police can still make arrests. Even after decriminalization, the Denver Police Department arrested two minors (for whom possession was not decriminalized under the ballot measure) for psychedelic mushrooms and the Drug Enforcement Agency searched another man’s home who they suspected of growing and dealing. What this decriminalization amounts to is more a symbolic message than a concrete change in the legal landscape. When asked about the impact of decriminalization, the Denver Police Department’s Media Relations Unit admitted that “psilocybin mushroom-related crime was not a big issue prior to the passage of the ordinance and has not been a big issue since.” Between 2016 and 2019, just over one tenth of a percent of filed drug cases in Denver involved psilocybin. So what’s the point of decriminalization if the psychedelics are still illegal and laws were already rarely enforced? A lot, actually, because it opens doors to future research and utilization of the drugs by a broader community. +++
KEEPING AN
OPEN
A glimpse at the fight to decriminalize psychedelics
MIND BY Will Allstetter ILLUSTRATION David Gonzalez DESIGN Anna Brinkhuis
For most, magic mushrooms carry connotations of hippies, music festivals, and perhaps a previous roommate. But, in recent years, there has been a concerted effort by psychedelic believers to change their bohemian image and bring magic mushrooms (among other psychedelics) into the mainstream. Proponents cite the spiritual and mental benefits the drugs can provide—including treatment for addiction, depression, and anxiety—as a central argument for legalizing and normalizing their usage. The decriminalization efforts seem to be working. Almost a year ago, Denver became the first city in the United States to decriminalize mushrooms containing psilocybin, the psychoactive chemical in “magic” mushrooms. Since then, two other cities—Oakland and Santa Cruz—have followed suit by decriminalizing
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mushrooms as well as other “natural” psychedelics such as ayahuasca and peyote. But what does it mean to decriminalize a drug? Contrary to popular belief, the legislative actions have not included legalization, but they will have strong impacts on the future of psychedelics. Once a substance is decriminalized, city funds are no longer directed toward prosecuting and enforcing possession charges for those over 21 and psilocybin mushroom possession becomes the lowest possible priority for law enforcement. Cities do not have the ability to make psychedelics legal—that’s up to state and federal authorities—but they can effectively un-enforce the law through their police department. However, decriminalization does not extend to those involved in the selling of the drug and state and federal
If we look back at the history of psychedelics in the United States, the recent decriminalization marks an important turning point in a fraught history. In the 1950s and 60s, psychedelics were brought into the forefront of American consciousness by R. Gordon Wasson when he detailed his experience with psilocybin mushrooms in Life Magazine. Investigated for their mind-altering uses, psychedelics were seen as a miracle drug by both the scientific and general population, with over 1,000 studies on the drugs published before 1965. Before that, indigenous cultures have been utilizing psychedelics for thousands of years, a fact often ignored by the Western scientific community despite indigenous knowledge being used to inform Western practice. The Aztecs, for example, believed that psilocybin could be used to receive divine knowledge, Amazonian tribes used and continue to use ayahuasca to help identify and treat illnesses, and many others incorporate psychedelics into both their medicinal and spiritual practices. As knowledge surrounding psychedelics spread throughout the 60s, these drugs made their way into the general American population, quickly becoming associated with the growing hippie counterculture. This association became a death sentence for the future of psychedelic research. As the face of anti-government and anti-war protest, anything associated with hippie culture became suspicious in the eyes of the mainstream and the government, psychedelics included. In an interview with John Ehrlichman, counsel to Nixon, he stated that their administration intentionally associated hippies (among other groups, specifically Black Americans) with drugs as an excuse to “break up their communities. . . [and] vilify them night after night on the evening news.” Unsparingly, Nixon began the War on Drugs in conjunction with this vilification. In 1970, he signed the Controlled Substances Act, banning the use, sale, and transport of psychedelics by making them a Schedule I drug, designating them as having no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse and tightly controlling research. Nixon’s decision greatly derailed promising research into psychedelics as a treatment for depression, addiction, and anxiety, among other mental health problems. Researching psychedelics became both a bureaucratic nightmare and a social taboo. Up until the mid to late 2000s, research was effectively halted. Through decriminalization, however, cities are bucking this restriction. Dr. Jeffrey Bratberg, a clinical professor at the University of Rhode Island, acknowledges the taboo still surrounding the medicalization and research of psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelics, “but [the government] is coming around to this group of drugs.” Nonetheless, psychedelics remain Schedule I drugs. What research has been done, however, shows encouraging results. In a 2014 study by Johns Hopkins, over a third of smokers treated with psilocybin did not pick up a cigarette for 12 months following their trip. Other studies have shown promising results when exploring psilocybin as a treatment for otherwise treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, and OCD. A 2017 psychological study at the University of Adelaide confirmed what many already believed: the medical benefits are commonly attributed to psychedelics’ ability for one to “step back” from themselves, changing the
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