Will California Follow Oregon and Decriminalize Psychedelics in 2023?
By Jim Miller
Last week I focused on what some scholars are calling America’s “social recession” that has led to an epidemic of loneliness and mental health issues. More and more of us lead lives devoid of real intimacy, friendship, or even basic trust in the institutions that are the building blocks of our society. In sum, there is a growing epidemic of alienation at the heart of American society.
As troubling as the research on this pervasive atomization is, there are, surprisingly, some positive developments at the state and local level aimed at helping Americans heal themselves. In fact, at precisely the same time the country seems as polarized as ever, there has been a significant increase of support for both legal and medical marijuana as well as the decriminalization of psychedelics.
In some ways, nothing could seem stranger than the latter phenomenon with the current zeitgeist being about as far from the summer of love as it could be, but, in other ways, it makes perfect sense. After many years of Trump-fueled grievance politics, over a million pandemic deaths, war, growing climate anxiety, and a litany of other crises, what defines us now more than anything else is trauma.
And the renaissance of research into psychedelic drugs is revealing that, counter to decades of drug war propaganda, these substances have great promise in the treatment of post-traumatic stress syndrome, alcoholism, depression, despair in terminal cancer patients, and a range of other intractable psychological problems.
As Michael Pollan wrote in the Wall Street Journal back in 2018:
Recent trials of psilocybin, a close pharmacological cousin to LSD, have demonstrated that a single guided psychedelic session can alleviate depression when drugs like Prozac have failed; can help alcoholics and smokers to break the grip of a lifelong habit; and can help cancer patients deal with their “existential distress” at the prospect of dying. At the same time, studies imaging the brains of people on psychedelics have opened a new window onto the study of consciousness, as well as the nature of the self and spiritual experience. The hoary ‘60s platitude that psychedelics would help unlock the secrets of consciousness may turn out not to be so preposterous after all.
Indeed, as Pollan’s seminal work on the subject in How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence illustrates, after being suppressed for decades during the failed war on drugs, new researchers are rediscovering what many were onto starting in the 1950s, that, properly used, psychedelics have the potential to be a transformative force in people’s lives and in the culture.
As the recent documentary based on Pollan’s book shows, this knowledge may be historically new to the Westerners, but indigenous people have had it for centuries.
But better late than never.
Under the radar screen advocates for the decriminalization of some psychedelics have succeeded in passing initiatives at the local level in Denver, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Oakland as well as at the state level in Oregon where legal guided psychedelic experiences will begin this year.
Here in California, state Senator Scott Wiener has introduced SB 58, a revision of an earlier bill that was gutted last year after lobbying by law enforcement. As the Los Angeles Times notes:
SB 58 would allow only plant-based hallucinogens, such as psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” and dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, which is found in some plants used to brew ayahuasca. Other naturally occurring psychedelics that would be allowed under the bill include ibogaine, a psychoactive alkaloid found in the iboga shrub, and mescaline found in cacti other than peyote.
Passage of this bill would be another step in unraveling the disastrous war on drugs, aid new research, and help with healing for everyone from veterans to the dying and mentally ill. But, as Pollan has noted, the promise of psychedelics, if treated with respect and wisdom, should be available to everyone:
The value of such an experience is surely not limited to the mentally ill. There are rich implications here for what one psychedelic researcher calls “the betterment of well people.” Who doesn’t sometimes feel stuck in destructive habits of thought? Or couldn’t benefit from the mental reboot that a powerful experience of awe can deliver?
Here's hoping that California follows Oregon this year and opens the door to opening the doors of perception for us all.
Lead image: Stuart Kinlough via http://www.scanpix.no