Are magic mushrooms next to be decriminalized in Kalifornia?

MARINA, Kalifornia (PNN) - November 26, 2017 - As Kalifornia prepares for the legalization of recreational marijuana in 2018, one man is pushing for the State to become the first to decriminalize magic mushrooms.

Kevin Saunders, a mayoral candidate for the city of Marina, just south of San Francisco Bay, has filed a proposal that would exempt adults over the age of 21 from any penalties over possessing, growing, selling or transporting psychedelic psilocybin mushrooms.

If he can get 365,880 voter signatures by the end of April 2018, the Kalifornia Psilocybin Legalization Initiative will be placed on the statewide ballot.

Saunders thinks that now is the right time because the drug can help bridge the current political divide and restore a sense of community.

“The world is really hurting and everybody is at a loss about what’s going on right now with Trump, Brexit, the refugee crisis, and everything else. I’m at a loss (as to) what to do politically, but the only thing I feel like we could do is get psilocybin into more people’s hands,” he said.

“It deflates the ego and strips down your own walls and defenses and allows you to look at yourself in a different light,” he said, adding, “It could allow people to figure out what to do and could revolutionize the way we treat those with depression, addiction, and cluster headaches.”

A profound magic mushroom experience helped Saunders get over a “debilitating five-year heroin addiction” in 2003, when he was 32. “I got to the root of why I made a conscious decision to become a heroin addict; I’ve been clean for almost 15 years.”

Kalifornia is one of eight states where voters have legalized marijuana for recreational use, even though it’s still included in the federal government’s list of schedule 1 drugs. Saunders and Kitty Merchant, who is co-author of the measure and his fiancée, believe that magic mushrooms - also listed as schedule 1 drugs - are the next logical step.

“I think we have learned a lot from marijuana and we are ready as a society,” he said.

So far, they have about 1,000 signatures, but plan to ramp up signature-gathering efforts in early December at college campuses and events like the medical marijuana summit. The Emerald Cup. Eighty-five thousand signatures will trigger hearings at the State capitol.

Merchant and Saunders are not the first couple to propose legalizing mushrooms. The husband and wife team Tom and Sheri Eckert announced earlier this year that they were pushing for a similar ballot measure in Oregon, hoping to make it the first state in the Fascist Police States of Amerika to legalize the drug.

They have taken a more conservative approach than Saunders has, aiming for a 2020 ballot and seeking to legalize the drug to be taken only in licensed centers under the supervision of a certified facilitator. Individuals would not be able to just buy the mushrooms and consume them at home, as they can with marijuana.

“It’s not only amazing for mental health, there’s also a lot of potential for self-development and creative work,” said Tom Eckert.

Their efforts run in parallel to several promising clinical trials in which psychedelic mushrooms have been used to successfully treat severe depression, anxiety and addiction.

Robin Carhart-Harris, who has been studying the use of psilocybin to tackle treatment-resistant depression at Imperial College London, believes that it is a “logical inevitability” that the drug will become available to patients.

However, such legalization will only take place once final phase 3 clinical trials are completed and the drug is approved by the FDA and the European Medicines Agency. To standardize the dose, the psilocybin would have to be administered in capsule or pill form.

“Depression is such a major problem and it’s not being treated effectively at the moment. A lot of patients aren’t seeing results with traditional antidepressants,” Carhart-Harris said, adding that psilocybin could be a legal medicine - to be administered in clinics - within the next five years.

Although magic mushrooms are the safest of all the drugs in terms of the number of people who require emergency medical treatment, according to last year’s Global Drug Survey, they still carry risks.

“They are drugs with very low toxicity and very low abuse potential,” said psychiatrist Adam Winstock, founder of the Global Drug Survey, who said that if you take into account how often people take them, they are safer than cannabis.

“The only difference being the potential for mushrooms to distort your perceptions, cognition, and emotions in a way that is totally outside of most people’s real of normal experience. For a minority of people, taken in the wrong situation, that could be terrifying.”

Winstock said he’d prefer to see a well-regulated market for magic mushrooms where you’d have to show a letter from a doctor saying you were not receiving any acute mental health care or medications. Buyers should also be given advice on how to use the drug, what the effects are, and given links to online services to manage difficult situations if they arise.

“I would get people to treat mushrooms with the respect they deserve,” he said.

The Drug Policy Alliance, a not-for-profit group focused on ending the “war on drugs”, would not comment on the specific proposals in Kalifornia and Oregon, but its director of legal affairs, Tamar Todd, said, “We certainly agree that nobody should be arrested or incarcerated simply because they possess or use drugs.”