3 Republicans just saved California’s magic mushroom bill | Hacker News Reader

3 Republicans just saved California’s magic mushroom bill

sfgate.com

29 pointsc42036 comments

Editorialized headline. The number 3 should be left in.

Regardless of whether you think the bill is good or not, we really have to get over this editorialized headline’s way of talking about votes.

“Republicans” writ large jeopardized the bill. Three of them broke from their party to pass it.

40 Democrats and 3 Republicans voted to treat adults like adults. That's the headline.

Yes, the state known for treating adults like adults until they assault or rob people.

that's actually almost every state and country in the world

Most states stop treating adults like adults when they commit crimes?

yes, you lose the rights to be treated as an adult, because you've demonstrated you can't be one, and consequently must be babysat

e.g., going to jail, your room and board, your exercise, your hygiene, and general behavior will be decided for you, in a way determined best for society

Most states and countries punish criminals with fines, jail or death depending on the crime

I'm glad you don't like California. You're comment has nothing to do with the article or my comment. Please refrain from comments like this on HN.

Thank you, I didn't even realize that I failed to copy the 3. It was unintentional and it's fixed.

HN removes it

Why?

"Top 10 reasons why this title is spammy" and titles like it

HN will drop a number in a title by default. I have to edit the titles all the time for this. I'm not sure why HN has that logic but never asked dang.

It's presumably because of this item in the submission guidelines:

> If the title contains a gratuitous number or number + adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The rules work 99% of the time but the automation of the rules some times make it so a little manual work is needed

For what it's worth, I appreciate the rules. The experience is much better for me! But I don't typically submit articles, so I'm never impacted by the manual effort.

Manual curation is what makes or breaks this site, I've had several interactions with dan and he's an excellent person.

They even will try and surface good content that didn't make it to the home page with a second chance pool ymmv

In this case, I think the rule is still good. "3 Republicans" is a baity title imo. It would have been better reworded, possibly just to "California's magic mushroom bill", or not submitted if it's only about the 3 Republicans, the politics angle doesn't accomplish much.

“Gratuitous” is a critical word in that guideline (“gratuitous” is not, itself, gratuitous); if removing the number substantiallly changes the connotation (or, a fortiori, denotation, but that's not an issue here) then the number isn't gratuitous.

Yes, in which case you're supposed to go back and manually edit the title. The automation doesn't always work but it nudges things in the right direction.

Someone explain to me how legalizing more drugs is the answer to helping the already massive drug problem in California. My last trip to SF just recently was an eye opening experience.

Hardcore mushroom addicts

None of the drugs being legalized are the ones causing the massive drug problems. No one is legalizing opioids or meth, for example. I don't think California is doing much in this direction, but legalizing less harmful drugs like weed and hallucinogens and help focus effort on addressing the more harmful ones.

Yet. After Oregon and Canada I could absolutely see California legalizing everything. There is a strong push to the extreme left in California and it seems inevitable.

You act like that’s a bad thing…

Yes because the “War on Drugs” has been so effective.

Also the War on Drugs has also been used to statistically target minorities and give police an excuse to abuse their power.

If legalizing drugs takes power away from the Justice system to criminalize behavior that hurts no one but the participant, I think that’s a win.

Sure: this bill wasn’t passed as “the answer to helping the already massive drug problem in California.”

Well, if someone goes to prison for a relatively harmless drug, they're more likely to turn to hard drugs.

For hard drugs it can probably help centers do things like safe injection sites. Legalization also means you can regulate. That can help in a lot of ways: making drugs safer, mandating that done portion of proceeds gives towards prevention, etc. Addicts will be less afraid of seeking medical treatment if they know they won't be in legal trouble. (They wouldn't anyway, but I've heard a lot of people are paranoid about this.)

Anyway, I don't have any facts or figures. But it seems reasonable to me that legalization could, in some cases, help.

There isn't a massive drug problem in California...

If you can believe it, there is more to California then downtown San Francisco.

The latest drug epidemic was caused by the pharma industry hooking people on oxy, and then the government clamping down on legal supply. Addicted people are still addicted and will get their fix. We just forced people into expensive black markets filled with cut product.

And actually, when you have people going to the black market for relatively benign things like weed, mushrooms, coke, ecstasy, etc, you expose them to these things getting cut with opioids, and developing an addiction they may never have intended. Why? Because it's profitable for drug dealers to have addicted customers.

The more interesting question to me is why you think prohibition still suddenly start working.

> The latest drug epidemic was caused by the pharma industry hooking people on oxy, and then the government clamping down on legal supply

This isn’t directed at you just a general statement. I find it strange that the narrative now is that the drug epidemic in “rural America” is being blamed on the government “loose borders”, “illegal immigrants”, etc.

But when it was happening in the “inner city” it was all about “poor morals”, “the nation getting away from God”, “out of wedlock pregnancies” and “absentee fathers”.

Cuts the profit of the dealers, frees resources needed elsewhere.

It doesn't sound like that's the aim of the bill, nor is it likely that ceasing to prosecute mushroom users will help the opioid addicts in any way. Those are unrelated issues. Although arguably a psilocybin mushroom trip might help a few folks who're on the wrong path but haven't completely given up yet. Psychedelic trips are often extremely introspective experiences and can help people rethink their habits, including addiction:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-08085-4

Drugs like mushrooms and marijuana can lead to dependency but they don't have the debilitating life-destroying effects that the harder stuff does.

The hard stuff causes the societal problems you saw. Marijuana and mushrooms, can't speak for LSD yet, create personal problems but not societal ones. Despite that, they are still widely prosecuted harshly. Legalizing marijuana and shrooms is a step to separate those drugs which are a personal issues, and those which create societal issues.

Some substances are pretty harmful, and some substances are pretty safe. It's kind of arbitrary which substances the USA has legalized and which ones have been outlawed. Alcohol and tobacco/nicotine can have dangerous health consequences, like various cancers. To make matters worse, they are addictive, so it's hard for someone to stop using alcohol or tobacco/nicotine even if they want to stop. Marijuana and psilocybin are usually not very addictive, and there's not much evidence of any serious medical issues when adults use these. In fact, there's some indications that marijuana and psilocybin can be helpful medical treatments, but that's not super well understood because it's very difficult for scientists to study the positive benefits of illegal substances (legalizing the substances would make it much easier to study).

The most dangerous things about these substances is that it's hard for a person to be sure what they're buying. If someone wants to purchase marijuana or psilocybin in a state where it is illegal, you have to go through shady channels to get it. Hopefully that psilocybin pill is just psilocybin, but maybe whoever made it laced it with something addictive, or maybe it wasn't processed in a sanitary way. Who knows? When these substances are legalized, their production can be regulated and inspected like anything else.

All that said, if an adult is caught with marijuana or psilocybin, they can face serious legal consequences and jail time right now, depending on where they happen to be in the country. That can ruin someone's life. And even though marijuana use doesn't vary that much by race, marijuana charges are overwhelmingly used to jail Black and Hispanic people, which just exacerbates race issues in the USA. Having these law on the books is doing way more harm than marijuana (or psilocybin) ever did. Let's get rid of them!

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