[VIDEO] A Resolution Supporting Adult Access and Education for Plant Medicine
During the campaign, I was fortunate enough to be connected with a wonderful group of people called the Bay Staters for Natural Medicine — a collective of people who are trying to push for the decriminalization of entheogenic medicines in the Bay State. This would allow individuals to grow it for recreational use, but not sell it for financial gain. I could never try the stuff personally because my job requires that I be drug tested a few times a year, and I like my health insurance. But they’re very upbeat, good at talking to people, and fun to be around — and as a result, they’re politically savvy. Last week, I introduced a resolution to Medford City Council, which passed 6-1, that called on law enforcement to make plant medicines a low priority and generally supported Senator Jehlen’s bill to decriminalize them at the state level.
I went to high school in North Carolina, and a few of my classmates that I graduated with are now dead from drug overdoses. Medford recently got an opioid settlement of $830,000 over 18 years as part of a payout from Purdue Pharma. Institutes pushing addictive drugs have caused public health crises, as detailed in Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain and historically through periods like the Opium Wars in Hong Kong. Portugal’s initiative to legalize all drugs turned out to be a failure.
This is all a way of saying that I’m familiar with the public health issues that highly addictive drugs can cause, and how they affect families, communities, and policies. This resolution does not concern those drugs.
Entheogenic plants — psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, ibogaine, and mescaline-containing cacti — and psychedelics generally have caused moral scares, but they lack the history of widespread public health crises of narcotics. In recent years, a growing body of scientific research has found them uniquely beneficial for treating addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder, in ways that other drugs can’t seem to be able to achieve. History is riddled with legislative mistakes that occur because many different substances, no matter how much their effects differ, are all treated the same under the law. This partially has to do with public education, and we're on an upward slope. Last month, less than 100 years after a Hearst paper reported that “Marihuana [sic] is a short cut to the insane asylum,” Medford opened its first dispensary on Mystic Avenue.
Why is this so timely? A few months ago, I was walking with my sister and her girlfriend in Somerville when a canvasser approached us. He asked me for my signature to legalize medicine that would help veterans. I signed it. I only learned later that that petition was the very thing I was trying to fight against — the canvassers were sent out by an organization called New Approach PAC that intends to create an unelected commission to heavily regulate plant medicines and make it into a for-profit industry. A similar initiative succeeded in Oregon, where the cost of a single psilocybin session can go for $3500. It costs nowhere near that to produce, and, as stated in the American Journal of Psychiatric Law’s article, “The Perilous Policy of Oregon’s Psilocybin Services”: “For many reasons, it may have been better for Oregon to legalize recreational psilocybin outright, as the legal repercussions from its model will likely be extensive.” We don’t want the same thing to happen in Massachusetts. So, it’s critical to offer all the support to the state bill that we can.
