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Where I Stand on Magic Mushrooms
The author clarifies his position on psilocybin policy
My position on the recent initiatives to change the legal status of psilocybin in various jurisdictions is somewhat nuanced and perhaps for that reason has been misrepresented in several press accounts. To be clear: I support decriminalization. “No one should ever be arrested or go to jail for the possession or cultivation of any kind of mushroom,” as I said in my New York Times op-ed piece. As I told interviewers in the days after the Denver initiative passed, I would have voted in favor of it had I been eligible.
However, I think it would be premature to push for the legalization, commercial cultivation, and sales of psilocybin mushrooms for non-medical use. My reasons:
1. Unlike decriminalization, legalization would encourage businesses to enter the market; they would not merely offer access but would actively promote the use of magic mushrooms — an important difference. The risks of unsupervised psilocybin use are considerable, and of a different order than the risks of cannabis. People with a personal or family history of schizophrenia, for example, need to be actively discouraged from using psilocybin; reckless or casual use can have more serious consequences than the casual use of cannabis, particularly in high doses, when the presence of a sitter or guide is imperative. Commercialization at the local or state level would also mean the establishment of large grow operations and these could easily prompt a federal crackdown.
2. Cannabis is not just a different drug but a different issue as well. The prohibition of cannabis has been the foundation of the drug war, and led to the incarceration of thousands of people, many of them people of color. A large number of the people jailed under “three strikes” laws were jailed for unconscionably long terms, and in many cases, one of those strikes was a cannabis crime. That’s why there has been a compelling social justice reason for working to legalize cannabis. While it is true that prohibition takes a psychological toll on mushroom users, I don’t see the same emergency in the case of psilocybin, where arrests have been relatively few and generally have not been targeted at people of color.
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