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California State Legislator Introduces Bill to Decriminalize Psychedelics
- diogenescynic 6y agoWith all the tweaker camps under freeway overpasses and homeless junkies on heroin, now seems like a bad time to be legalizing even more drugs. The entire state already feels like Mad Max. Quality of life is in free fall and rule of law basically not followed in major cities, and this is what our legislators are concerned with. It's appalling.
- farp 6y agoThere are causes of poverty that are not drugs, I don't see how addiction treatment centers and other forms of decriminalization will make the problem worse. The situation you're describing is already happening, under our existing drug laws. Is there any evidence to believe this would make that worse? > The Netherlands reported just 235 fatal opioid overdoses in 2016, compared to 4,050 in Ohio, alone, for the same year. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/opioids/netherlands-free-heroin-distribution-program-could-serve-as-possible-model-for-us.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/opioids/netherlands-fr...
- diogenescynic 6y agoSerious question do you live in California or have you spent much time here? Do you think decriminalization via prop 47 has had a positive impact? I cannot comprehend you saying yes to both of these. The quality of life is in absolute free fall, even compared to only a few years ago. Comparing the Netherlands to California is laughable. There aren't junkies with needles in their arms passed out under freeways all over the Netherlands like there are in California. The slums of the Netherlands look clean compared to California living standards. I understand psychedelics aren't habit forming, but it's not going to make the drug situation better or the quality of life better in California. It will simply be an abdication of responsibility. More kids will take them and drive and kill themselves doing something stupid. Same thing happened with prop 47, now you can get caught with meth or heroin and it's a ticket, as a result it's treated like weed was in the 90s. It's a race to the bottom for society. Raise the minimum wage, pass universal healthcare, increase access to universities and job training. The rest of this is just bread and circuses to keep us distracted. "Sure, take your soma and leave me alone"- Newsom
- Trasmatta 6y agoPsychedelics are not comparable at all to the types of drugs you're thinking of. For one, they're generally not habit forming.
- robbyt 6y agoBig difference in the type of drugs being used here... don't you erowid? You can't compare homeless people on crack living under a bridge to tech bros boofing ayahuasca with their personal shaman on a weekend getaway.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- meken 6y agoAnyone know how likely this is to pass?
- sep_field 6y agoMore likely if we all call our congresspeople and let them know that we want it passed.
- dragonwriter 6y agoSince it's not a bill in Congress, calling Congresspeople is mostly a waste of time. Call your CA State Legislators to get this bill passed (if you are in CA). Call Congress if you'd like to see something similar at the federal level, I guess.
- sep_field 6y agoI was thinking of the state's congress. However you are right that's not what it is called. I'm so used to thinking of the federal system I misremembered the term. Thanks for clearing it up.
- tsomctl 6y agoHow about making it legal to import spores, just like most other states? https://erowid.org/plants/mushrooms/mushrooms_law8.shtml https://erowid.org/plants/mushrooms/mushrooms_law8.shtml
- dragonwriter 6y agoI would suggest contacting an involved legislator if you genuinely care about this, because the bill doesn't address it but it seems likely to be an oversight, as the general provisions against growing the things which produce the listed drugs is explicitly lifted in the bill, but the separate specific provision on spores is not.
- jessaustin 6y agoI would upvote this, but apparently mere bills are off-topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26185428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26185428
- dragonwriter 6y agoMere bills are usually off-topic per dang in your link; upvoting is a very fine way to say that you think that is not the case in this specific circumstance.
- vmception 6y agoThat "guideline" is a just a convenient way for them to nuke a thread when they don't want to moderate it anymore. They let a lot of bill discussions continue on. You have 23K karma, you can spend a little.
- whiddershins 6y agoPsychedelics are not without risks, but the risks are for me a deal breaker when they are illegal. There are too many ‘designer drugs’ out there with unknown properties that are sold by misrepresenting what they are. LSD25, psilocybin, MDMA, DMT these are drugs with known risks and side effects, and there has been legitimate investigation into their benefits. It would be great if we could legally continue to gather data. So far, it seems these substances are arguably much less dangerous than many illegal substances. I would be in favor of legalizing all of them. Decriminalizing seems to be a necessary step in that direction, but it doesn’t allow for quality control. Legalization allows for real and enforceable disclosure about what I might be putting in my body. I hope we get there someday. Edit: and possibly less dangerous than some legal substances.
- tcoff91 6y agoPeople are getting hurt by the black market. We need to bring this into the light. I know someone who died from taking what he thought was LSD and was instead some kind of designer drug like 25I-NBOME.
- vmception 6y agoN-Bombs are messed up, there is one variant that gives instant permanent parkinson's disease! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP There is so much to learn from these things, the cure for natural parkison's is probably within that drug, but we need the whole supply chain regulated and the ability to study these things in the light. I absolutely hate the current status of the psychedelic community, full of anecdotes, invalidating victim's experiences, some straight up voodoo about how to "end trips early" with candy flipping. Dangerous. All because it relies on urban legends.
- cwkoss 6y agoPedantic quibble, MPTP is not an NBOMe: MPTP is opioid-adjacent. Though, your point stands: they are both certainly quite dangerous substances that are among the reasons that testing drugs is an important harm reduction measure.
- baggy_trough 6y agoIt's rather outrageous that a plant can be illegal in the first place.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoHow is LSD or MDMA a plant?
- dualthro 6y agoI don't see GP suggesting that anywhere in their comment?
- electrondood 6y agoI'm with you, but then so is "owning" land, etc.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago“owning” land is illegal?
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoSome people reject ownership of land. Its good that this is getting more discussion because I think its generally nonsensical and this idea is rather old and doesn’t get debunked because up until recently it rarely made it out of socialist/communist dogma.
- mandelbrotwurst 6y agoWhy is it nonsensical? I've always interpreted this as being an attempt to call attention to things like the relative shortness of our lives in comparison to the earth and an argument that there's a certain amount of hubris involved in saying that you own components of ecosystems that you exist within and depend on to live.
- ShakataGaNai 6y agoThis would be very exciting to see pass. Not that Psychedelics are a thing for me, but there is a lot of promising research with some of these substances. Many have been shown to have a lot of beneficial effects... if used correctly. Right now they are illegal because they were misused. Many also sound scary. Are used in too high of dosage. And very frequently cut with extremely dangerous stuff. It'd be like making ibuprofen and acetaminophen illegal with severe jail time.... Because someone took much while it was mixed (cut) with sodium hydroxide. Sure it sounds like scary stuff to the lay person until you remember that's Advil, Tylenol and drain cleaner respectively.
- sep_field 6y agoGreat points. Worth noting that Tylenol is extremely hepatotoxic in quite low doses (relative to the therapeutic dose). Several grams can kill you.
- astrange 6y agoIbuprofen is also extremely dangerous if you repeatedly take the recommended dose for too long. Although it's not as likely to kill you in a single overdose like Tylenol can easily do.
- emkoemko 6y agohow do you cut a mushroom with dangerous stuff? dirty scissors?
- vmception 6y ago> Peyote, an endangered plant, is excluded to protect traditional Native American spiritual practices. Hm, this seems like a mistake. They should create a separate framework to deter the use of peyote. Like a killing endangered species framework.
- sep_field 6y agoNative Americans already have a legal way to use peyote in the context of spiritual practice.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y agoI’m beyond offended that anyone thinks it’s okay to decide that some spiritual practices are okay for certain religious groups or ethnicities and not others. It’s racism.
- sep_field 6y agoit isn't that you aren't allowed to have the spiritual practice, you are welcome to use mescaline (the active ingredient in peyote, which can be synthesized) however you want. It is also available in some other cactuses that aren't near extinct. The intent of the restriction is to keep the harvesting of the peyote plant at a level that hopefully prevents it from going extinct. If everyone was permitted to harvest peyote, it would be available to no one at all very quickly. Native Americans get the exception because the tribal groups that use the plant have a culture of respecting it and being caretakers of it.
- vmception 6y agoTreaties exist outside of our cultural sensibilities. Alongside religious exceptions. Here it is possible to have both simultaneously.
- cwkoss 6y agoThere are non-threatened species of cacti which also produce mescaline at slightly lower levels, but grow significantly more rapidly. Primarily the trichocereus genus.
- buzzert 6y agoI really don’t understand how someone could walk around the streets of San Francisco and think that we need _more_ drugs in our society. With a nearly 6 times as many people dying from overdoses versus COVID-19[0], it absolutely baffles me that drugs are continuously being decriminalized and legalized while pandemic restrictions are some of the strictest in the nation. Do these politicians really have a lot of public support? [0]: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-12-overdose-deaths-outpace-covid-san.html https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-12-overdose-deaths-outpa...
- linuxhansl 6y agoI hear you. The down-votes are unfair since you just voiced your opinion. At the same time... ODs frequently happen because of lack quality control. You get this stuff from some shady folks, who got it from other shady folks, you have no idea whether you can trust the dosage, or whether you even get the drug you paid for. The drugs themselves are often not the problem. You can kill yourself with alcohol and nicotine is one of _the_ most additive substances we know. Should be prohibit these as well? The key is regulation and quality control, and that you can only do within a legal framework.
- buzzert 6y ago> You can kill yourself with alcohol and nicotine is one of _the_ most additive substances we know. Should be prohibit these as well? I understand this is a relatively extreme viewpoint, but yes. I believe nicotine should be prohibited. I think society would be better off if alcohol was prohibited too, but I understand the historical context behind that. Nicotine, unlike psychedelics, does not “open one’s mind” or have any long term benefits to anyone’s life like MDMA supposedly does. In fact, it seems to be one of the only drugs I can think of where everyone is constantly trying to get off of it, and literally no one is promoting it’s usage.
- mancerayder 6y agoThe trouble with your reasoning here is the idea you can protect people from themselves. The second problem is that heart disease is the biggest killer, and there's no rational way to use the law to stop that. Extreme sports, fast cars, alcohol, boxing, hell, even gymnastics, unprotected sex.. you see where I'm going with this. What's moral is a separate question of, what's the best policy for society to keep people as safe as possible. Bootleg cigarettes and fines (prison?) are probably not those things. Besides, some people can smoke moderately or rarely and not get addicted or die. Finally, you're too soft on your alcohol prohibition stance, where you're saying you can see the benefits. Empirically, do you see the benefits in the creation of a criminal syndicate that still exists, a century later? History has spoken, prohibition causes harm.
- wsycharles0o 6y agoFYI, non-urgent bills like this typically gets processed in one year. So if you are hopeful, the decriminalization can happen on Jan 1st 2022! https://indivisible.org/resource/indivisible-guide-california-state-legislature https://indivisible.org/resource/indivisible-guide-californi...
- linuxhansl 6y agoFinally! The risk of getting an unclean drug from some street dealer is far higher than the risk from the substance itself. The key is legalization and regulation and quality control. This is true to alcohol as well. Alcohol is ethanol (C2H5OH). When created unskillfully also you get methanol (CH3OH), which is really poisonous. A controlled, regulated market here is far safer. Like with alcohol there is risk of abuse with psychedelics, but IMHO that risk is smaller than the risk of bad products from the black market. Note that I am not talking about opiods. Those are very additive.
- snarf21 6y agoI agree that random drugs have more dangers. I've been watching with interest what has happened with pot in CO. For people who don't like to break the law, it has worked and been safer. However, it has come at a cost. All that testing and quality control and middlemen adds cost. Now buying the quality legal pot is way more expensive so people are going back to the black market. This is the big challenge. For the middle class people who want an occasional fix, legalization works out great for everyone. For the poor and desperate, not so much. I don't know how to solve it.
- ckosidows 6y agoIsn't this a product of other states driving demand for illegal cannabis? If all states legalized, wouldn't the demand plummet and increase the price of illegal pot?
- snarf21 6y agoI'm not sure. There can be other reasons too like not wanting to be tracked by the government (depending on your job/career). Also, the city of Denver has a 20+% tax on weed sales. This causes a lot of variability in cost.
- ravenstine 6y ago> This is true to alcohol as well. Alcohol is ethanol (C2H5OH). When created unskillfully also you get methanol (CH3OH), which is really poisonous. A controlled, regulated market here is far safer. This is a misconception. Alcohol has to be adulterated for it to even approach having enough methanol to be harmful. The only methanol most homebrewers and moonshiners will get is in whatever was added to the wort in the first place, usually fruits or juice, but this is not enough to be harmful, not by a longshot. Even when it's distilled, it's in such sparse amounts that the ethanol acts as an antidote. The stories of methanol poisonings from the prohibition era were a combination of crooked dealers stretching bootleg liquor with wood alcohol, people making stills from car parts(containing methanol among other things), and authorities adulterating bootleg liquor to discourage buyers. If you've got a still made of copper or stainless steel, and you didn't pour antifreeze directly into your wash, you'll be fine. Now still explosions is a whole other thing, and is a better argument from a safety perspective. Homebrewers have even less to worry about; it's so insanely safe that they couldn't keep it illegal any longer.
- luis8 6y agoOff-topic, but I wonder if decriminalizing all drugs will kill the cartel profits. From what I can see, they make a ton of profit due to the illegality(risk-profit) and this big profit is how they became so powerful. Food for thought I guess.
- thomastjeffery 6y agoThat isn't off topic at all. One of the biggest motivations for decriminalization is to do disincentivize black markets.
- tayo42 6y agoDecriminalization? I don't think that removed black markets. You still need to purchase your drugs. You just don't get trouble for being the buyer or possessing it? Unless I misread this and they're going to have lsd and mdma stores in California?
- elliotec 6y agoDecriminalization is the first step to legalization. So, while we wont see psychedelic stores in CA tomorrow, we could see incremental regulation that eventually leads to literal LSD stores, killing the black market. Like cannabis dispensaries. Seems crazy to think that was possible 20 years ago, but I get weed delivered to me in Utah now, and get to work on the tech that enables that too.
- sep_field 6y agoThis is a good argument in general but unfortunately it depends on tax structures and other external forces. For instance, cannabis is legal in many states now yet cartels still distribute it at huge profits simply because the taxes are exorbitant and also that there are weird rules about who can buy how much when (example: prior to adult use laws I still purchased cannabis illegally even though I technically could have gotten a medical license because it was so complex to get one). So while I firmly believe the answer is yes, there is still a balancing act that needs to happen.
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- liquidify 6y agoWow this would be great.
- yters 6y agoWhat if psychedelics makes people more susceptible to demon possession?
- de6u99er 6y agoI only do weed. It helps me slow down so others can keep up.
- swayvil 6y agoIn this age of communication, propaganda has become a beast indeed. And echochambers rise up and walk like godzilla. Which is dire. Arguments and rationality won't save us. They are only as good as the authorities that we choose. And we rarely choose rationally or even consciously. And even if we do, for every clearheaded one there are 1000 sleepwalkers. So insanity walks the land. What will save us? I think that psychedelics might save us.
- buttholesurfer 6y agoOh boy can't wait for the retards to be out in public.
- markdown 6y agoThese Norwegian "anti-drug" posters provide food for thought: https://i.imgur.com/tZ2eDOV.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/tZ2eDOV.jpeg
- sep_field 6y agoThese are awesome! Really helpful to shift conversations towards harm reduction.
- cosmodisk 6y agoI don't understand what are the benefits of it? Some of the psychedelics mess with your head way more than most people would want to, so what's the reason for it?
- tayo42 6y agoThere's a lot of substances listed here. Ketamine through its interaction with glutamate is working as a depression treatment where other medicine is failing. Lsd mushrooms have a lot of therapeutics benefits, there was a lot of research done in the 50s that was shut down when it became illegal in thr 60s. Related to treating addiction. Mdma allows people to go through therapy and touch on topics that are causing ptsd that they normally don't talk about. That's just a gist, how to change your mind is a great book about it. Psychedelics can also be a tool to learn more about the brain and how it works.
- joncrane 6y agoJust want to give a shout out to Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, who has been fighting this fight since at least 1990. He, like myself, is an alum of New College, a non-traditional college in Sarasota. He graduated I think the year before I matriculated, but his presence was well known on campus and his house was a legendary house he rented out to a few students every semester. To be clear, MAPS already existed back then, he was already working to get psychedelics (and entheogens such as MDMA) incorporated into therapeutic modalities. Back then the idea of legalized psychedelics seemed like a pipe dream. To see his dreams begin to come to fruition 30 years later must be one of the most satisfying things a person can accomplish in his life. My hat's off to Rick Doblin. What a mensch.
- RickJWagner 6y agoAh. That'll help that homeless problem.
- goldenchrome 6y agoStrange comment. Psychedelics aren’t really life ruining drugs. You’re probably thinking of opioids.
- astrange 6y agoMost homeless people doing drugs are doing drugs because they're homeless and need a break from life, not homeless because they did drugs.
- emmanueloga_ 6y agoDoes anybody have any insight on what are the incentives for a politician to pursue something like this? (in general or even specific to Scott Wiener). I haven't heard about him before, but looking as his wiki page [1], it look like he has a history of involvement in "cool"/progressive projects, so it could just be the fact that he truly thinks this is a good idea. But, like any other politician, I assume there must be some other non obvious reasons why he's doing this other than "I think it should be done" or "if I do this, people will vote me". 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Wiener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Wiener