtly different than LSD, there would be no need to specifically lift the ban on that. Meanwhile, MDMA (molly, ecstasy) induces effects that appear to be unique to that drug, or only a handful of other, also synthetic relatives. I'd guess that there would be some therapeutic settings warranting MDMA; likely, the drug would have a narrow scope of distribution to select therapists deemed qualified by some kind of course which is probably less difficult than it sounds yet nonetheless requires to doctor to spend a Saturday on it, deterring many from obtaining that license. Ketamine will ultimately likely reach a similar fate.
However, the naturally-occurring psychedelics are harder to regulate and restrict, and seem much more digestible to the American public. And they have precedence: thousands of years of precedence. Native Americans have used an array of psychedelic plants and fungi for religious rituals for a long time. This includes the Mazatec of Oaxaca, Mexico, using Salvia divinorum, a pretty unpleasant hallucinogen, if you ask me. It exists outside the class of standard "psychedelics," falling into the broader category of "hallucinogens." Some have suggested to call these kinds of substances "entheogens," translating essentially to 'spiritual substances.'
In the narrower category of psychedelics (which contains acid and shrooms, to name a few), Amazonian tribes in South America have for perhaps millennia concocted "ayahuasca" from a combination of plants. The active drug in it is DMT, which normally does not work when consumed orally, but the other ingredients allow it to do so. Ayahuasca produces some extremely intense effects. The iboga plant originates from ritual use in West Africa, now seeing an application in opioid treatment; the clinics are located outside the United States because it remains a Schedule 1 drug across the US. Morning glory seeds--yes, the ones available around springtime at any grocery store along with sunflower and cucumber seeds--have had a religious usage among Zapotecs, also in Mexico, because they contain LSA--a natural precursor to LSD. Then, you have the psychedelic cactus variety: San Pedro and peyote. Native Americans in the US can legally consume this preparation, as long as they can prove membership in the Native American Church. That religion caught on in the late 19th century and revolves around peyote consumption, which they view as a sacrament akin to the Eucharist for Christians.
So many more obscure psychedelic plants and fungi exist across the earth, with one spanning the globe and having seen human consumption for centuries upon centuries: shrooms. Psilocybin and psilocin-containing mushrooms. Making this distinction is important, because mushrooms from the Amanita genus produce drastically different effects. When people imagine mushrooms, they often think of these: the red with white dots kind. Those are NOT the type of mushrooms that this article refers to!
^These are NOT the type of psychedelic mushrooms decriminalized in Denver; these ones are very dangerous.
Psilocybin/psilocin-containing mushrooms do not induce terrifying hallucinations--well, they do so less frequently than their deliriant cousins. For the rest of the article, the phrase "shrooms" relates to the psilocybin and psilocin-containing kind. By the way, psilocybin and psilocin are the names of the actual psychedelic drug inside those mushrooms, akin to how THC inside of marijuana gets a person high, and caffeine inside coffee or tea causes that stimulating jolt.
Shrooms went on to reach decriminalization status in Oakland, California shortly after Denver did it first. Then, about a month ago, Santa Cruz, California became the third city to make the move. Many speculate that 2020 will see referendums on the matter in even more places. The state of California may become the first to decriminalize statewide; Decriminalize California is working to collect signatures at the moment in order to put it on the ballot this November; the petition and more information can be found on their page here.
Despite what many people have been led to think, psychedelic drugs like LSD and shrooms actually have a very safe profile. Why would the government keep relatively safe drugs illegal for all these decades?
After all, shrooms will put you in jail, while alcohol, a much more dangerous drug in every aspect, will not. The status quo is much more accepting of a deeply ingrained depressant that acts to incapacitate, reduce worry and cause forgetfulness in its users, versus a set of substances which lead to a fundamental reassessment of one's environment and self as we see in psychedelics. This remains true even when alcohol can lead to overdose, serious bodily damage, and addiction that can kill a person during withdrawal, while nobody has ever overdosed from shrooms or acid, which also has no addiction potential--in fact, it is impossible to do shrooms consecutively for very long because users develop ridiculously steep and acute tolerance, an effect known as tachyphylaxis.
The government can lie and run disinformation campaign to scare people away from these substances for a while, but they cannot hide the truth forever. Medical research in the last twenty years or so has proven substantively that various psychedelics have legitimate medical applications, with great effectiveness in aspects of mental health treatment that traditional medicine has had a poor record with. Yet research by respected authorities like Johns Hopkins University have shown promising results treating things like opioid addiction, treatment-resistant depression, end of life anxiety in the terminally ill, PTSD. Along with anecdotal evidence, a strong body of information has now amassed that makes it increasingly difficult for the powers that be to thwart the usage of these drugs.
The intelligence of anyone with even a small amount of scientific knowledge on the subject is insulted by the fact that the federal government in the United States places marijuana, LSD, shrooms and MDMA on Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act, the most illegal category which includes dangerous drugs with 'no accepted medical uses,' yet that same list has cocaine, methamphetamine, PCP, and fentanyl on Schedule 2, a category which contains dangerous drugs but ones which have an accepted medical use.
Soon, that classification will likely change for shrooms--first in localities, then a couple of states, and finally, hopefully, eventually, the federal government as a whole. The medical usage will probably precede any recreational legality for some time. Yes, I do believe in the medicinal potential of entheogens like psilocybin mushrooms. However, the right for adults to consume a drug for their own purposes needs to be incorporated into the law for society to be rational and just.
All drugs should be legalized and heavily regulated while simultaneously discouraged (somewhat akin to how the government handles tobacco nowadays). Doing so for crack, meth or PCP does not appear politically viable in the near future--or the distant future, for that matter. Those drugs, though, sit on Schedule 2 until then...such hypocrisy, given that a barrage of recent studies affirm that they all have various health benefits in clinical contexts, whereas it does not seem that PCP or cocaine brings anything especially useful and unique to the medical field. Given their actual nature, mushrooms et al represent a distinct group that makes decriminalization so much more rational. Not just for medical purposes, because shrooms are an entheogen. Medically-licensed therapists can't have a monopoly on spirituality. Using shrooms or LSD as a spiritual endeavor should fall under First Amendment rights, and I say that not as somebody just trying to rationalize getting high, but as someone whose life has been shaped for the better by experiences on these substances. Whether someone wants to microdose for increased productivity, or take a huge dose of peyote to talk with God, or just eat some acid and hit a music festival, these comparatively safe drugs must ultimately reach legalization. As with marijuana (a journey which still continues), that path there begins with decriminalization, and the first steps have been taken.
References and Sources:
--National Interest, "50.6% of vote,"
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/denver-just-legalized-magic-mushrooms-what-happens-next-57457
--Decriminalize Denver, Website Promoting Yes On Initiative 301.
--USA Today, Oakland decriminalizes.
--Patch, Santa Cruz decriminalizes
--Filter, California initiative
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