Welcome to a murky new front in the war to bring psychedelics out of the shadows and into both legal recreational use and professional drug-assisted therapy. In recent years researchers have shown that psychedelics like mushrooms and LSD appear to treat a range of disorders, including depression and PTSD. The paradigm is so promising, in fact, that the FDA has granted MDMA breakthrough status in phase 3 trials, thus fast-tracking the approval process. Psilocybin itself is undergoing two separate clinical trials.
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Meanwhile, the psilocybin decriminalization movement is snowballing at an incredible clip. [June 4] the Oakland, California, city council voted unanimously to decriminalize a range of psychedelic plants, including mushrooms and cacti.
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The concern, as Michael Pollan—author of How to Change Your Mind, a recent book on psychedelic science—expressed in a piece in The New York Times last month, is this: The accelerating movement to decriminalize psilocybin risks a political backlash, which could derail that promising research. “It would be a shame if the public is pushed to make premature decisions about psychedelics before the researchers have completed their work,” he writes.
Read full, original post: The heady, thorny journey to decriminalize magic mushrooms
