Psychedelics are about to become a casualty of Oregon’s opioid crisis
It would be one thing if arguments against the decriminalization of psychedelics were being made. But that’s not the case. Instead, the lumping together of psychedelics and opioids seems to have gone largely unnoticed, setting up personal use of psychedelics to become an unintended casualty of Oregon’s opioid crisis. By treating all drugs as an undifferentiated category…
There are no op-eds being written about tripping hippies filling public spaces in grand displays of love and cosmic beatitude. The streets are not littered with acid blotter paper or mushroom caps. Psychonauts aren’t seeking out encounters with DMT entities in public parks. No argument for recriminalizing psychedelics has been made, and yet, they’re being swept into a recriminalization bill by the debate around opioids… while regulated and supervised models for using psychedelics are showing growing promise for treating mental illness, decriminalized use allows for a much wider spectrum of user motivations — many of which have occurred for millennia — no less deserving of legal protection, from recreational and spiritual to the simple pleasure of spicing up a museum visit with a small handful of mushrooms… instead of specifically targeting the opioids and methamphetamine that have been behind most overdose deaths, HB 4002 also recriminalizes personal possession of psychedelic drugs like psilocybin mushrooms, MDMA, and LSD.
Original Article (Vox):
Psychedelics are about to become a casualty of Oregon’s opioid crisis
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