It's nice to see progress being made towards more rational drug policy, and also disappointing that this a "plant medicine = good" bill instead of a "criminalizing psychedelics is stupid" bill.
Chemically-derived ones like LSD and MDMA are not in-scope in Wiener's bill, even though (like mushrooms) they aren't the kinds of drugs that cause social problems.
That's a problem. The other side of that is "natural = unstandardized doses" That's become a big problem with cannabis, which has had huge potency upgrades through both selective breeding and concentrates.[1][2]
The good thing about cannabis used to be that the effective dose and the hazardous dose were a long way apart, and it was hard to reach the hazardous dose. That's changed.
You can thank the black market for that one. Same as you couldn't buy much beer and such during the prohibition, because hard liquor was more lucrative to smuggle.
And while psychosis occurrence might raise with increased doses, at least LD50 for THC in rodents (I know, but hard to ethically gauge it in humans) is 1250mg/kg orally. If we naively scale this up to humans, a 70kg human would have to consume 90g of pure THC, which is an incredibly outrageous, absolutely unattainable amount.
I would also argue that you need less cannabis to reach a desired state if it is of higher potency. Do people measure their intake in "joints" which are consumed no matter what the actual potency is?
That argument indeed doesn't make much sense to me. If I smoke, its not "this amount regardless of potency or method" rather "to get this high". If I smoked joints which I don't do since I like my lungs it would just mean much more unhealthy hobby.
So yes strong stuff is a godsend, can get to desired state more effectively and cheaply too.
The only situation where it may make sense is some inexperienced users taking too much, which can easily happen with random illegal street stuff. But its like arguing to ban hard liquors since people can get shitfaced from few shots easier than from beer. And indeed getting properly wasted increases the chance to develop some bad mental issues, father of one of my ex gf ended up with lifelong schizophrenia just from excessive drinking at ripe age of 18.
Which is all true but response is - don't do stupid stuff, as it should be with other drugs. Legalizing and having easy available advice / guide is much better.
Someone who isn't me found cannabis intolerable because it was making them feel anxious. Asked whether they considered using a smaller dose or lower potency they said they already tried that. What happened was even though they acquired the least strong stuff it was still too much for them to benefit from it. They ended up with a process making edibles, very much diluting the weakest stuff and that proved useful to them.
I think it's relevant to point out that even Amsterdam eventually chose to ban magic mushrooms, though less potent magic truffles remain legal. This happened after a rapidly increasing number of incidents of people having psychotic episodes while tripping and injuring or killing themselves, usually while trying to fly.
I don't really see how legalization could work, let alone in an area with extremely high numbers of people with mental illness. Shrooms + mental illness go together like ammonia and bleach. And how many 'flying deaths', particularly of otherwise healthy young people, will society accept before backtracking? One can already easily envision the commercials for the inevitable proposition over it.
> number of incidents of people having psychotic episodes while tripping and injuring or killing themselves, usually while trying to fly
1 person died and she was 17 so could not legally purchase mushrooms.
> Sale to minors is prohibited, and an information leaflet should be given with the mushrooms (apparently, the French girl had not bought the mushrooms herself, but older friends).
I think we live in era when driving a car and dying is ok while taking mushrooms and dying is not ok.
The first has one or two orders of magnitude more deaths than the second case.
Driving is very optional. Guns are very optional. We have both, so, we should also consider responsible adults worthy of choosing to use/not use substances.
Can I also claim that taking LSD is a necessity for me to have my well being?
Who decides what is a necessity and what is not? I would say that the harm rate could be a good indicator what a society should tolerate and anything that is less harmful what is tolerated should be legal.
The Netherlands have been under the control of a conservative government for a long time now, and countless coffeshops have been forced to close under their rule. Banning magic mushrooms is just par for the course.
The Netherlands used to have a well-deserved reputation for tolerance, but that's been wearing away for decades now, with intolerance for everything from Muslim immigrants to drug users.
I say this with a heavy heart, as someone who absolutely loves the Netherlands for everything else it has to offer, and who used to be in awe of how tolerant and accepting they were.
There was a day when the Netherlands could be justly proud of leading the world in tolerance, but that time is over.
Is there any proof that people trying to fly and jumping off a building is actually real? I always assumed it's some sort of anti drug meme that had been around since forever.
That does seem… odd. I’ve been enjoying mushrooms multiple times a year for 22 years. I’ve been around a lot of other people doing mushrooms. On fire lookouts. Rooftops. High in the mountains of Oregon, Washington, and Colorado. And I have never, ever seen anybody try to fly.
You haven't been around enough people doing psychedelics then. Psychotic breaks are not uncommon. Once you're at a music festival where n=thousands you realize this. Flying and drowning in lakes is not unheard of.
Everybody thinks they are immune to psychotic breaks until they do enough psychedelics and have one. This could be you some day.
You haven't been around enough people drinking booze then. Psychotic breaks are not uncommon. Once you're basically anwywhere with people drinking you realize this. Flying and drowning in lakes, murdering your wife, or dying in a fiery crash on the freeway are not unheard of.
Everybody thinks they are immune to psychotic breaks until they do enough booze and have one. This could be you some day.
I'm not sure why you're responding in this manner. I never said alcohol was any better. I was addressing a comment that they were surprised psychotic breaks and deaths happen on psychedelics. This has nothing to do with alcohol.
Honest question: How many people do you think avoid murdering others because there is a law against it? Or another way of putting it, do you think that the reason more people don't go around murdering others is because the government wrote down somewhere "this is illegal"?
Oh, I’m aware it can happen. I’ve been around people who OD or go super deep in K Holes, and been to more than enough festivals for one lifetime, but those extreme side effects don’t seem to be all that common with mushrooms. I don’t even know anyone who knows anyone who knows anyone that has had a psychotic break tripping. The dearth of information online leads me to believe it really is extremely uncommon.
> I don’t even know anyone who knows anyone who knows anyone that has had a psychotic break tripping.
It's not that uncommon. If you don't believe me, volunteer for a medical tent for any music festival where psychedelic use is rampant. You'll get psychotic breaks all night.
I'm saying all psychedelics commonly cause psychotic breaks. I've had to assist people on mushroom induced psychotic breaks before. I love mushrooms as much as any other hippie and think they should be legalized but don't agree with the whitewashing that is happening in the psychedelic activist circles. Let's not swing the pendulum too far in the other direction - they should be taken seriously just like any other mind altering drug.
It means psychosis. I'm confused about what you do not understand about this. It's losing touch with reality, knowing that you're in a situation or place which you are not - losing the ability to determine what is real or what is not real. Once you are out of this state you realize that you could not have been trusted to make any decisions about reality (whether you were where you thought you were, whether what you were doing was safe, whether what you believe was true). It's basically sleepwalking while on psychedelics. Once you're done with the psychosis you might not remember most of it.
If you get caught in this state at a music festival and restrained (sometimes restrained to a gurney if you are caught in a camping festival like Electric Forest and they determine an ambulance is not necessary) you get sent off via an ambulance where they will feed you benzodiazepines/antipsychotics and hold you at a hospital until you are back to reality, incurring a pretty hefty ER bill. This is not just a bad trip that someone can talk you down from. This is literally losing control of your entire being. It's like having someone else at the wheels. Short term psychosis.
That's how ALL big music festivals in the US handle psychotic breaks. They won't let you just go around the festival endangering yourself and being a menace to the rest of the patrons.
Not a great place to be in, but I've seen it enough times to know it's not uncommon.
Just weighing in, but sampling for these events isn't necessarily applicable to the general population.
Whether that's because people whose brains are more likely to experience psychosis are more drawn to music festivals, whether it's a supply-trust or dosage issue (lower purity or higher potency compounds, goers don't know what they took or how much), or that prior exposure to cultural lore like "drugs makes people want to fly" is influencing them, I don't know.
Age is also a known factor - schizophrenia is more likely to emerge around the age of maturity, often associated with stress and drug use (again, may be wet roads causing rain - people self-medicate even if they don't realize it), even though, statistically, "college" would be just as likely, and it often happens as a psychotic break, the way you described. I worked with young musicians for many years and saw it happen regularly enough - no psychedelics required.
So the fact that everything you mention happens is evidence, but of what? That's a harder question to answer.
The worst compounding factor is that many people do not have "trip sitters": sober people that take care no one gets up to too dumb shit, get injured, or that rude external people don't barge in and ruin the vibe.
Most of the times I’ve seen someone have a mental health episode while on drugs, it’s been caused by either overdose, poly drug consumption (taking a bunch of shit), or the drug they took not being the drug they thought they were taking.
Or massive sleep deprivation powered by stimulant abuse over a protracted period of time.
If you Google around it seems like there's plenty of anecdotal cases of it happening, although some of them are a bit tabloidy and sensationalized, and some of the people had multiple substances going on
It's real, but highly uncommon (that is, every incident will be in the news); compare that to e.g. instances of drunken rages, alcohol poisoning, Korsakoff and drunk drivers which... is still reported on, but a lot of it goes by silently.
My friend experienced a situation where she took something 10 years ago that was speedy and trippy that was sold as LSD but was clearly NOT and there was definitely a feeling of invulnerability to damage at altitude and a heightened perception of strength.
If it weren't illegal, we'd have better supply chain transparency, and your friend would have been less likely to have been sold a dangerously mislabeled substance.
> And how many 'flying deaths', particularly of otherwise healthy young people, will society accept before backtracking?
But it is fine to put those "otherwise healthy young people" to prison for having a pack of shrooms in their pocket, amiright?
And when they are out (probably not as healthy or as young anymore) let's ruin their lives further by preventing them for ever getting any reasonable job for having a criminal record...
I’ve been around a lot of people on mushrooms. I will say that the experiences I’ve observed never made anyone think they could fly off a building. Maybe they were just lucky or the shrooms were always weak.
However, I have very real concerns about the effects on those who might have dormant mental illness. I have no proof but the idea that many kinds of drugs could amplify or accelerate a mental illness scares me in a mass consumption setting.
If there is no evidence for this then I’d like to know. If there is evidence for this then we need to really make it clear and educate people of the risk.
Incidentally mescaline tends to be one of the exceptions from the "legalize all plant medicine" crowd. Apparently it's a lot of effort to cultivate peyote; there isn't much of it, and it's associated with tribal practices. People advocating for legalization tend to leave out peyote because they don't want people competing with tribal shaman for access to it.
I believe there's another source (S. Pedro cactus?) that doesn't have the tribal history, and is thus considered a reasonable alternative for legalization.
Let's make it clear, if by gentle you mean an intense 18 hour journey in a mind roller coaster you cannot control or stop, then yes, that's what a friend told me.
The research is old and in its infancy, but I believe there is a pretty clear evidence that link underlying predisposition to certain mental illnesses and a psychotic episode when using psychedelics. I believe it remains to be determined what exactly this means, and how to go about it.
It is, in my opinion, a very strong argument for not allowing unsupervised mass consumption. And to be fair, most people are not using psychedelics in a way that maximize their psychological healing, but rather just to trip. On the flipside, smoking and alcohol are legal, and that causes a lot of early deaths every single day, even to people not smoking or drinking.
By “not allowing” do you mean putting people in jail, or something else? Because passing a law doesn’t make it just go away. Putting people in jail seems worse in every way.
You should never put people in jail for using any controlled substance. That is mostly an american thing. For people using it, just fine them and be done with it. Go after the people producing, distributing and selling.
This isn't legalization. It's just decriminalization. There's a big difference. People can still be fined for their use if there isn't a medical reason, but they won't go to jail or prison.
> Chemically-derived ones like LSD and MDMA are not in-scope in Wiener's bill, even though (like mushrooms) they aren't the kinds of drugs that cause social problems.
I think that is a mistake; both have a long record of use and potential in clinical trials dating back since the 60s in Harvard, with a litany of uses from depression, alcoholism, schizophrenia etc... We all know the work of T. Leary, but the research needs to be continued and implemented at a time when we seem to need it more than ever.
Thus why this portion is perhaps the most notable take-away and not the decriminalization aspect (Oakland, like Denver, has been decriminalized for sometime):
The bill also would require the California Health and Human Services Agency to study the therapeutic use of psychedelics and submit a report with its findings and recommendations to the Legislature.
Oregon was supposed to lead the way in this respect but has effectively stalled out in the process despite having first mover advantage [0], so I hope CA takes over in it's place. Colorado doesn't seem to have any interest in anything other than decriminalization, either.
They were originally, from the article, this is a narrower version that removed ibogaine, LSD, MDMA. Which is silly, because LSD is comparable to mushrooms and MDMA is a powerfully therapeutic substance.
I think all drugs should have licenses that can be obtained and taken away. I think it’s ok to require IDs and a certain level of test performance. Heck, I wish alcohol was the same (at least for 18-20 year olds).
Upon what reasonable moral authority can anyone claim to control what another person does to their own body that does not harm another person?
I claim an absolute, perpetual, inviolable, and inalienable moral right to my own person, and modifying it in any way I see fit: tattoos, scarification, branding, piercing, amputation, et cetera. I get to choose what medical procedures I will or will not accept. I get to choose when my life ends voluntarily. I alone choose what I will or will not eat, will or will not insert into my bloodstream.
The same moral authority that tells me I cannot put a specified substance into my bloodstream must also simultaneously claim the authority to tell me that I must swallow a certain substance or food, which is ridiculous. Does looking at it in that way reveal its absurdity to you?
If you don't have the moral basis to force me to eat a food I do not wish to eat, you do not have the moral basis to deny me the right to ingest a drug I do wish to ingest.
It turns out the state can restrict what you say, what you do with your body, what you ingest, and all the rest. This is demonstrably true to anyone with a passing familiarity with the criminal justice system.
Not in my experience. Nobody really agrees with the state here, and their restrictions are ignored by everyone (when it comes to their own body). The people who support these restrictions support them only when applied to the bodies of other people.
My question was not what authorities the state claims - my question is about upon what moral or philosophical basis such claims would be morally justified.
I am of course aware the state claims such authority. I am also aware that they further claim the authority to enslave me, arm me, ship me across the earth, and execute or imprison me if I then refuse to commit murder on their behalf. The state claiming an authority does not actually provide them with a moral basis to do so.
On what reasonable moral basis could anyone claim the authority to strip someone of their rights to final disposition over their own body?
Well, a murderer is just having an experience and moving their body, right? So obviously there are restrictions in the case where one’s internal experiences lead to actions that affect others. Even for actions like suicide there are negative externalities. Hence the need for regulation.
People disagree on the definition of harm, therefore there will be preferences for law.
On a societal scale, if there is a 1:N chance a drug or experience will nullify your health and you will require society to bear the burden if your existence, then people in society may decide to attempt to minimize such occurrences through law.
If N is 6 as in Russian Roulette, society might control what you might accidentally put in your body. If N is 1,000,000 like in driving, we might regulate the requirements of who can do that to minimize the chance of harming others and drive N higher.
If N is 10,000 (for certain drugs) in terms of the chance you might overdose and harm yourself sufficiently, society might say the benefit isn’t worth the risk and ‘control what you do with your body.’
Early versions of the bill had Ketamine in it. It was villified as a "date rape drug". I don't remember why MDMA got removed, but babysteps if my guess.
Alcohol too, if we are applying rigor equally. And yet not many bite the bullet and say “alcohol, the well-known date rape drug, should be banned and its users put in jail”.
it's even sillier. LSD is derived from very small modifications to compounds produced by the ergot fungus. and certain synthetic psilocin analogues like 4-ho-met and 4-aco-dmt have few if any meaningful differences to psilocin itself (aka 4-ho-dmt)
That's risky. I and millions and others have natural hallucinogens growing in the fields in North America and much of Europe. Henbane is pretty hard to completely eradicate, is likely one of the most naturally powerful hallucinogens and is also one of the most dangerous to use as a recreational drug safely as potency varies wildly in each plant. Every part of the plant is a drug and every part of the plant is deadly. It can be and has been used in the medical field but has been replaced with chemicals that are safer to measure.
I’ve met people who were addicted to both LSD and MDMA. One guy took LSD for a year straight. Decriminalization is a step in the right direction but where’s the support structure? California probably has the most drug problems in the states and mushrooms are not going to cause anymore problems. The other piece for support and therapy needs to improve. Alcohol is included as well as legal marijuana.
This is the opposite of rational. They are decriminalizing it based on a fashion that drugs are good and when it comes to drugs people should be able to do whatever they want without regard to consequences. Compare this with the fanaticism against smoking you see from the same quarters, that should be enough to tell you this is nothing more than hippy fashion.
Then I would say you're not looking closely enough. The impetus is there, but so far there is enough resistance to it to prevent it. That wasn't the point anyway, the point is the contradiction in the antipathy towards tobacco on the basis of health vs the libertine attitude towards drugs. The kinds of people who tend to be pro drugs, pro prostitution, etc are the same people who will scold others for smoking.
A lot of people believe in the freedom to do what you like if you don't harm others.
People doing MDMA or LSD generally don't harm others.
People smoking do. Bartenders, card dealers, etc have their workplaces polluted by cigarettes.
I'm sure there are plenty of libertarians who are against social restrictions on smoking. There are others who tolerate the restrictions because they personally find it to be a nicer experience to not have ambient smoke out in the world. Nevertheless, nobody thinks you should be thrown in jail for carrying cigarettes.
Taxing cigarettes and decriminalizing psychedelics are not the same conversation. Your attempt to conflate them is a fallacy.
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Moreover, that aspect of the conversation is just about the "should"s - should someone be free to alter their minds/bodies in the privacy of their own homes/if they aren't causing undue harm to others?
The strongest argument for legalization is to defund the cartels. Countless dollars are being funneled to violent mobs because of the remnants of Richard Nixon's paranoia. The world would be a better place if the cartels were less powerful, and the drug problem would be much less of a problem if drugs weren't adulterated.
The cartels and fentanyl poisoning are causing trauma for way too many families. There aren't enough pros to Nixon's line of thinking to justify that.
The solution to second hand smoke is simple, if you don't want to be around it, then don't put yourself near it. That goes for most things. Nobody is forcing people to become waiters in restaurants where there is smoking. It is the converse, they want to ban the possibility. Nobody is going to jail for smoking...yet. But they have been pushed out of every public place where they used to be accommodated and punitively taxed. The intention is clear.
The argument is not important, the motivation is what matters, because that tells you where things are going to go. People that want drug legalization want to do drugs, not defund their supply, that is just a convenient argument.
Long overdue. I’m becoming more and more inclined to think that the criminalization isn’t bad because of the side-effects of criminalization. I think the very INTENTION of criminalization, to reduce the consumption of these drugs, is harmful.
So far, the decriminalization of drug use in California has been a nightmare of human misery. Throwing psychedelics into the mix is going to make it even worse. It is a feeding a cycle of Mental Illness -> Drugs -> Homeless -> Drugs -> Mental Illness -> Homeless.
Yep. Psychedelics like magic mushrooms and LSD just aren’t addictive. Taking them is existentially exhausting. It’s like going for a hike - when you get home you just want to have a cup of tea and rest. You don’t want to set off again immediately after.
You also lose some agency about what you’re thinking about. Having a bad trip while homeless could be utter hell.
I think it’s very unlikely that they’ll displace alcohol and friends as the drugs of choice for homeless people. If you want to dissociate from your shitty life, you will hate LSD.
Has there been any studies into the relationship between an increase in crime/mental health problems/etc and the decriminalisation of drugs in Cali (or elsewhere?)
For thousands of years human existence, society made adjustments based on effects of observed harmful activities and habits, and codified them in the form of taboos and myths to pass them down to future generations. This happened without embarking on formal studies.
My argument is that collective human intuition is good enough in many cases to avoid harming society, we are the evidence, because our ancestors survived
This is the very definition of survivor bias. Just because being afraid of the dark used to be evolutionarily benefitial, doesn't mean we need to continue being afraid.
>My argument is that collective human intuition is good enough in many cases to avoid harming society, we are the evidence, because our ancestors survived
The same human intuition that has repeatedly led to things like slavery and genocide?
Sometimes fighting against our intuition is exactly what's needed. A lot of our instincts are bad but our only saving grace is that we can sometimes think our way out of them.
If you go outside, you will see what unfettered access to drugs does to a society. Of course, you don't need to go outside to see it, since you can do a search and find plenty of examples and studies. The truth can exist, even if someone doesn't want to do your homework for you. Late 19th century China comes to mind. Right now, one only needs to walk the streets of LA, NYC, Chicago, Charlotte, Orlando, Detroit, San Diego, Philly, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, and any other city. You will see this on the streets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e72zMER95ps
Is this really glamour? How is it helping, exactly? I don't see any purpose to unrestricted access to these substances, unless your goal is to shatter and/or destroy the lives of 20,000,000 Americans.
I'll add that I think people should have a choice, but rights cease being rights when they impose on the rights of others. Weed, tobacco, and alcohol are legal, but that doesn't mean there is no cost to society. People do stupid shit after smoking. Tobacco has health care implications. Alcohol destroys families. Free access to fent, heroin, crack, cocaine, lsd, meth, and even mdma is going to incur a very big cost. Those are non-starters. And while I think mdma can be used under medical care, abuse of that specific drug incurs a debt.
The annual NSDUH survey disagrees with you. You know, actual evidence. And a random Sky News video about a specific increase in fentanyl-associated deaths where xylazine was detected is hardly evidence of larger trends.
So you follow one poor example of evidence with another. There are many confounding factors for why large cities are more likely to have observable population of unhoused and drug abuse, such as availability of services and facilities that treat vulnerable populations and the habit of smaller cities to ship their vulnerable populations to these areas. Let's not forget stagnant wages and disproportionate increases to the cost of living and lack of housing.
Decriminalization also means we're not hiding away this vulnerable population by stuffing them in jails and treating the justice system as a half-assed mental health solution. Let's also not forget that the Greater Los Angeles area has a population equal to the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Utah combined.
> Free access to fent, heroin, crack, cocaine, lsd, meth, and even mdma
How do you jump from decriminalization to free drugs? What a silly attempt at a straw man.
So about your list of cities and the masses of homeless in them. Are you saying that drugs are legal in all those cities? It seems like the homeless issue is completely orthogonal to drug decriminalization.
> Do you live in california? Go outside and open your eyes for evidence.
Not any more, but I was born there (multi-generational too) and visit often: I can assure you homelessness has been an issue long before either medical MJ or recreational legislation reforn; the massive effort the US states go to bus their undesirables is well documented [0] and a much larger reason for your 'evidence.'
Skid row was arguably a direct byproduct of the Reagan era defunding of mental institutions, and I've come across anecdotal evidence that a large cohort was caused after releasing the broken and hapless former Japanese prisoners in internment camps during WW2: a Japanese colleague of mine found out her paternal grandmother spent time there for years (after she passed) while trying to find her biological family as an adult after having been adopted as a child. And guess what helped her get over this trauma and declining mental health issues?
Psilocybin and MDMA and a caring partner that tried to be there for her.
> I was born here and I've lived here all my life. I still live here.
Your point? I'm here visiting right now, too.
My point was that this State has always had a myriad of issues at any given time, but thinking MJ legalization and decriminalization led to all of this is absurd.
I'm from SoCal and I recommend you go watch footage from the late 80s in LA during the crack epidemic, I lived through that as a child; LA country was ground zero for gang violence and crack is and remains illegal.
The 90s were only slightly better, despite my nostalgia I'm well aware bank heists made the National news, as did the LA riots, and then the highly emblematic of SoCal culture high speed car chase that still gets people to watch the news to this day.
CA has never been a safe place, we have to be tough to live through cycles of drought/earthquake/crime-waves/fires for generations and if you were born here, you'd already know that: these transplants have been deluded by Hollywood into thinking otherwise and think homelessness is a recent phenomenon because Joe Rogan, Elon and his cohort of influencers fled to Texas. Only to realize Texas is a much bigger s**hole than they anticipated with way more homelessness than they were promised.
There was a recent article posted here that tech workers and companies are regretting leaving CA because how things have played out in Texas and it's 'good old boy' way of doing things, it's still the South after all: what did you expect?! You have to be a fool to think they were going to tolerate the SV 'woke' culture outside of Austin?
Sidenote: The compassion act made MJ legal since the 90s, and it was incredibly easy to get a medical/red card (I had one without even being a resident of CA anymore while living in CO); I actually preferred that over recreational for reasons I won't explain here, and I can assure you beer was harder to get in the early 2000s as a HS student than high-grade MJ was.
You announced your origins in the first sentence of your post. My point is that it doesn't validate anything because I have the exact opposite experience and
I lived in both NorCal and socal for over a decade in both places.
It's a bigger problem in NorCal. It's less visible in socal and it's only mostly just a recent phenomenon in socal.
In NorCal it's not just a thing on the news. You see broken syringes on the street, people defecating on side walks, people fucking on the streets, people getting high all while walking in the city. It is daily life.
In LA, it's so large that likely the events you lived through you experienced vicariously through the news. You are not walking through filth everyday.
> It's a bigger problem in NorCal. It's less visible in socal and it's only mostly just a recent phenomenon in socal.
I agree, the bay area has immense wealth disparity and it looks like an abject cesspool depending where you go; things have gotten worse since COVID but I lived in Sunnyvale for a while and it is visible, but I will also remind you that skidrow is actually on the map, hell it's even on the GPS on Tesla's its so big.
This isn't a completion of who has it worse, I moved in the end it was so bad, but I get it is bad and getting worse and it saddens me as my family is all over CA, but you said it yourself: it's using illegal drugs like heroin, fentanyol etc...
The US created an opioid epidemic using legal means using big Pharma and it was systematically done with no regard for who it affected; I worked in the Industry and the little diagnostic firm I worked at that primarily did diagnostics got bought out by a Swiss Pharma Mega Corp and I've seen what happens from within; so if you want to direct your rage and ire at anything do it to that as that is how the biggest amounts of suffering have occurred. Perdue isn't the only one who leveraged the FDA to get it's drug approved, I saw how ELi Lilly do it and got the physician challenging the safety of it's drug get thrown off the panel first hand when I was a senior in University.
Moreover, this legislation pertains to the use of psychedelic class of drugs which are not recreational and have long standing efficacy in helping people deal with trauma and overcome their addictions. It has been the pharmaceutical lobbyists in conjuration with law enforcement who refuse and outright deny these findings despite having created a more wide-spread problem: I will remind you that homelessness before COVID [0] was already causing outbreaks of diseases from the middle ages it had gotten so bad.
Your observations are not invalid, your reasoning and conclusions are based on a falsehood and are easily refuted; it's simply not the same thing, and cannabis while legal/decriminalized didn't cause this issue, it was already a much larger issue due to inequality, poverty and corrupt business practices.
Seriously, I wish someone had the temerity to do a 1980-2010s series like the Wire to raise awareness on this matter; it would open people's minds to the notion that it's not just solely confined to one thing, let alone decriminalization of MJ. Wasn't breaking bad supposed to be based in Riverside County [1] but they charged too much and so it's creators went to NM?
I'm split on this. Psychedelics can help reduce usage of hard drugs and help with treatment. They can also send folks over the edge and put even more pressure on the mental health system. I guess we'll get to find out...
This would only be possible if you are treated by professionals. An addict whose brain is soaked in nasty chemicals will never voluntarily seek treatment even if it was freely available, let alone come up with a plan by themselves to use psychedelics to sober up.
opiates are the most shitty drug family, up there with alcohol. always have been! see opium wars, opium dens, etc. synthetic opiates like fentanyl are downright evil.
This is especially true for psychedelics. Psychedelics are very useful, but really should not be sold by some anonymous person in a park or alley who isn't providing any guard rails or guidance.
The worry is people relying on someone else with a title to make decisions who only have a fraction of information but people give themselves permission to turn off critical thinking. Getting from a park or alley people means you need to take responsibility because no one is looking out for you. In a store setting or expert setting many will blindly accept instructions designed for the average because someone sounds official (even if official is just trying to sell more product)
This sounds logic on paper, but in reality is flawed: in an alley you almost never know what are you putting in your body, and you never can really make an informed and critical decision. Alley drugs addicts are 100% deprived of critical thinking, and they will not only blindly accept instructions from other drug addicts but trust that powder they are injecting is actually a non lethal dose of the expected substance. The only real decission you can make is "I'm not putting that in me".
At least when a drug is legalized you can start at the point of "this is a 50 miligram dose of 99.9% pure heroin, not laced with fentanyl or rat poison, and I've used this before, so this should be safe for me".
Yes, that's often the case. Many interests (alcohol, police, private prisons) gain revenue from all the 'drug crimes' that really shouldn't be treated as severely as they are. It's also a common excuse to arrest, search, and oppress minority groups while the affluent majority generally gets a pass.
One good idea I've heard is to reschedule pyschedelics to the same level that commonly used medications for things like ADHD, anti-depressants, etc. are, i.e. Schedule IV. The main effect really would be reducing the barriers to scientific study and clinical trials while retaining some basic barriers to reckless use by people who have no idea of issues such that the dose-response curve is more exponential than linear (e.g. the effect of 500 ug of LSD is not simply 5X the effect of 100 ug of LSD, etc.). A similar approach would be to only supply them in low-dose packages, which would also facilitate ease of microdosing approaches.
Using psychedelics should be contemplated as something like driving a car - letting someone who has never driven a car get on the road with no training whatsoever is just not that great of an idea.
That is how this sort of thing should be handled in a functional country -- unfortunately ours isn't, and even rescheduling cannabis to schedule III (as has been proposed) will inevitably be a massive political fight. Worse: the opponents of rescheduling often hypocritically use the lack of research to justify their opposition. These state-level laws, as awkward as they may occasionally be, open up an opportunity to build a fact-based case for rescheduling (or descheduling) drugs at the federal level in the longer term. I at least don't see any other realistic way of reaching that point.
Point of note that most of the ADHD drugs (stimulants, the ones that work) are Schedule II, which makes them a PITA to obtain, even with lawful prescriptions. Most opiates are in this category as well.
Schedule IV is basically the benzos(Xanax)/z-drugs(Ambien), which is ludicrous considering drugs in that category aren't supposed to have much addiction potential.
S3 drugs are mostly weak opiates in formulations that help prevent abuse and steroids.
For purposes of studies, S1 is the only real deal breaker, because by definition, there are no medical uses for these drugs. The rest of the schedules are roughly equivalent in terms of PITA for studies and research, only nuance with dispensing to patients varies significantly.
I have used Magic Mushrooms on occasion. They provided me with very valuable insights that led to make meaningful changes and choices in live. Insights that have stops my panic attacks, made me more appreciative and empathetic to others. I really believe I am at a better place in live because of those experiences. I am however very careful with taking them. Only when I feel very stable mentally and physically. Only when me and my environment is well prepared and not too often. I had a friend that took them after he split up with his girlfriend and went to the fair on them. Yes, ... don't do that.
I have a good bit of experience with some of these drugs. These types of drugs absolutely have therapeutic use cases and its good people who need them will have easier access. HOWEVER - these are powerful drugs and making them more easily available to The Common Idiot is grossly negligent.
Seriously, people on a technical forum arguing for prohibition with the wealth of evidence showing it's a well intended failure at best, a farcical show to placate and win votes from ignorant sanctimonious puritans at worst? Tragic.
At this point It's a way to funnel money that could go to addiction treatment to the DEA, money going to an unwinnable war to control adults who are going to do what they want.
5% of the global economy in the black market we could take from criminals and turn it towards the social good. Instead of violent cartels that will serve the need no matter what we could have taxed businesses with daily limits. "But ppl will do bad things". Tell me how that's worth the cost of the war on drugs? Shocking position. Please explain it to me how what cartels do is worth your desire to be sanctimonious??
The only thing we have to do to get huge financial and social benefits is give up your frankly childish notion that we should control uncontrollable substances and police adults in something that in most cases harms no one. Police adults who commit crimes on substances extra. Let adults make their own choices otherwise. The war on drugs and anyone still supporting it as a way of doing anything but throwing money in a fire pit are a joke.
Opium didn't do much good to China. Opioids aren't doing much goods to the US. An individual's freedoms can lead to macro phenomenons that negatively impact everyone's freedoms and outcomes.
Individualism shouldn't be the only lens we look through when considering these problems.
I think debilitating substances that are potentially addictive and don't have social acclimatation (unlike alcohol) are a very high risk. I don't think they should be banned outright if they have useful properties, but I don't think they should just be allowed in society without proper care.
Just looking at it from a "I do what I want to my adult body" completely ignores the condition some of these adults will find themselves in, and the risk they will impose on others as a result. And it also completely ignores how we are all interdependent on each other in a modern economy.
We all require a village of people to function and thrive and defend our rights. Something that potentially harms a large percentage of this village will also harm those in the village who don't partake. And then when your village is helpless, a belligerent neighbouring one comes knocking.
Maybe you think that's an exaggeration, but it's literally what brought down China in the 1800s. It turned from one of the oldest and most grandiose powers on earth into an incapacitated corpse pillaged by western powers.
So you know, being careful with these substances seems just a bit prudent.
Last time I checked, opioids were illegal in the US. Why are you talking like opiates are legal, so the current situation is evidence that legalization is bad? If anything, the current situation with opiates in the US shows ilegalization is not doing much good to the US.
Also, the situation in China (if you are talking about the Opium Wars) are not that straight forward "legal opium bad". In fact, opium was legally consumed for centuries all around the globe. China emperors worried about "opium addiction is bad" so they illegalized it multiple times in 1729, 1799, 1814 and 1831. Opium wars started in 1839, but opium smuggling into China due to the prohibition was already rampant since 1729. It will be like saying that all the problems that arised around the Alcohol Prohibition was actually caused by alcohol and absolutely not caused by the prohibition.
It looks that drug problems are always linked and worsened to some form of prohibition than to drug usage itself, but somehow it is the only logical and obvious solution to drug problems.
The fact that you think individualism is the only lens I'm looking at things with here shows you didn't read my comment in good faith. Of course bad stuff happens with free access to any drug if you're above 25 with daily limits. Addicts happen.
The question I have for you is, is anything addicts do to themselves society whomever, worse than what drug cartels do to it? Fuck. No. I'd rather have addicts than international drug cartels with hundreds of billions of $, any day of the week. Not to mention we have tons of addicts NOW. The war on drugs does not solve addicts.
You know what does? Treatment/rehab centers funded by taxes. If only there was some way we could fund them tho.... Crazy to me you lot just ignore the damage the war on drugs does "bc addicts bro". As if we don't have addicts now. So idiotic.
I believe it is an inalienable right that individuals use or abuse any drug according to their own inclinations. When I become Benevolent World Dictator, this will be explicitly stated in the Constitution.
That said, in aggregate, unconstrained drug abuse and addiction can and does have devastating effects on societies as we see today and historically.
I don't know how to resolve this conundrum. I would fear the effect of anyone being able to casually go to a bar and order magic mushroom tea or LSD ice cream or PCP punch as one might order a Mai Tai. While psychoactives aren't known to be addictive, they can lead to deranged, erratic or even destructive behavior.
I suspect the key is to create healthy social norms and conventions around each drug and make sure those are communicated to consumers. On the other hand, if one is not free to be wrong, then one is not actually free. So, I still dunno.
I think the US got it right on tobacco. You can still purchase tobacco if you really want to, but we have gotten consumption down to a much more manageable level than most other rich countries, and without any sort of particular egregious rights violations.
The key point, is that at no point when I was being educated about tobacco did I feel like I was being lied to and I had to check it out for myself, which is very different from how marijuana is treated in health education in the US. Reefer madness and whatnot.
There is a wide spectrum between completely illegal and absolute free access and while I would Position most drugs on the liberal side of the spectrum, there are good reasons to manage access in some ways, I.e. age limits, legal settings for consumption, etc. and of course I think a low cost/free and universal health system is a prerequisite to manage the fallout of drug consumption, no matter of legal or illegal.
>in aggregate, unconstrained drug abuse and addiction can and does have devastating effects
I ask again, a cost greater than the impotent war on drugs and the cartel violence? I say of course not. I'd rather have some addicts in rehab centers than drug cartels with 5% of the global economy, and frankly I question the judgement of anyone who can't do that math.
I think they are about even in social costs, tbh, but I would rather have the social devastation associated with freely available drugs than the social corruption associated with prohibition, if I must choose between the two.
>unconstrained drug abuse and addiction can and does have devastating effects on societies as we see today and historically
1. Who said unconstrained. I sure as hell didn't. I literally said taxed (licensed) facility that has daily limits.... So...shadow boxing.
2. No one said they didn't. Shadow boxing again. For the fifth time in this thread, I ask any of you engineers, please, just briefly try to remember your sociology elective.
Do you think drug cartels and the racist war on drugs (minorities get locked up for longer for same crimes) have a higher or lower cost to society than measured licensed legal use that funds treatment centers and clean injection sites would have?
People simply want to get high, be it to forget their lives, or have an intense trip to neverland and back. Heck, animals enjoy getting high from alcohol to the point of becoming alcoholics if unchecked.
I think its about time we accept this as part of our humanity and act like grown ups, not this childish banning which clearly does much more harm than good. There are endless states between ban and having it thrown at everybody for free.
You're being unnecessarily defensive. My comment was neither a criticism nor attempt to refute your point of view.
It seems like you and I mostly agree. I mean nothing patronizing when I ask: do you know what inalienable means? It's a great word. I believe the right to do drugs is inalienable: a government does not have the moral authority to tell you not to if that's what you want to do. A law that forbids it is illegitimate. Illegal, even.
> Who said unconstrained
Me. I did. Believe it or not, my perspective was once even far more... radically laissez-faire, so to speak: stick to the principles of each according to their conscience and let the chips fall where they may. Anything less is an unconscionable and illegitimate encroachment on personal freedom. Society would adjust.
Talk about "shadow-boxing". With respect, that's you. You are shadow boxing.
I seem to have replied twice to your comment and missed a different reply. The octal client for hacker news struggles with comments sometimes. Sorry about that.
To the rest of your comment, yeah I recognize we mostly agree thus I'm not even replying to you directly, I'm defending against all the other people in this thread who go "but dur addicts bad" and can't think past that when it comes to drug policy who may be reading by adding context to your comment from my pov. Sorry about that too.
It's not about being libertarian, it's more utilitarian for me. Prohibition is horrible for everyone but the ultra wealthy and dangerously criminal. I threw out every argument against prohibition kinda all together in my anger at the silliness from engineers on a forum I respect.
There's the math, it's cheaper to sell them taxed drugs and use that money to help addicts than unsuccessful policing, it's more moral than allowing cartels to operate, more humane, etc. There's no argument against it other than being moral police. Prohibition does not do anything other than filter money to waste on cartels and law enforcement.
I agree. I likely never will argue for prohibition, given that I have believed in the principle of an inalienable right to drugs ever since I could ponder these matters.
My perspective on public drug policy has become more nuanced over the years, in that I have come to recognize that those who fear legalization have actual, legitimate points that need to be addressed. For me, that was kind of a huge shift.
But, yes, clearly, charging taxes on drugs to monitor quality and mitigate the social effects of drug use is far more efficient use of our resources than the endless escalation of violence and corruption we have now.
It's tempting to argue in favor of personal freedom here, but two special characteristics of certain drugs make them different from pretty much anything else: 1) users often heavily affect people around them, and 2) these drugs change people's brain chemistry in such drastic ways that the people who exercise their freedom to start consuming end up losing their freedom to stop consuming.
Tobacco and Alcohol have similar issues, but we don't have to make the addictive substance problem even worse than it is today. Drugs like Heroin have supersized versions of Alcohol and Tobacco's problem traits.
In other words, I think I'll be there to participate in the revolution against this Benevolent Dictator! :)
I'm not arguing from a personal freedom perspective. That's idiots shadow boxing, ignoring the main point of my original comment to jump on a "drugs r bad" train.
The real thrust of my original comment was any harm legalized drugs would do is less than what the war on drugs/cartels do. And frankly you have to be an idiot to suggest some addicts AND the cartels are worse than just the addicts.
You like the word "idiot", I'll avoid using it in my reply.
In my opinion, it's actually hard to say that "just the addicts" is better than the "cartels plus the addicts". I think the opioid crisis gives us an idea of how "just the addicts" would look like and, I have to say, it doesn't look good. So many deaths that the life expectancy for males in the US actually dropped as a result.
But a true "just the addicts" scenario would have Oxycontin being sold by multiple vendors competing in potency and price and selling their wares at Wal Mart. How would the US look like if literally anyone could walk in a nearby store and buy Oxycontin practically at will?
Sorry for the use of idiot, you're right. It's frustrating otherwise smart people be so reactionary and puritanical instead of analytical. I seriously can not imagine how "addicts + cartels" could ever in anyone's mind be better than just the addicts. Couple things there.
>Oxycontin being sold by multiple vendors competing in potency and price and selling their wares at Wal Mart
Again, from my very first comment on this thread I've never suggested limitless legal use. Daily limits, licensed taxed sellers only, could even have a licensing system. For the harder stuff could make counseling a requirement or something.
>How would the US look like if literally anyone could walk in a nearby store and buy Oxycontin practically at will?
More addicts than now is the answer you're looking for, and I'd agree if all we did was legalize drugs. but seriously consider my side for a minute. I do not want to stop at legalizing.
Consider the benefit of nearly limitless funding for rehab and counseling and other sociologically sound ways to reduce addiction. 5% of global trade $ wise cartels are responsible for. All that money turned to rehab. And you think we'd end up with MORE addicts?
I am seriously struggling to see how that even sounds logical to you.
Not to mention as a socialist I'd argue the real root cause of addiction is an alienation from our labor and the fruits of our labor. Ie: fix poverty, fix most fixable addiction.
I think the distance in our way of thinking is too great for a HN thread.
I see your argument and admit the possibility that you are right. I just want to point out that you are not only struggling to see how it sounds logic to me, you are struggling to see how this sounds logical to a vast number of people, including policymakers. The fact that very few countries in the world adopt a liberal view on any and all drugs should tell you that even if there is truth to what you are proposing, implementation will likely be very, very slow and difficult.
>you are struggling to see how this sounds logical to a vast number of people, including policymakers
I don't struggle to understand them. They're just machiavellian. Policy makers are bought by the capitalists, sorry, the lobbyists who benefit from billions in funding to the DEA and border control and prisons - and so they are not looking for the solution that helps constituents, they're looking for what enriches them personally thru super PAC donations or LE budgets.
It's the educated voters' positions, looking at the wealth of evidence showing prohibition is a failure at best, and a moral show put on for the puritanical more realistically, that baffles me.
People like you falling for something there's pretty much infinite evidence refuting the value of. Has the war on drugs helped ANYTHING? Anyone??? Stopped anything? It's never been easier to get drugs.
On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence that shows treatment centers safe injection sites and further, reductions in poverty do more to reduce addiction than moral policing.
It's most analogous to abortion policy. Abortion isn't reduced by banning it, it's reduced by better sex ed and access to contraceptives.
So counter intuitively to the simple minded, it may seem as if "pro choice" advocates don't also want to reduce the number of abortions. When in fact, they just use reason to solve the issue rather than a fkin harry potter book written 2k years ago they take as absolute truth.
>implementation will likely be very, very slow and difficult
Agreed, but the quicker we dispel the anti scientific notion that cartels + addicts > addicts... The quicker we may see progress.
I did time for shake I didn't even know was in my car, if I wasn't wealthy and white I would probably still be in jail rather than law school. So this is personal to me. Sorry for getting so heated
Do you really feel that way? How about prohibition of possessing and manufacturing radioactive materials? Think of all the research consenting adults could be doing and all the medical uses but a bunch of anti-science puritans are keeping them from doing it.(sarcasm)
I am assuming there is hardly anyone on the planet who thinks the public is able to make its own informed decisions about radioactive materials. So it's odd how instead of arguing the merits and costs of criminalization/decriminalization there is this argument that anyone who wants to limit drug use is an ignorant, corrupt puritan and that restriction has been generally a failure. There is a nuclear black market too and the spread of nuclear weapons has still happened. Does anyone think we should shut down IAEA because of its failures?
Do I really think international 12 digit valued drug cartels are a worse outcome for society than allowing adults to buy the substances at a taxed store where the money goes to pay for addict treatment and rehabilitation??? You can't be serious. Don't you? If you don't I'll call you a blind man and useful idiot.
People here do not read my comment because I advocate for something that hurts their little sanctimonious puritanical brains. Would swear you lot are Mr mackey. Nothing more material than "drugs r bad mkay. Addicts bad mkay." Stick to STEM i guess. Sociology isn't for you.
>How about prohibition of possessing and manufacturing radioactive materials?
Yeah, radioactivity that harms everyone around the material is def the same as me getting high in my house after work and playing a video game. Definitely arguing in good faith innit. The drug discussion makes people like you so damn silly and childish it's crazy
> Yeah, radioactivity that harms everyone around the material
But that's not true. It can be handled safely and radioactivity can be used for medical treatments! Besides there is radioactivity in lots of things. I swear you people are so anti-science and propagandized about radiation, you're afraid of radiation lurking around every corner. It even occurs naturally from the sky! Are you going to ban the sky? Since banning nuclear armament has clearly failed people like you are really just enabling state actors who traffic nuclear materials.
I was being facetious again. My point all along is that everyone is ok with banning certain things, it's just a question of which things do we ban and why.
I haven't seen convincing research that making psychedelics is 100% beneficial. It seems like it's on the margin and could be either way. The reasons I am not convinced are that 1) research that said it's harmless couldn't isolate psychedelics because psychedelics users were highly likely to use other drugs that have known side effects so they used models that attempted to isolate it and the result is not convincing. 2) Clinical trials had a clinical setting which is not the same as allowing the public to use them without supervision. 3) There's some studies that show a marginally higher likelihood to have health consequences for psychedelics users. 4) Arguments pro freedom are odd because most people don't believe in total freedom.
If it were me I would just let the law sunset in five to 10 years with a clause if the experiment worked out then vote to make it permanent.
The research need not show "it's 100% beneficial". It only has to be more beneficial than prohibition, which is an insanely easier bar to clear... considering prohibition stops nothing and harms tons. So.... I'm not seeing what you're getting at with "no research it's 100% beneficial" line of thought...
I agree more with you than the GP, but reaching for the nuclear comparison is ineffective here. You might as well cite weaponised smallpox and the infinity gauntlet while you’re at it.
Unless “decriminalize” means something different in California, decriminalizing a drug exactly means that it’s a controlled substance, it’s still illegal to sell.
It just means you are not throwing people in jail for personal possession. Whatever you think about mushrooms, jail is certainly more harmful than the mushrooms themselves.
Looking at all the tranq zombies in CA, I strongly disagree with that last statement no matter the drug. Unfortunately, I'll have to concede that jail is likely not the right place either. I think we can all agree that those people need hope and something to live for long-term. Drugs have proven not to be that solution to everyone except those in their bondage. In that sense, I fail to see how decriminalization of possession is going to send anything but wrong signals. Kids don't do drugs, just keep them in your pockets. How's that sound if it was your kid?
The real root problem is that we refuse to pay to treat any of the actual root causes of any of this, whether that is on the street or in a jail cell.
The health system has a shortage of mental health and drug treatment spaces and practitioners, and what exists often isn't affordable to those who need it. At the same time, we don't pay for those things in prison either, and it's also expensive to have a bunch of disruptive, unhinged prisoners constantly needing to be contained after damaging stuff when they have an episode or whatever.
Bail and sentencing reform was often kicked off by conservatives initially, because a low-tax state cannot afford the very expensive cost of locking up every single drug user. California has been sued multiple times over the fact that its prison system is chronically overcrowded, and lost at the Supreme Court level: https://lao.ca.gov/reports/2011/crim/overcrowding_080511.asp.... But there is no appetite to pay more to open new prisons, which are nearly impossible to site even if there was funding (do you want to live next to a prison?)
My reading of the parent comment suggests that they're in favour of decriminalizing them, but not permitting the commercial sale of them. Acquisition would then be achieved by e.g. prescriptions / medical studies, growing for personal use, or from "friends".
The important thing is that no one is charged criminally for possession.
Ah, that's not as bad. Still, I'd prefer full legalization. Commercial sale as well. The less risk, the better. Risk from still being illegal, from bad sources, from bad product.
I find adderall to be nothing short of life-changing, should we sell it over the counter to anyone? Should buying it black market be legal?
How about antibiotics? Codeine?
Some drugs have very little risk when used improperly, and some can fuck you up for life. The average person isn't really equipped to make that kind of judgment for themselves, they need a medical expert in the chain who knows how much is safe and whether it's an appropriate treatment.
That's why we have OTC drugs and prescription drugs. Some drugs just are not safe to use without guidance.
Lots of things will kill you if you consume them or misuse them, yet you can buy them from many stores.
People should absolutely consult medical experts before using most medications. I will consistently say that that does not mean they should be restricted from purchasing arbitrary medications.
(Antibiotics are a potentially interesting case that may require some additional complexity, precisely because they're a commons, and taking them incorrectly or even taking them correctly can affect people other than yourself. That doesn't apply to anything that only affects yourself.)
The first step to protect adults from accidental poisonings with medicines is by making better safety caps, and storing them on a much higher shelf where adults cannot reach them
But you cannot only rely on storing medicines up high and using adult-resistant caps to protect your adults. Also, it is just not possible to watch adults every second. So, other strategies need to be put in place to prevent your adults from gaining access to medicines.
It's not exactly the "fairest" policy but maybe there's something to the approach used to qualify investors? Allow drugs to be sold to 'qualified' users (aka persons with a demonstrable net worth). Ostensibly this would try and keep drugs out of the hands of people who abuse them to the degree of losing functionality in society while letting 'responsible' people enjoy them.
Linking money to rights so directly grates with my idealistic sensibilities, but my realist sensibilities are against policies that would exacerbate the homeless situation.
Seriously? So someone who is poor can't get legal access to some potential life altering drug just because they're not affluent enough? And that'll somehow have an impact on homelessness?
Many people in the open-air drug encampments are there because they aren't getting real help. Your proposed plan would do nothing to help those that might just be assisted by the new perspective psychedelic therapy can give. It would only let the rich keep living the untouchable life they already live.
Yes, and that's a problem. Structuring society around capital acquisition is unhealthy for the social body, much as structuring a diet around sugar and complex carbohydrates is a fast route to diabetes. Dysfunctional as drug addicts are, obsession with money can be equally pathological.
The current model is an improvement over previous methods of value distribution which trended nearly exclusively toward warlordism or hereditary monarchism (but I repeat myself).
A model which on the margin (not totally) allows decisions about value allocation to be made by people who generate value seems to follow homeostatic principles which are evolutionarily fitting for a relatively peaceful time.
One may quibble that this equilibrium is largely limited toward English speaking nations and European peninsula, and that even there exist edge cases on the high and low ends. Thats focusing on the empty end of a glass that is generally getting fuller over time.
decisions about value allocation to be made by people who generate value
I don't believe this to be the case in most instances. Value agglomerates due to preferential attachment, and greater a capital accumulation the less effort is needed to increase it.
relatively peaceful
Compared to what, historical nadirs? Substituting economic conflict for kinetic warfare has had only limited success and had drastic atomizing effects upon society. I don't regard this as a great improvement over the historic methods, which were more pragmatic than you suggest and where excess could be tempered by replacement. The elevation of property rights over virtually all other considerations has been a net negative in my view.
a glass that is generally getting fuller over time
Sure, if you look at naive measures like GDP growth or the like. Capital proponents recoil fromt he idea of factoring in all externalities, viz environmental impact. There's a reason insurers are scrambling to get out of many markets. I used to believe in the cis cornucopian version of capitalism, but have come to think it's much closer to zero-sum than proponents care to admit, preferring to take refuge in idealistic accounting than frankly appraise reality.
>> decisions about value allocation to be made by people who generate value
> I don't believe this to be the case in most instances.
Seems like a potentially objective thing to determine. My impression is that the largest non-govt money flows are in the consumer economy which reflects the decisions of working people. Is that not the case? Are people not earning money for work and spending it? Does that not represent the largest portion of value created and passed along?
>> relatively peaceful
This phrase is recognition that warlordism was probably evolutionarily suited for those historic nadirs as opposed to today excluding certain regions.
Zero-Sum vs Ubiquitous Abundance
I totally agree about economic mis measures. My thought is that we are approaching an age of ubiquitous abundance without the necessary psycho-cultural supports in order to not treat it as a zero-sun moment. Despite material well being, there doesn’t seem to be much realization of how awesome life is. It’s a philosophical tragedy.
It is a bit insensitive to call people who had problems with drug abuse idiots.
Not only insensitive but also very simplistic and wrong point of view. A lot of drug abuse is basically people trying to self-medicate psychological issues, trying to have a escape from oppressive life conditions, or trying to fit in with a crowd due to loneliness and self esteem.
Considering how much of our work is destroying people’s jobs or making their lives a bit more miserable we should at least try to be a bit less judgmental.
Agreed. I would guess that mushrooms in particular might be a helpful option for those self-medicators willing to pursue it. It is not a cure-all, and it doesn't work for everyone that tries it, but it has shown to help people sort of zoom out, reset, and gain a new perspective on their own psychological "baggage".
This is pretty much the same excuse used to prevent full democracy from happening
Hey, voting is great, helpful and powerful, but letting The Common Idiot vote is a slippery slope
For the record, yes ideally we should have better education, especially around drugs and how to use them
At the same time, anyone can buy a knife or scissors or plenty of toxic chemicals, and do a ton of harm (way more than with any psychedelics), how do you propose we regulate those?
Growing up in a communist regime I'm all in for democracy and freedom. Having experienced drug addiction while having a graduate degree I also believe regulation of drugs and alcohol is necessary. You think you are in control until that one day when you take it too far. If you don't have a strong support system of relatives and friends and access to good health care, there's no coming back from that hole.
A degree doesn't mean you're somehow less susceptible to addiction. The risk of addiction shouldn't prevent anyone else from choosing what they put in their own body.
>A degree doesn't mean you're somehow less susceptible to addiction
I could see this go either way. There are people who are, somehow, simply unaware of risks and not very interested in learning more. I'd expect at least some effect.
I propose a hearty ban on bad-faith "do you have a source for that" questions directed at negative statements. If this community is to be science-based, it must adopt the position that the null hypothesis is valid until proven otherwise.
There is no good faith in conversation-stopping, impossible asks. It's not up to others to carry your weight in a conversation. They would rather disengage because it's a lot of energy (emotional and otherwise) to hand-hold someone through an entire process of reasoning. Usually tutors are paid top dollar for their time and effort in such situations.
Impossible asks? Asking you why you believe something, a conversation stopper and an impossible ask?
Refusing to explain, or cite, or accusing others of bad faith, those are conversation stoppers.
It is not that anything not proven beyond all doubt has to fall back to assuming a null. There is such a thing as probabilistic arguments, statistics, and bayesian-ish reasoning
Sometimes, people have reasons for making negative statements. It helps to show arguments, instead of immediately launching into bad faith accusations.
There's such a large gap between "why do you believe that" and "do you have a source for that" -- for exactly the reasons you cite about reasoning techniques -- that your points here are entirely irrelevant to the question at hand.
My friend you don't even understand the topic being discussed - these things are not addictive at all, its not your usual drug of communism like tobacco and alcohol which have ruined countless lives and almost nobody gets over them once addicted. Neither are these opiates like heroin or coca extracts like cocaine, which are highly addictive.
The more you take say LSD or mushrooms the less effect they have on you (and this effect is the only reason to take them), and quickly you reach the state when normal dosage basically doesn't work. Also the experience is mentally so taxing the last thing users want after coming down from the trip is to start another one. They are so profound that some processing of experiences is required.
It staggers me how even quite a few regular HN users are clueless about trivial basics of drugs. No wonder politicians can push literally any fearmongering bullshit lies to common population even these days, and they will swallow it all without even questioning it.
Yeah I've had a mixed history with psychedelics. Imitation LSD(probably DOx on blotter) left me with panic attacks and HPPD around 16 years old. Later on I had great experiences with LSD, psilocybin and mescaline over a couple decades. Recently, a strong mushroom trip left me with months of spasmodic torticollis(violet head jerks to the side), migraines where I would lose half my vision, and seriously diminished my cognitive abilities.
I don't think psychedelics should be illegal, but I don't think we should be encouraging folks to do them until we understand them more completely.
I think it was either PF Redspore or Golden Teachers. Home grown but dried and kept in an oxygen free environment until use. Probably took around 5g dried but that's over 6-8 hours as I never eat them all at once. When I was doing 5g/night, I started getting the day-after headaches. Did them at least 4 times without long-term side effects until I got them.
The article is not very clear about that. It does say that is decriminalizes posetion of limited quantities for adults, it requires that institutions research the drugs further, and does not decriminalize commercial sale.
Obviously there's some amount of risk with these drugs and you don't want them to be widespread and consumed daily (like alcohol, which is also nasty). But you need such laws for medical institutions (of all sizes) to be able to touch the drugs. No one is being negligent here.
A huge amount of this IMO has to do with driving. Autonomous vehicles are a game changer in many respects, but one of them is making it safer for the "Common Idiot" to use mind altering substances more safely.
California has a rampant, unmanaged homeless problem largely caused by mental illness, addiction and economics and they are choosing to legalize more drugs which will increase access, and yes, while psychedelics are known to help some, they are also known to cause psychosis and exacerbate mental health issues in others especially when combined with other drugs. Seems like a questionable choice.
What will definitely help the homelessness problem is turning people into felons, locking them up for a number of the prime years of their lives, and making it much harder to have a viable career with a criminal record.
I understand your point, however California has the most relaxed drug prosecution laws in the United States. Short of distribution, people aren't often prosecuted for minor drug possession.
Edit:
In a controlled environment, I'd tend to agree with you. California's issues are so grave though it seems they should address the current issues prior to potentially adding to the existing problem.
I have spent ample time in California and even if I hadn't, the data is available. My response isn't whataboutism, causation and/or correlation perhaps. If you don't see the connection between the decriminalization and accessibility of drugs and mental health, addiction and homelessness, I don't know what to say.
Good to see. Here in Nevada we had a chance to beat California to the punch, but the legislation got neutered to the point that it didn't even decriminalize anything - just established a committee to determine whether or not it should be decriminalized.
I don't know how much my experience with weed matters here. I've never tried psychedelics.
But with weed, I tried it in 2021 because it was "legal" so it must not be so bad. At first, I just used it socially. Eventually, I started using weed every single day, from morning to evening. This was made easy by WFH and boredom due to covid lockdowns. After lockdowns, I still used it - even more.
I justified it because it was "legal" and I felt like it was better than alcohol, which poisons the body and increases aggression in men.
Weed made me unambitious, scrape by at work, ignore family and friend messages, stop working on tech side projects, fat, lazy, dumb.
Weed slowly consumed my life. It wasn't sudden. Unlike alcohol addiction, weed felt harmless at first. Alcohol addiction has clear downsides immediately. Weed addiction is slow. Next thing you know, your whole life could be based on it.
I finally saw the negative effects of weed and made a decision to quit forever. Never again.
I'm not a mentally weak person. I have a fairly clean background. I never smoked cigarettes. I never drank alcohol by myself. Never tried other drugs.
Weed consumed 2 years of my life. I basically did almost nothing except get fat and scraped by work. If I continued, I'm sure I would have lost my career and I was prepared to be ok with it just so I can continue to get high everyday.
In the past, I was pro-legalization of weed because of all the things I read about jail times and the criminal injustice. Today, I'm not so sure anymore. In this case, I do not wish for California to legalize anymore drugs until we are absolutely 100% sure of its effects on society and that it's better. Let other states or countries try it first and then analyze the data.
It’s pretty well known that people can develop psychological dependence on cannabis.
Psychedelics have anti-addiction effects, and it might’ve helped you quit cannabis sooner, even give you insight into why it happened in the first place (potentially numbing of some underlying emotional pain)
I can't answer that question. It's well above my expertise. I'm also biased because I had a weed addiction and thankfully was able to see it and quit. I never had alcohol problems.
But let me ask you this, should cocaine be legalized?
The War on Drugs has been a failure and an absolute disaster on every level. It causes untold suffering that could be alleviated by making currently illegal drugs legal and regulation them, just like ordinary pharmaceuticals are regulated.
I'm pretty sure the way we treat the earth should send the message to kids that they need to get their kicks in before the whole shithouse goes up in flames. If that means they want to do some drugs, I don't see much of a problem with that.
But bleach isn't advertised nor meant to be consumed by the human body. Weed is meant to be consumed and advertised as such. I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison. In fact, I don't think there is a comparison to weed.
Legalizing drugs without a clear understanding of what you are trying to achieve and how to get there has been a net loss in many countries.
I absolutely trust California to do it wrong, since they seem dedicated to keeping as many homeless on the streets and in the maximum poverty possible, while trying to insulate the rich.
[I assume they want to switch people from Fentanyl to Mushroom, since they border Mexico and stopping the influx of drugs is not gonna happen. From my meager experience it won't work.]
Is there any data on how many people in California are being arrested over magic mushroom or LSD possession? What impact does this bill have in that sense?
I can't find this data for CA but here's my guesstimate:
The web tells me there are approximately 750,000 drug possession-only arrests in the US each year.
The web also tells me that psychedelic arrests make up an estimated 2-3% of that.
Of those arrested, about 33% seem to do at least some time as a result, but usually months not years.
Those are national figures, based mostly on FBI claims, so hard to say about CA but if CA is at all typical, here's how that would look.
Maybe 600-1,000 psychedelic possession defendants doing time each year.
Let's assume about $8K for each of those doing time (assuming short, like 2 months) and $2K for the rest that end up in court but not in jail and you get over a million dollars a year prosecuting people who do no harm and whose use of the substance otherwise has no cost on taxpayers (except maybe the occasional uninusured ER visit).
Perhaps not a huge savings, but also, IMO, a hugely wasteful spend that should come to an end that will have the more important benefit of not overturning the lives of thousands of people for no good goddamn reason other than purely puritanical bullshit we should have abandoned a long time ago.
"Potential future savings (General Fund) to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), of an unknown but potentially significant amount, in reduced incarceration costs. Under existing law, personal possession of mescaline, DMT, psilocybin, or psilocin is punishable by incarceration in county jail or, if the defendant has certain prior
convictions, by incarceration in prison. Under this bill, possession of small amounts of these substances will no longer be a criminal offense. If there are fewer prison sentences issued for drug possession as a result of this bill, CDCR's incarceration costs will decline."
You don't have to lower the taxes, you just have to make the property taxes equal regardless of when you bought the property. While extremely unpopular, this would solve so many problems for California.
Many municipalities have that issue. It's an issue where I live also. Here the county does the reassessments and does so at their own schedule. It's been 12 years since the last one.
But my point is that low property taxes create inequity because they are typically based upon "value to owner" and don't include "cost to society". The largest cost is unaccounted for - the cost to protect property rights. Your property is worth nothing to you if a thug could come and take it away.
Psychedelics have anti-additive effects. Common ones like LSD, mushrooms, Ayahuasca have helped many people quit cigarettes, alcohol, and the stronger ones like Iboga help people get off of meth and opiates. Based on what you’ve said, you would actually support this.
We already have very good therapies and drugs to successfully treat addiction. The problem is you need to force an addict to seek treatment and once in make sure in completes it, which can takes months and years. This is a monumental task for someone with the resources and caring, supportive family/friends. For someone sick, broke and living alone on the streets is just not possible and psychedelics is not going to change that.
What I meant is that it could potentially help people who are at high risk of getting into addictions, and depending on that addiction, one that could lead to homelessness. And as far as I know, I don't know any therapies/medications that work over a period of 6-48 hours to stop addictions. I have heard of some meth/opiate addicts who, by some luck or connection, had opportunities to try Iboga/Ibogaine, and some completely overcame it, and some relapsed.
I didn't even have any history of doing therapy, but one dose of LSD on my own was enough to completely change my perspective, stop substances, and get me on the path of living healthy. Without it, I probably would've gone down a very dark path few years later; I might not even be alive today.
I’m not sure there’s anything to backup this short time frame. It worked for you and that’s great, but basing your support for something like legalizing all hallucinogens on anecdotal evidence is not ideal.
Personally for me, it helped me quit alcohol, cannabis, and even alleviated my diagnosed ADHD permanently so I quit taking my prescribed stimulant medications. I used it in a therapeutic environment, not with friends or at a party.
After numerous Ayahuasca ceremonies, turns out my traumas/upbringing led to the addictions in the first place.
If these two are the only study and follow up you have no definitive conclusion should be taken (per your second link)
>Despite suggestive early findings on the therapeutic use of hallucinogens in the treatment of substance use disorders, rigorous follow up has not been conducted
> Although the open-label design does not allow for definitive conclusions regarding the efficacy of psilocybin
There’s a huge reproducibility problem in studies like this, and what you’re pushing here has not had multiple rounds of conclusive studies to boot. Basing sweeping policies off of one off “studies” or presenting them as objective fact is a dangerous course of action.
My cynical take is that this will not make it past the Senate, due to Newsom leveraging himself into the discussion behind the scenes. His national political ambitions likely prevent him from taking a public stand on this issue, as he would were it to come to him to be signed.
Ah. It was paywalled and I foolishly assumed it was copy I read earlier about it passing the Assembly with it yet to be sent back to the Senate. That's what I get for assuming.
Unpopular opinion incoming: the move to legalize drugs is a society-wide experiment that will end very badly for everyone affected by it.
From the article:
> Criminal justice reform advocates said decriminalizing psychedelics is a step toward ending a war on drugs
This assumes ending the war on drugs is a good idea. In fact, it is a bad idea on an individual level as well as a society level.
On an individual level, it is likely that all of these drugs are harmful. We know all pharmaceutical drugs have negative side effects, and they are only meant to be prescribed by a doctor who weighs the costs and benefits. Why would recreational drugs be any different? Alcohol, the most common recreational drug, has terrible health effects on individuals. Are we supposed to believe marijuana or LSD or DMT will be somehow harmless?
On a society level, legalizing recreational drug use will contribute to the social decay. Recreational drugs are a way to withdraw from society. Even if most people do not become addicted, many will, and the addicts will wreak havoc on society.
Look at alcohol: alcoholism is a bad thing. Anyone who has seen it in their family or friends knows this. Alcohol is associated with drunk driving and violence. And alcohol is a substance with a long, long history of regulation and social conventions. It is the "best case" out come for a recreational drug, with a huge amount of mitigating forces.
Are we really to think that throwing in 10 new drugs in the span of a few decades is going to end well for society?
My opinion is throwing people in prison and confiscating their stuff is wrong unless they’ve violated someone’s person or property. Drugs can be legal as long as crimes committed under the influence of drugs are properly punished.
Chemically-derived ones like LSD and MDMA are not in-scope in Wiener's bill, even though (like mushrooms) they aren't the kinds of drugs that cause social problems.