California Gov. Gavin Newsom, heir apparent to the neoliberal throne after the Kamala entity took a swan dive in the polls, recently took the opportunity to deny Californians a potentially therapeutic medicine.
Via Associated Press:
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill aimed at decriminalizing the possession and personal use of several hallucinogens, including psychedelic mushrooms.
The legislation vetoed Saturday would have allowed those 21 and older to possess psilocybin, the hallucinogenic component in what’s known as psychedelic mushrooms. It also would have covered dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and mescaline.
The bill would not have legalized the sale of the substances and would have barred any possession of the substances on school grounds. Instead, it would have ensured people are neither arrested nor prosecuted for possessing limited amounts of plant-based hallucinogens.
Psilocybin and the other so-called “classic psychedelics” are not “drugs” in the same way that crack cocaine or methamphetamine, with little to no medicinal value, are drugs. It is a plant-based, traditional medicine, the potential therapeutic value of which we are just beginning to understand.
Via “Molecules”:
Psychedelic-assisted therapies may provide new and significant opportunities to current issues in the conventional treatment of psychiatric disorders. Psilocybin-assisted treatment may be feasible, efficacious, toxicologically safe, physiologically well-tolerated, and may have enormous potential in psychiatric medicine, as evidenced by decades of multiple clinical studies and thousands of years of anecdotal reports…
The future of psilocybin-based neuropharmaceuticals may also involve the general research and development of psilocybin drugs, the development of individualized neuropharmaceuticals to meet the specific needs of a given patient, combination therapy of psilocybin or psilocin with other drugs (such as cannabis/cannabidiol), conventional psychotherapy, and of non-psychoactive analogues of psilocybin.
The dearth of research into psilocybin is due in large part to the government-enforced moratorium on research following the counterculture’s adoption of the substance in the 1960s and the consequent stain on its image that the mushroom still carries.
Many drugs currently legal and regulated by the FDA are psychoactive. The distinction between illicit drugs and “medicine” appears to be a spurious judgment of unelected government bureaucrats.
Regardless, even if psilocybin were a dangerous non-medicine, the hubris of the state to dictate to the peasants what substance they are allowed to ingest should render anyone who professes to believe in the inalienable right to self-determination as inscribed in the Constitution indignant.
Furthermore, the government’s track record on drug regulation, at any rate, is totally discrediting. I’ll take my advice elsewhere than from the people who brought the “safe and effective” mRNA shots and effectively outlawed ivermectin, a drug on the WHO List of Essential Medicines that has literally saved millions of lives.
Related: Lawsuit Against Pharmacies That Refused to Fill Ivermectin Prescriptions Tossed Out
One reason among many that politicians like Newsom would rather not have the peasants permitted to take psilocybin is that, as anyone who has taken them can attest, the mushroom has a way of stripping away all pretense and prevarication. (Aldous Huxley called it opening the “doors of perception.”) Newsom’s greasy hair and American Psycho-ish demeanor are less attractive and decidedly more repulsive to anyone who can see past them.