Yesterday was a sad day. Many people worked on this for years and one person gets to stop it? Do we give too much power to individuals sometimes?

https://apnews.com/artic...0df06de668ef69aafc1f13e1

Gavin Newsom vetoed two bills Saturday that would have decriminalized the possession and personal use of several hallucinogens, including psychedelic mushrooms. Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS worked hard to create and pass these bills. So why the veto?

https://www.cbsnews.com/...te-discrimination-bills/

https://maps.org/2022/09...for-2023-reintroduction/

Same motivation as everything else: They're defending the economic interests of their lobbyist partners.

I'm not into USA politics, but this happens all the time in my country too.

Gruesome Newsom owned and operated by BigPharma.

I wouldn’t say it’s big pharma. It’s presidential ambitions. Never elect a governor who wants to be a president. In California it would have made him popular. In a federal context, it was too risky.

Be mindful with the political nature of this conversation please.

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this statement and concept really are not bad,

"California should immediately begin work to set up regulated treatment guidelines — replete with dosing information, therapeutic guidelines, rules to prevent against exploitation during guided treatments, and medical clearance of no underlying psychoses," Newsom's statement said. "Unfortunately, this bill would decriminalize possession prior to these guidelines going into place, and I cannot sign it."

that any entheogenic and psychedelic legalization has taken place in our lifetime, it's really incredible!! If it started going too fast, we could also live to regret it happening. but it hasn't happened yet and maybe this was the one moment it would have jumped too far ahead.

So, at least if one of these gets sent back, it's California where to some extent we know it will eventually happen.

Translated:
People cannot be allowed access the products of nature. They will continue to be locked in cages unless they pay up to the priestly class to regulate, control, and dictate their experiences for them.

This is a dark day for cognitive liberty indeed.

He also vetoed the bill price capping insulin denying affordable access to literal life saving medicine to millions of Californians.

Disagree completely. Do you think it is OK to send someone to prison and completely ruin their life for growing natural plants or musbrooms because "dosing information" is not established?

Sorry if I'm being curt, but this is infuriating to me.

Cannabis is technically still Illegal at the Federal level, but how many states can you literally walk into a store and buy the strain of Cannabis that you want? Yes, entheogens should all be legal at the Federal level, but it often takes states and voters in those states to push the Federal Gov into action. Newsom is bought and paid for, like most Congress Critters in most states on every political side possible, by B.R. and V.G., which own BigPharms and the Media.

Like McKenna said long ago, we are led and ruled over by the least of us.

I can gift anyone I want certain natural psychedelics in Colorado. There's too much needless restriction is his rhetoric for him to sign the damn thing.

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It's not anything as vague and grandiose as a priestly class. Even worse if that's possible. It's a banal bureaucratic system of certification and licensure which ensures that all pockets are filled and all the bureaucrats are paid.

#uck that. We already have that in Oregon.

One thing that I take comfort in is - the people passed it. The government and the people will it - and that is known now. Newsom shut it down, because like I said, I think he wants to be president and that would have been a label he didn’t want attached to him (he also shut down safe injection sites, for the same reasons I suspect). But Californians and their elected representatives know what their will is now, sans one single man. A silver lining of that, in my eyes, is that it makes future legislation less politically risky than it was this time around, where it was a real question whether it would get through or not.

And you know what? Maybe (this is a big maybe) - maybe this guy will end up being president. And maybe, just maybe, he’ll do more radical things once in that office, than he’d be willing to risk on the way up to it, for fear he couldn’t get there. Long shot, maybe, but, establishment politics is like that sometimes. Obama was supposedly against gay marriage for a while. Yeahhhh, right. Of course he wasn’t against gay marriage. He was an establishment politician. But he played the game, and he had a mission to do a select few things - like reform American healthcare. Establishment politicans *do* have goals other than serving corporate interests….. it’s just that they basically sell their souls along the way in order to accomplish those select few goals. Maybe this guy will change up some small but crucial federal things, like what Cory Booker and Rand Paul are working together on to make it easier to take things off Schedule 1. Just that small little thing at the federal level would make things massively easier at the state level.

It sucks, but, he’s basically sympathetic, it really just looks like he has too much federal ambition. Hopefully if that works out for him he makes up for it a bit later. Meanwhile, now California knows this is not politically insane - it was done. It was just a single man with presidential ambitions who couldn’t allow it. That aside, the will is known now, and it is therefore safer to proceed. We’ll get there.

My personal hope is for a more radical blanket decriminalize-all-drugs bill with a taskforce inquiry into regulating legal distribution of a select group of psychedelic and entactogenic compounds to individually licensed users (like a driver’s license), along with other harm reduction things like safe(r) injection sites and free safe(r) supply hard drug distribution, as is being done on the West Coast in Canada, and (cue the pitchforks) some select intensification of laws around public intoxication.

A real concern Californians genuinely have to face is the stupid manner in which liberalization is rolled out. Rather than doing things like Portugal, liberalization is often done like Mad Max. This has been catastrophic and stupid, in this drug policy reformer’s opinion. We need to reconceptualize what is okay and what is not. Having and doing drugs, okay. Shooting up openly on the sidewalk, or walking around a residential area every night screaming at meth demons in your head - not. Need to have systems in place to accomodate people first, before that can be enforced with justice - but once accomodation is made, that needs to stop. Shoot up in designated areas, and go crazy in designated areas, or it’s a detox center and possible antipsychotics for you. Speaking from experience, that is just not okay, and that needs to be recognized as part of the legalization reform movement. It ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. Meth addicts in particular are going to be more of a social menace, because violent psychosis is a thing, and while free safe(r) supply drug distribution will cut out people constantly stealing looking for a fix, the whole camping in the street thing, or being passed out in the street, or openly shooting up thing - has to stop. People need to be sheltered and have facilities to be strung out at - because it is unreasonable for society to have to put up with that shit. Facts.

It needs to be both. Enforcement has a place. It just needs to rethink what that place is. If any of you have lived in California, at least certain parts of it, you’d know what I’m talking about. If this part of drug reform liberalization messaging was more prominent, I think people who are less into drug reform would be more on board with it, because man, it is anarchy on the West coast. Portuguese style reform and West coast anarchy are very different animals. Newsom’s hesitation around drug reform, both supervised injection sites and this, probably stem at least in part from that, in addition to his federal ambitions. You need to see it to understand, it’s wild.

OneIsEros, Yep, we already have all of that currently in CA. Openly shooting up on the streets, having to step over the occasional dead body to get access to city buildings, meth heads everywhere breaking into cars and stores and stealing things from others, zombies passed out in heaps on the sidewalks, needles and human feces piled up on sidewalks, huge tent cities, we have it all. Just stop by San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Monica or most other major CA cities and see for yourself. Our "leaders" created a literal Walking Dead zombie theme park out of most of the state. We CAN have all of this wonderfulness, but not legal or decriminalized access to entheogens.

Yeah, my point is just that some of this anarchy needs to be addressed more comprehensively when we’re opening various floodgates, because it quickly became evident that there was a disconnect between what we heard from Europe and what we ended up implementing. Too often we just focus on removing enforcements without any emphasis on reorienting them. Drugs are basically, on the ground, already de facto decriminalized in most places on the entire West coast, whether or not the laws reflect that, because of how hopeless the drug war became.

I’m hoping to see some bipartisanship on this stuff eventually. Call in the authoritarians and be like, “So, we want to remove a, b, and c…. But would like some collaboration on implementing x, y, and z.”

I dunno if it’ll get there, but that’s what I’d like to see. I’m sure the authoritarians would appreciate it if their validity was recognized, and it would move things along faster if we could just learn to take each other’s points more.

Yes, they need to recognize our points - but we need to stop being such dang bleeding heart ostriches with our heads in the sand and recognize their points too, because truth isn’t partisan, and we each have a share of it. Recognize that, and this drug reform we almost all recognize needs to happen, regardless of party divide, will move along a lot faster, I personally feel. If the legislation had had a bipartisan intelligently authoritarian element installed in it, I bet it might have been able to have been even more radical in its liberalizing content, and may have had a better shot at getting a guy like Newsom to sign off on it.

I definitely disagree with that aspect of it.

A bad implementation on such a large scale as California could diminish the likelihood of legalization and decriminalization elsewhere, including federally. So, i see it coming as close as possible to protecting and uplifting people affected by outdated policies, with the downside of not improving the situation for California at this exact time.

It perhaps is an overly cautious veto leading to a disappointing result, but not a step backwards.

I'm gonna have to disagree on this, and quote Mr. Nick Sand from this amazing article:



I believe, as Mr. Sand wrote, that trying to regulate this compounds is a crime against spirituality and freedom, and, ultimately, a waste of time if not worse.

I think it should be noted that another aspect of regulation is harm reduction. Naivete leads to concerns on safety, and not every user is going to do their due diligence.

Also, if we want something to be made socially acceptable, we have to first convince others why it's not a bad idea. Hence, "authorization." One has to meet those at the level that they're at to change the overall milieu.

There's also more than one way to work with these psychedelics/medicines.

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I agree on that, but I see the point in Nick Sand's argument: We're dealing with the mind when using psychedelics. Every external input will influence the trip, including the input from a benevolent and well-intentioned scientist.

I'm all for harm reduction, and we've all seen users that aren't responsible or informed. But I agree with Sand in lots of ways: At this point, we've studied, scientifically, that lots of these psychedelic compounds are harmless, physically. But they can be extremely powerful and de-stabilizing for the mind.

Trying to study the effects of these compounds on the body and the mind changes the context of the psychedelic trip, and thus, the output. It can be dangerous to even perform these tests. This is why Sand criticises Strassman studies: Not for their scientific value, that's out of the question, but for the impact on their subjects, and how the act of experimenting changed the trips.

It's similar to quantum mechanics, where the observation of quantum phenomena changes the behavior of said quantum phenomena (whether it's the instrumentation needed to observe or the observation itself is still up in the air imo). That said, regardless, there's also external input that changes the internal output, whether it's trauma or joy, whether it's good or bad.

I wouldn't say they're harmless, but generally safe. The toxin is in the dose.

Have you looked into how they perform these studies? Many are pretty safe, and sometimes they even make the medical space psychedelic for the journeyed, only increasing comfort for the experience. Also, if people are consenting to such study (which they are and are typically seasoned in some psychedelic use) that also mitigates and limits some of the dangers you're concerned about.

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