"Our overall goal is to follow the lead of Oregon"
October 4, 2021 10:04 PM   Subscribe

Seattle Votes to Decriminalize Psilocybin and Similar Substances [ungated] - "Seattle's city council voted unanimously to relax its rules against naturally occurring drugs, joining a handful of other cities that have decriminalized psilocybin and similar substances since Denver kicked off a wave of such changes three years ago."

Oregon Legalizes a Breakthrough Treatment: Magic Mushrooms - "Oregon will license and regulate psilocybin-assisted therapy by 2023. Some health care professionals aren't willing to wait."
posted by kliuless (17 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
I don’t know that I like where this leads. What’s next? MARIJUANA?
posted by glaucon at 4:40 AM on October 5, 2021 [3 favorites]


"living, fresh, dried or processed plant or fungal material, including teas or powders"

Isn’t sassafras oil one of the precursors used in producing MDMA? Asking for a friend.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:02 AM on October 5, 2021 [1 favorite]


naturally occurring drugs

I get what they're trying to do, but for chrissake, people: do you think cocaine is manufactured in a lab? Or opium? Stop trying to draw distinctions that don't exist, and just decriminalize all of it. Then we can actually get to work tackling the issues around addiction without the specter of a prison sentence hanging over addicts' heads.
posted by Mayor West at 5:34 AM on October 5, 2021 [30 favorites]


I get what they're trying to do, but for chrissake, people: do you think cocaine is manufactured in a lab?

Cocaine is manufactured. The coca leaves themselves, of course, are naturally occurring (not in Seattle, though), but they require a good bit of chemical processing to end up with the powder we know as cocaine.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:18 AM on October 5, 2021 [15 favorites]


Cocaine is manufactured. The coca leaves themselves, of course, are naturally occurring (not in Seattle, though), but they require a good bit of chemical processing to end up with the powder we know as cocaine.
The process for turning coca leaves into raw cocaine is pretty toxic.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 7:00 AM on October 5, 2021 [2 favorites]


In Denver it was a pretty low key change.

After the fear campaign of marijuana ended up a lie, people understood they had been lied to about a bunch of other drugs too.

After the end of the "War on Drugs" (TM), we are firmly in drug controlled territory.
posted by nickggully at 7:18 AM on October 5, 2021 [3 favorites]


eh most shit that ends up on our plate ends up going through some kind of chemical treatment that is toxic to humans whether it's pesticides, preservation, processing, or some other necessary reality that's involved with feeding hundreds of millions of people across thousands of miles on a consistent basis

the distinction between 'natural' and 'unnatural' has always felt like artificial one because ultimately what matters isn't what's involved in the process itself but whether or not the end-product is toxic - and there are a lot of foods that are 'naturally' toxic which both you and I and everyone else knows but we still associate 'natural' with safety. it's like the debate about Splenda vs Stevia - Splenda has mountains of evidence behind it showing non-toxicity to humans but because it's ~artificial~, Stevia, which is purportedly natural due to its pre-processed state, gets sold by the ton even though it has much less evidence behind it and even some warnings related to how little researched it is

but it makes sense that in Seattle and Portland there's this added on tack of it coming from 'natural' sources. the PNW has always had an obsession with things that signify 'purity' - environmental purity, sexual purity, food purity, political purity, racial purity, etc. if you make it about 'pure' sources of hallucinogens, there's much more public support behind it than 'impure/artificial/etc' sources because that's just what the culture demands

which is fine - I'm all for destigmatizing drugs and doing actual, good research on them without fear of incarceration. but like Mayor West, I just think it's so fucking irrational and ignorant that this is the way you have to do it
posted by paimapi at 9:01 AM on October 5, 2021 [15 favorites]


I wonder how many of the supporters would be horrified to realize they’re aiming along the same line as William F. Buckley?

It’s one of the things I find myself in agreement with and I feel conflicted because I lost my best friend to drugs and alcohol addiction. I suppose all the laws in the world won’t stop someone bound and determined to destroy their lives (nor, in my friend’s case would education because he knew what was happening and couldn’t stop) but I wish there was some way to make it more difficult.

Like I said, conflicted.

He started started trying trying to sober up about a week before he died.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 9:10 AM on October 5, 2021


t’s one of the things I find myself in agreement with and I feel conflicted because I lost my best friend to drugs and alcohol addiction. I suppose all the laws in the world won’t stop someone bound and determined to destroy their lives (nor, in my friend’s case would education because he knew what was happening and couldn’t stop) but I wish there was some way to make it more difficult.

Keeping drugs illegal hasn't stopped addiction. If anything it's made addiction worse because what should be a public health crisis and handled like a public health crisis is forced into the criminal justice system and all that's doing is creating even more misery. This is before you even get to things like safety of supply and organized criminal elements wreaking havoc in Latin and South America.

Addiction is a scourge but prohibition is definitely the greater of two evils here.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:21 AM on October 5, 2021 [21 favorites]


Opium processing can be extremely low-tech. But keep an eye out for a spike in really nasty infections when people try to make it injectable.

If there is a surge in home-grown hard drugs, I'm pretty sure opium will be where it's at.
posted by ryanrs at 9:26 AM on October 5, 2021 [2 favorites]


In the age of abundant fentanyl, would there be any room for home-grown opium?
posted by acb at 12:15 PM on October 5, 2021


After the end of the "War on Drugs" (TM), we are firmly in drug controlled territory.

Goddamn, do we have to lose all of the wars?
posted by kirkaracha at 12:28 PM on October 5, 2021 [1 favorite]


In the age of abundant fentanyl, would there be any room for home-grown opium?

*looks at the number of people who grow their own weed*

I wonder how much better things would be if we did allow people to grow their own Coca though. Coca leaves give a buzz, not a "fuck man with this idea we're going to be billionaires" level of stimulation that cocaine gives out. The natives of areas bearing Coca plants would chew the leaves effectively rate limiting how fast and how much of the alkaloid can get into your system at once since you can only chew so fast and you can only fit so many leaves into your mouth to the point where you have a mouth full of leaves.

Colonization basically took it from a tool to an addictive as fuck substance that's easy to abuse. When we turn coca into cocaine we're doing something analogous to turning starch into high grade glucose syrup. Which just goes to show, colonization ruins everything it touches.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 3:40 PM on October 5, 2021 [7 favorites]


I wonder how many of the supporters would be horrified to realize they’re aiming along the same line as William F. Buckley?

Well, credit where it's due: ol' Buck was pretty much right on the money with that one. He basically nails all the major arguments for drug legalization, including some based on social justice that it's hard to imagine a Trumpublican giving any consideration to at all:
And added to the above is the point of civil justice. [...] I have not spoken of the cost to our society of the astonishing legal weapons available now to policemen and prosecutors; of the penalty of forfeiture of one’s home and property [...] I leave it at this, that it is outrageous to live in a society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana. I would hope that the good offices of your vital profession would mobilize at least to protest such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal equivalent of a My Lai massacre. And perhaps proceed to recommend the legalization of the sale of most drugs, except to minors.
And the National Review editorial board is no less on point:
[I]t is our judgment that the war on drugs has failed, that it is diverting intelligent energy away from how to deal with the problem of addiction, that it is wasting our resources, and that it is encouraging civil, judicial, and penal procedures associated with police states.
That was all in the February 12, 1996, issue.

It's taken us a quarter of a century as a nation, just to come around to where William F. Buckley was.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:32 PM on October 5, 2021 [4 favorites]


Re:Buckley - as a friend of mine used to say, "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while..."
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:36 PM on October 5, 2021


> Isn’t sassafras oil one of the precursors used in producing MDMA?

Sure, but that's moot here. Safrole isn't a controlled substance but a DEA List I chemical. It's currently legal to buy, sell, and manufacture in the US, but with documentation requirements to prevent diversion into illicit drug manufacture.

You could extract your own safrole at home from wood chips you buy off a dodgy eBay seller (please don't, it's bad for the environment), it remains illegal to manufacture MDMA. MDMA isn't decriminalized by Seattle's resolution because it doesn't meet the definition as being derived from any "living, fresh, dried, or processed plant or fungal material." MDMA has to be synthesized into existence from other precursor compounds (safrole or otherwise), you can't extract MDMA from a plant or fungus like you can with mescaline or psilocybin.

> I get what they're trying to do, but for chrissake, people: do you think cocaine is manufactured in a lab? Or opium?

Fwiw, the resolution doesn't use the term "naturally occurring drugs," that appears to have been the reporter's choice, the resolution instead specifies three classes of chemicals. It decriminalizes "psychoactive indolamines, tryptamines, or phenethylamines" that are "derived from plant or fungal material." This does not include cocaine (a tropane) or opium (an opioid). Drugs like MDMA or 2C-B are psychoactive trypamines, methamphetamine is a psychoactive phenethylamine, but they are not derived from plant or fungal sources so they remain illegal under Seattle's new rules.

So yeah, the war on drugs continues because legislators feel like they have to draw the line somewhere ("natural" vs "man made", ugh), but I still think this is still a positive step overall.

> Cocaine is manufactured.

I'll disagree and say that cocaine is not manufactured but merely extracted. The cocaine compound exists in the coca leaf, powder cocaine is made by extracting and purifying it. Just like brewed tea is an extraction of caffeine (plus other flavor compounds) from plant material and not the manufacture or synthesis of caffeine. It's not too hard to turn your tea bags into the powder we know as caffeine using some extra steps, but those extra steps are just more extracting and purifying. Same as making the powder we know as cocaine from coca leaves, it's just a few extra extraction and purification steps separating what you want from what you don't. It's processing a plant into a powder, not a chemical reaction to create something that wasn't there all along.

(And yes, Multicellular Exothermic, clandestine makeshift labs are bad for the environment and people, but it's harmful and dangerous because it's illegal, not vice versa. The cocaleros are using dangerous chemicals and solvents because the war on drugs means coca leaves can't be processed like any other value-added agricultural product. The chemical process they use, an acid/base extraction, is covered in the first semester of organic chemistry lab and is used widely in industry to make the processed foods we all eat. If cocaine was legal, I imagine there would be hipster-friendly small batch, single origin cocaine for sale in Portland, extracted on vintage hand-blown glassware with organic solvents by artisanal yayochemists following the local health department's guidelines. It can be done cleanly and safely, but only outside of a prohibition regime.)

Anyway, here's why the manufacture/extraction distinction matters: the same chemical process is often used to extract and purify some of these newly decriminalized entheogens. For example, both mescaline and DMT are extracted from plant sources using acid/base extractions (both links to possibly nsfw sites: mescaline, DMT). The Seattle resolution is clear that steeping a plant in hot water is okay, the only extra steps are to adjust the pH of that water up or down to optimize the extraction of the compounds you want and minimize the extraction of the compounds you don't, and to clean your final product in another volatile solvent that will evaporate away in the end.

If you wanted to take mescaline, would you rather consume less than a gram of extracted alkaloids or eat pounds of raw San Pedro cactus? With one option, the opportunities for personal growth will be limited by countless hours of extreme cramping and vomiting.
posted by peeedro at 5:23 PM on October 6, 2021 [3 favorites]


The worldview-changing drugs poised to go mainstream - "The growing legitimacy of psychedelics as therapies promises to transform how we view the extraordinary, writes Ed Prideaux."
In the last 10 years, psychedelic drugs like LSD, magic mushrooms, DMT, a host of "plant medicines" – including ayahuasca, iboga, salvia, peyote – and related compounds like MDMA and ketamine have begun to lose much of their 1960s-driven stigma. Promising clinical trials suggest that psychedelics may prove game-changing treatments for depression, PTSD and addiction. The response from the psychiatric community, far from dismissive or even sceptical, has been largely open-armed. The drugs may well mark the field's first paradigm shift since SSRIs in the 1980s.

In 2017, for example, the US Food and Drug Administration designated MDMA a "breakthrough therapy", which meant it would be fast-tracked through to the second stage of Phase-3 trials. Doblin, whose organisation was instrumental in achieving the designation, hopes it will achieve FDA approval by 2023.

Psychedelics remain Schedule-1 drugs federally in the US and Class-A in the UK, but rules are relaxing. Along with Austria and Spain in the EU, psilocybin mushrooms have been decriminalised in Washington DC and a host of other US cities, and legalised for therapy in Oregon, where LSD has also been decriminalised. A California bill to decriminalise LSD and psilocybin passed several crucial committee stages and will be decided next year. A vote to federally sponsor psychedelic research recently made its way to Congress.

In anticipation of this shift, psychedelic drug developers and clinical providers are attracting significant investment. Business reports describe "psychedelic euphoria" and a "Shroom Boom". This phenomenon is known as the "psychedelic renaissance" – and it promises to change far more about our societies than simply the medical treatments that doctors prescribe...
posted by kliuless at 11:42 PM on October 6, 2021


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