Psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin, the psychoactive chemical in “magic mushrooms,” are inching closer to mainstream medical and research usage — but election results out of Denver suggest Americans aren’t quite ready to adopt legal steps that could eventually pave the way for that type of study.
A step on a May 7 Denver ballot would have made the Colorado city the first in the country to effectively decriminalize personal possession and ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms, which can lead to hallucinations and religious or emotional experiences. Some city lawmakers opposed the measure, and Denver residents on Tuesday narrowly voted down it. About 51 percent of respondents opposed the measure, according to local news reports.
A similar attempt in California stalled before reaching the 2018 ballot, and organizers in Oregon want to get a magic mushroom measure in 2020 there on the ballot. However, the results in Denver imply that Republicans even in the most liberal areas of the country still have some hesitations about psychedelic drugs, even as legalization of recreational and medicinal marijuana becomes increasingly common.
Denver voters’ decision tracks with some research. A 2016 poll from Vox and Morning Consult discovered that just 22% of surveyed registered voters supported decriminalizing magic mushrooms, for example.
But at exactly the exact same time, in a 2017 poll from market-research company YouGov, 53 percent of respondents said they support medical research into psychedelics such as mushrooms and ketamine, and 63% said they would be open to incorporating them into clinical treatment, if the medical community had deemed them safe.
Researchers have been interested in medicinal uses of psilocybin for decades, but the movement has gained significant traction in the last few years. Promising preliminary research indicates the hallucinogen may be used to treat mental health conditions such as melancholy and anxiety, perhaps because it can trigger and change parts of the brain involved in regulating mood. Psilocybin mushrooms have shown promise for helping with smoking cessation.
The results are compelling enough, and the rates of abuse low enough, that in 2018, researchers from Johns Hopkins wrote a paper arguing that psilocybin ought to be reclassified from a schedule I drug to a schedule IV drug, as long as it clears clinical trials in the coming years. The Drug Enforcement Administration believes schedule I drugs, such as heroin, to have high potential for abuse and no accepted medical purpose, while specifying schedule IV drugs, like sleeping pills, as people with a low risk of abuse or dependence.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved some trials involving psilocybin, and in 2018, according to preliminary evidence, it granted a “Breakthrough Therapy” designation to Compass Pathways’ lab-made psilocybin for therapy for treatment-resistant depression.
Rescheduling the medication would make it easier for researchers to study and develop since they would require permissions and licenses to examine it in the lab. Marijuana’s current status as a schedule I drug has contributed to the dearth of research about its health consequences, experts say, and researchers say the exact same is true of psychedelics.
If Denver’s ballot measure had passed, of course, it would have had no effect on drug scheduling. (Nor would it have outright legalized recreational use of magic mushrooms in Denver — it would only have made psilocybin use and ownership the lowest priority for law enforcement officials.)
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