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Comment by corry | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of how the shroom dispensaries popped up in Vancouver because City Council has barred the police force from enforcing psilocybin prohibition (ostensibly so that police can focus on opioids instead, although any positive outcomes from that approach seems dubious).

So you have 'mainstream' online shrooms shops in Canada. It's great, on the one hand. On the other hand, it's easy for everyone to assume that magic mushrooms are almost legal (like cannabis was) even though it's very different. Medicinal cannabis was around for a long time; currently Health Canada only allows ~80 people in the country to use psilocybin for health.

But why didn't they include psilocybin or other psychedelics in this decriminalization? It is because they are defacto decriminalized already due to this policing decision?

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> But why didn't they include psilocybin or other psychedelics in this decriminalization? It is because they are defacto decriminalized already due to this policing decision?

Because a) they contribute to very little of the problems this move is focussed on, b) there are a lot of psychedelics, and any additional drugs included in this policy probably added to the risk of it not being approved, and possibly c) not wanting to run the risk of having some kind of psychedelic incident that the media run with as a scare story, because "Doctor's daughter jumps out of a window on acid" will trump any number of "Petty crime, burglary and muggings are down 40% from last year" stories.

I tried truffles in Amsterdam, I was told one reason they sell those is you need to take a lot more to get a bad trip, similar to why they only sold poundcakes as edibles.

(I was trying to stick to flower so I didn't look hard for magic brownies, but honestly I think poundcake tastes better -- now that I don't drink I often want to grab something like a poundcake or pocky that has calories and carbs but not as much as a Hershey bar, when I literally just want something small to settle my stomach and have zero desire for psychoactivity)

Doing psilocybint was a lifechanging experience, in a positive way -- it cured me of a huge chunk of my depression, at the expense I saw every interaction that followed, including two coworkers collaborating to try to get me to step in front of a train.

One stood, and told me it was safe to cross, as the other looked around the corner to make sure a tram was coming. I she reads these: I gave you my salary information and I told you this isn't high school, and then you tried to fake an accidental death.

In parallel with that, a different woman, from a different country, also attending the conferene, told me that some people made it through the fall of the GDR and the Nazis unpunished.

I deeply appreciate interactions like the second, but I will never forgive or forget that when I tried to do what people told me to since childhood, someone tried to kill me, a pattern that needs to end.

(I've only been to Vancouver once, it was a really nice city when I visited but like any similar sized one in the states, you gotta be careful -- it's not Ottawa!!)

Are you okay?

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