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California moves to decriminalize use of magic mushrooms and other natural psychedelics (www.latimes.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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California lawmakers on Thursday narrowly approved a bill supported by veterans and criminal justice reform advocates to decriminalize the possession and personal use of a limited list of natural psychedelics, including “magic mushrooms.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom will now decide the fate of Senate Bill 58, which would remove criminal penalties for the possession and use of psilocybin and psilocin, the active ingredients in psychedelic mushrooms, mescaline and dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, known as ayahuasca. The bill also would require the California Health and Human Services Agency to study the therapeutic use of psychedelics and submit a report with its findings and recommendations to the Legislature.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not all drugs are bad. There are some that are obviously terrible and ruin lives. There are also some that help with a wide variety of physical and mental health issues though.

Even if you're just thinking all drugs are bad, dumping people in jail for drug use/possession doesn't fix anything. Time and money would be better spent on rehabilitation in that scenario.

Decriminalizing possession helps keep people out of jail, opens the door for proper studies on effects, and can help people with chronic conditions. I have heard that microdosing shrooms is apparently helpful with treating depression. It would be nice to see more information on that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Re: Microdosing

Unless something recent came out that I missed the few studies on micro dosing suggest it's no better than placebo. Which isn't to say it's not effective, we do need more studies here.

Macrodoses of about 20-30mg (which is between 1g and 3g of mushrooms depending on potency), in clinical settings, have shown very strong evidence in the treatment of treatment resistant depression and end of life anxiety, and good evidence in treatment of anxiety disorders as well as alcohol and tobacco addiction.

Personally, I like 10-20mg once or twice a week for habit change*, and larger doses for getting out in the woods by myself and just being. I guess you could call it ego dissolution but I've done it enough times that when I'm in the right headspace it doesn't feel like I'm losing anything but becoming part of everything. Listening to the birds and insects, it's easy for me to completely forget myself on tryptamines like psilocybin and DMT.

*Psilocybin helped me quit smoking.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's interesting to read, thanks for sharing. I'm not particularly knowledgeable about the subject, I had just heard that about microdosing before.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Huberman Labs podcast has done a lot of episodes on psilocybin and psychedelic research. The current understanding of the main mechanism of action is really cool.

Basically, psilocybin helps different parts of the brain communicate better. Of course, this can be undesirable if repressed trauma surfaces and their's no one there capable of helping the person process the trauma.

But it's also amazing because it can help us tune back into how children process information, openly and innocently, because that part of the mind is still there. Hiding under our egos (which we develop mostly as teenagers). Assuming we feel safe enough of course, to let our survival mechanisms (ego) go for a bit.