[US CITY OF] ARCATA DECRIMINALIZES PSYCHEDELICS
HEALING

The City Council of Arcata made the decision unanimously to decriminalize the personal possession and growing of psychedelics…

Danielle Daniel, Lead Organizer of Decriminalize Nature Humboldt… “The Arcata City Council’s decision to decriminalize entheogens within city limits was both courageous and honorable.. with decriminalization more Arcata residents will have access to the support they need to heal with entheogens.” That the City Council of the City of Arcata hereby declares that the investigation and arrest of persons for planting, cultivating, purchasing, transporting, distributing, engaging in practices with, or possessing Entheogenic Plants and Fungi or plant compounds which are on the Federal Schedule 1 list shall not be a public safety priority for the City of Arcata; and that only limited City funds and resources be used to investigate, detain, arrest or pursue prosecution for an alleged violation of State and Federal law regarding the use of Entheogenic plants by a person twenty-one (21) years of age and older when other code violations are present such as driving while under the influence, use in the presence of minors, or jeopardizing public safety.

There's another analogy that I use, too... that is, imagine a castle, a huge castle, very large. Many rooms, many turrets, many levels of it. There's only one way to get into this castle, and that's the front door. The front door is solid steel. Impregnable. You can knock on that door all you want. You can do everything you can to tear it down. You can't get it down. Every now and then you might somehow or other move it a little bit to get a glimpse and what's behind it, but that's all. There's no way, and you've tried every way possible to get into that castle. Which is yourself. What happens on a trip is by some mysterious magic means this door is dissolved, and you have the opportunity to go in and explore that castle. Any place you want. You go in and you look around, and you find many, many wonderful places, strange places maybe, scary places and all that. You can go to the top and you can go to the bottom and you get a sense of what the totality of yourself is really like. As you come down, what happens is that the door somehow or other gets back up there. But that's all right, because you have a memory of what possibilities are there and what you've experienced. The biggest experience that it brings to you is that it connects you with feelings that you've never been connected with before. They are now open to you. Not on the level or the intensity that you had in the experience but certainly much more than they ever were before. -The Secret Chief by Myron J. Stolaroff

YOU CAN NOW CONSUME, CULTIVATE NON-COMMERCIAL PSYCHEDELICS WITHOUT ARREST IN SEATTLE
MODERN CULTURE

The city had already taken decriminalization steps when it comes to personal drug possession, having a policy to not arrest or prosecute in those situations.

The new resolution aims to protect those who cultivate and share psychedelics for “religious, spiritual, healing or personal growth practices.”

I was laying down on the ground, tripped out into the dirt - as you could be when you let your vision go to the very smallest things in front of you: dust motes, the gravel and stuff - letting myself flow into the mountain. I felt myself become one with everything that was alive on the mountain. I became so one with the mountain that I knew that I was them and they were me, and I wanted my friends to feel what I could feel, I wanted them to understand this, too. I went over to where they were, and they were tripping along and talking quite a bit. "Listen. Be quiet, and listen now." At that moment, all the animals and all the birds, all the bugs and rabbits and critters on the whole mountaintop, all made their noise at the same time. Not loud, but a giant, huge sound, coming up from acres and acres and acres at once. Every creature there made its sound. And we all heard those creatures make that sound to us and tell us that we were all really one. We were one with them and we were one with the hill. We were all really One. I heard years later that the Indians say that God's Name is the cry of all the animals at once. We felt like something as strong as that was a new beginning of some kind. We came down the hill, and the creek-bed, which had been almost dry when we went up, was running bank-full clear water as we came back down. We stopped, and each one of us took a little of the mountain's water out of the creek and poured it on us. It was like a baptism from the earth. We went back down the mountain, and we were so changed by that that it made a tremendous change in our living. We went home and we saw that some of the stuff we had around was not nice. We had an amusing picture on the wall, a picture of some kind of home for some kind of ladies who needed a home. They were tall and skinny, short and fat, weird looking in one shape or another, and it was a funny picture. But when we came down off the mountain and looked at it, it was not a funny picture. It wasn't funny at all. It was gross to have it on the wall to laugh at, and we had to take it down... in another room... [well] when you're stoned, every little thing resonates so hard that anything that's actually a little gross is pretty strong. That was a really seminal trip, for all of us. It put us into a oneness and a compassion so we couldn't take any joy in people being hurt, or representation of... tortured fashions. It wasn't good to look at. -Amazing Dope Tales & Haight Street Flashbacks by Stephen Gaskin

…ON [CITY OF] EASTHAMPTON DECRIM…

PSYCHOLOGY

The upcoming vote on the part of Easthampton, Mass. is expected to decriminalize possession of all drugs, while enabling adult residents to cultivate [entheogens].

Owen Zaret, Easthampton council member and sponsor of the decriminalization resolution. “It’s time that we recognize their different therapeutic uses as well as the lack of harm of recreational use.” he adds.

We have seen that inebriation is part of our natural, biological heritage and has certainly played a crucial role in our cultural, if not biological evolution; that inebriants, indeed, can "provide a more robust and long-lasting" pleasure than feeding or mating. Absent any harm to others and self-destruction... what conceivable problem might we have with others' pleasurable peccadillos? Dare we disparage the pharmacophile, despairing of more direct pathways to purer pleasures our prudishness, prudence, pusillanimity or prejudice prohibit us?... Prohibition can only distort and pervert the continued expression of this basic animal drive; as Huxley said, its only possible justification might be success, but its patent lack of success is obvious to anyone paying attention, notwithstanding its perennial appeal to those who derive their pleasures from endeavoring to control and manipulate others, and who perchance are devotees of legal inebriants. -Pharmacophilia or The Natural Paradises by Jonathan Ott

RESEARCH IN OREGON SHOWS 86% OF ADULTS INTERESTED IN PSILOCYBIN SERVICES ARE INTERESTED IN MICRODOSING

SPIRITUALITY

Oregonians who are not interested in Psilocybin Services because they don’t want to pay for them list their largest concern is supporting Big Pharma…

On average, people would like to pay around 100 USD for a psilocybin therapy session… however, there is a significant difference between those in lower-income brackets vs. higher income brackets (93 USD vs. 223 USD, respectively). [Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit and Chief Assistant Prosecutor Victoria Burton-Harris told the crowd at Entheofest 2021 about their policy of not criminally charging anyone for entheogens. That was a “tremendously easy” decision, said Savit... he lamented those who get caught using or possessing them in other communities still can face cascading consequences, including criminal records and loss of jobs and housing. [State Sen. Jeff Irwin said, “It does no good to criminalize these plants....”. Burton-Harris said, "How many of you know we aren't going to get there by criminalizing nature?" to loud applause].

The direction this movement takes depends on the response of the larger community through its agencies of social control... if the agencies of social control respond to the movement with a certain amount of flexibility then we can expect another kind of evolution. When channels are open for peaceful agitation for change and a patient and thorough hearing is given to grievances, then the larger community's response is essentially an accommodative one. This would require some initiative on the part of the agencies of social control: legislators, universities and colleges, the place to get a dialog going. If we have learned anything from intergroup relations, it is that the contact between community officials and the new bohemians should not be patronizing... in short any contact initiated must be on an equal status basis with a sympathetic regard for the values the new bohemians hold. There is a certain urgency in doing this because of increasing disaffection of young persons, the widening cleavage between them and adults. Any initiative exercised by community leaders requires a willingness to listen, a desire to understand... whatever the outcome we shall all be better, it seems to me, for taking seriously the call to slow down, to live our lives instead of enduring them, to open our eyes and really see what is happening around us and in us, to respond to beauty, to humanize our large-scale social structures and yes, if you will, finally love one another. -Journal of Psychedelic Drugs : Volume II - Issue I

…ENDING SILENCE AROUND PSYCHEDELIC…

POLITICS

Unlike community and underground settings with their implicit ethos of personal responsibility, reputational accountability, and “buyer beware,” drugs sold as medical treatments and administered by experts strip people of protective caution.

What’s new in the “psychedelic renaissance” is that, at a time when other medications have lost their momentum, pharma and the mental health industry are moving in on the underground market in search of money and power. And to do it they are rebranding psychedelic drugs as, well, not really drugs at all, but psychiatric treatments. In order to position therapists and doctors at the center of this new gold rush, they have to gloss over the fact that psychedelics – as weird, unpredictable, mind-shaking and life-altering as they can be – are still the same underground marketed drugs… One of the great ironies of today’s interest in psychedelics is that drugs celebrated for illuminating the spiritual and aesthetic mysteries of the human mind have instead fueled a burgeoning brain research industry based on the crudest of mechanistic determinism. In their zeal to credit psychedelics with tantalizing promises of new potentials, today’s wide-eyed psychedelic advocates have gone all-in on neuroscience determinism, as if the explanatory gap of the hard problem of consciousness – how mind arises from body – were already solved. Psychologist William James’ warnings about “medical materialism” are today more apt than ever…

It has been put in evidence that the effects depend not only on psilocybin and psilocin concentration, but also on the specific mushroom species... many consumers notice differences among P. semilanceata, Psilocybe baeocystis and Psilocybe stuntzii... another factor could be the so-called "biochemical race". This means that different varieties of the same mushroom species could biosynthesize different psilocybian alkaloids in different concentrations. -Dragibus : Plant Medicine and Mysticism : Volume 3 - Issue 2 

…CORPORATE [FDA REGULATORY ROUTE OVER THE OREGON ROUTE]…

ANTHROPOLOGY

In addition to suggesting that council formally decriminalize sharing of psychedelic mushrooms…

…the personal journey of hedge fund investor Sa’ad Shah and his involvement… favoring the FDA regulatory route over the Oregon route… “Shah welcomes big pharma and big institutions to enter the fray in the interest of spreading the chemical gospel far and wide. He sees the financial and therapeutic potential for psychedelics not in the cannabis model, which would make psychedelics broadly available for retail purchase, but in the pharmaceutical mode — psychedelics as prescribed drugs, with patent rights, administered in medical settings.” That “with patent rights” bit right there is behind the so-called psychedelic renaissance we’ve been hearing so much about: “favoring the FDA regulatory route over the Oregon route,” as a psychiatrist cited in the article put it. It’s being driven not by the need to free human consciousness from the prohibition-induced coma it’s been under since the sixties so that we can collectively navigate through the many existential hurdles our species is fast approaching with wisdom and insight, but by the agenda to make rich people even richer by forcefully controlling psychedelic substances via the pharmaceutical industry… the gamble appears to be premised on building a high fence to keep everyone playing in the shallow end of the pool, where they are useful.

An approximate guideline many have found useful is the following: devote equal amounts of time to preparation beforehand and integration afterwards, as the duration of the ceremony itself. Thus, for a typical four hour entheogen experience, such groups would spend about four hours in preparation and four hours in integration. In the past 30 years or so I have been a participant-observer in a large number of circle rituals, in both Europe and North and South America, involving hundreds of individuals, many of them repeatedly, in ongoing ceremonial circles. The entheogenic substances involved in these circles have included psilocybe mushrooms, ayahuasca, San Pedro cactus preparation, iboga, LSD, mescaline, MDMA, 2CB and others... no doubt there is a core belief and value system in many explorers, myself included, that would question and resist received assumptions and instruction - especially in the context of spiritual practice. -Allies for Awakening : Guidelines for Productive and Safe Experiences with Entheogens by Ralph Metzner, PhD

…[THE EVOLVING] VOCABULARY OF THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE
BIOGRAPHY

Compared to other psychotropic drugs available in the 1950s, LSD induced “something phenomenal, … of unimaginable intensity,” according to its creator Albert Hofmann. Speaking in an interview in 2004, he continued, “There is a vast difference between the emotional experience of this sensation and its purely abstract, philosophical description. It would be like trying to describe colours to a blind person: words alone will never make it possible to see what they are.”

…[she] nevertheless shows a semantic divide between cold and technical scientific language and the often-inexpressible fullness of a psychedelic experience. It also highlights the difficulty many non-academic intellectuals faced when describing the effects of these substances: their attempts were too far removed from the scientific culture of psychiatrists, who were the only recognized experts on these substances… Anaïs Nin therefore judges Huxley’s psychedelic writings harshly: “Huxley was a scientist. These visions came from chemicals. They were controlled. There was no danger of a Rimbaud walking out of his poetic world.” Betty Eisner dedicated one of her articles to Nin with the following: “To Anaïs Nin, who knows more about this than any of the scientists do.”

What intrigues me the most about psychiatric disorders is that every one seems like an exaggeration of some aspect of myself, and by seeing these aspects magnified I can understand myself better. Looking through a copy of the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which identifies and describes all the known psychiatric disorders, makes me feel like I'm reading a book about myself at my worst. It seems like I have symptoms of just about every single one of the disorders... however, in actuality these different forms of mental illness are exaggerations of psychological dynamics that are inherent in all human nervous systems. -The New Science of Psychedelics : At the Nexus of Culture, Consciousness & Spirituality by David Brown 

PSYCHEDELIC PATENTS: NATURE, IP LAW, & EXCLUSION

SCIENCE

…the private sector is hoping to capitalize on the ongoing medicalization of psychedelics through manufacturing, drug development, and clinical administration of these substances and their proprietary, patentable derivatives. It isn’t news that there are certain for-profit companies that have been openly challenged on their questionable practices in this process of monetization.

When examined closely… U.S. patent laws highlight a grave issue of ‘structural exclusion’ that may have contributed to the ongoing disparity… the potential is there for issues of structural exclusion to take hold. The psychedelic industry has already started to adopt practices of the mainstream pharma companies, whether effective or not. [For example, so far, the Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative lists a number of founding Western donors including ATAI Life Sciences...] Advocates and activists, in the meantime, are trying to redefine those fine lines between ethical and unethical practices, and stop these problems from becoming a part of the… industry through public health research and related discussions...
 
[Q:] What about all the anti-psychedelic publicity? Wouldn't the word psychedelic scare away investors? [A:] Thomas Roberts, PhD: I think publicity would come in three phases. First would come the immediate surprised, skeptical, and humorous reactions. Suppose Community Psychedelic Centers International had LSDD as its NASDAQ trading symbol; headline writers would have a field day: The Sixties Reborn - Hey, Man, Want to Buy Some LSDD?, or, Heads Up On Wall Street Market High on LSDD Hippie Investment Vehicle. A second headline/publicity phase - reflecting interest in and investigation of the claims of CPC's [Community Psychedelic Centers] prospectus - would probably tone down the first with views like: LSD for Drunks? CPC Says it Dries Them Out, or, Investment Bankers Taking LSD - Seriously. Perhaps this is more hope than actuality, but I think a third phase is a realistic possibility: Strong Premarket Indications Cause CPC to Raise Offering Price, Number of Shares, or, Todays IPOS - LSDD takes Investors Higher. -The Psychedelic Future of the Mind : How Entheogens are Enhancing Cognition, Boosting Intelligence, and Raising Values by Thomas B. Roberts

SANTA CRUZ REMOVES PEYOTE FROM PSYCHEDELICS DECRIMINALIZATION LAW AND [RE-CRIMINALIZES] OTHER MESCALINE-CONTAINING CACTI

RELIGION

“It is unfortunate that the Santa Cruz City Council has taken a position to recriminalize… all cacti which contain mescaline,” [said Larry Norris, PhD]

The change, he argued, will “increase the likelihood of… increasing the potential of arrests for possessing common household plants such as San Pedro and Peruvian torch cacti.”

The modern use of the San Pedro cactus, along the coastal regions of Peru and in the Andes of Peru and Bolivia, have been greatly affected by Christian influence - influences even in the name applied to the plant, originating possibly in the Christian belief that St. Peter holds the keys to heaven. But the overall context of the moon-oriented ritual surrounding its use indicates that it is truly an amalgam of pagan and Christian elements. -Plants of the Gods : Their Sacred, Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers by Richard Evan Shultes and Albert Hofman