CA Gov. Newsom vetoes bill that would have decriminalized psychedelic mushrooms
abcnews.go.com
abcnews.go.com
This is 100% the doing of the Prison Guard union.
The Legislative Counsel’s digest at the top is a very accessible summary of the bill. The meat of the summary being:
(1) Existing law categorizes certain drugs and other substances as controlled substances and prohibits various actions related to those substances, including their manufacture, transportation, sale, possession, and ingestion.
This bill would, on and after January 1, 2025, make lawful the possession, preparation, obtaining, or transportation of, specified quantities of psilocybin, psilocyn, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and mescaline, for personal use, as defined, by and with persons 21 years of age or older. The bill would provide penalties for possession of these substances on school grounds, or possession by, or transferring to, persons under 21 years of age.
The bill would require the California Health and Human Services Agency to convene a workgroup to study and make recommendations on the establishment of a framework governing the therapeutic use, including facilitated or supported use, of those substances. The bill would require that workgroup to send a report to the Legislature containing those recommendations on or before January 1, 2025.
Absolutely shameful. Clearly decriminalization is the correct thing to do here. Adults should be able to do what they want. ( Within reason, clearly fent should not be publicly available. )
Zero connection between the desires of our people and what our government does.
Drug problems are solved by better access to quality health care and not punitive policing
This action commits state resources and funds to snatching people up, so it's not like we can't afford the better way - we're just allocating our people and efforts to ineffective methods.
Chasing around users to lock them in cages for 20 years is way more expensive than actually solving the problem of abuse. The only reason a better way stays impossible is because there's an ideological commitment on the part of mainstream political beliefs to keeping it impossible.
I agree with caesil that this is posturing to support his presidential run, whether for public perception or lobbying/fundraising reasons.
Man I need to get off social media as it’s completely overrun with moneyed/political interests.
Really? Can you point anywhere where drug problems are "solved"?
Portugal used to be the poster child for this, but opinion is shifting because it hasn't solved anything[0]. We are trying the same in Canada, with similarly mediocre results.
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...
> João Goulão — head of Portugal’s national institute on drug use and the architect of decriminalization — admitted to the local press in December that “what we have today no longer serves as an example to anyone.” Rather than fault the policy, however, he blames a lack of funding.
> Twenty years ago, “we were quite successful in dealing with the big problem, the epidemic of heroin use and all the related effects,” Goulão said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But we have had a kind of disinvestment, a freezing in our response … and we lost some efficacy.”
The story turns out to be much the same as a common trope for those who wish to undo successful policies here in the US: under-fund them as sabotage, and then call them failed when the lack of funding causes lower efficacy. Additionally, prohibitionist policies and the policing drug use has been rising (see 24,25,26 at https://substanceabusepolicy.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1...) over the second half of the time drugs have been decriminalized, so the rollbacks in societal gains need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Perpetually spending more and more money is not a solution. I'm also not surprised to see the architect blame funding as opposed to admitting their policy failed.
Again, we are trying to do the same in Canada, and while overdoses are decreasing, these policies are not solving the crisis. In some places they are making it worse.
That's how running a society works.
The criminalize and lockup method isn't free of cost
Are you expecting biological addiction to be like breeded out of the gene pool? How would a $0 cost solution eventually happen?
On the right, people criticize and blame the users, rant about personal responsibility, and try to lock drug users and the mentally ill up and throw away the keys. This is failed policy.
On the left, people invest in legalization and treatment as a personal ideology and don’t seem to be willing to admit when their policies fail. It almost seems like a failed policy conflates to some kind of personal failure that cannot be examined or criticized. And instead of policy failure, it’s always a funding issue, no matter how many times consistent results emerge. This is looking more and more like failed policy too.
I’ve seen it in Van, Portland, Sacramento, Seattle, San Francisco and LA, and it’s pretty consistently not only not getting better but getting much worse.
Ultimately, neither approach seems to be working very well. And in the meantime people are living lives of hopelessness and despair in tremendously awful conditions.
Are there no other options available than these two counter positions? I think we should be having more of an open dialogue about how to solve the problem and be more ready to examine the evidence, even when it doesn’t support our positions, for the greater good of those suffering, and I often see conversations on the topic break down into the tit for tat I’m seeing here. These kinds of conversations are the default, and solve nothing.
You are making assumptions about funding being the issue based on what you think should work and then attacking my argument by justifying your belief with assumptions to support the conclusion you want instead of letting the data and the facts lead.
Sadly, I don’t believe that most mentally ill, homeless addicts are going to get better. It’s a terrible situation, and I don’t know of a solution.
I don’t think anyone does.
I would also note that most rehab facilities for substance use disorders espouse an abstinence-based approach to treatment. That approach simply doesn’t work. The standard of care for opioid use disorder is medication assisted treatment, which is both evidence-based and far more effective than abstinence-based programs. The difference in outcomes is stark, particularly since dropout often results in death.
Bottom line, though, from my perspective: you can’t effectively treat people unless and until they are motivated to enter into and engage with a treatment program. “Junkies” of the type you describe rarely fit that bill. Drug courts are a good step in the right direction, but they need to take a more evidence-based approach to their operations.
I wish there was an easy solution to this problem, but there isn’t.
As per usual this is presented as a “uniquely American” issue, when in reality many other countries have found solutions to mitigate the issue.
In Los Angeles I can easily find needles in the streets and large encampments of people on drugs.
In say Tokyo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, I cannot. The money and resources we're throwing at the problem is being ineffectively allocated and structured because we're spending more and it's doing less.
By solved here I mean if we spend billions on a problem we shouldn't be getting increasingly large sprawling encampments as a result.
Even poorer cities with plenty of problems of their own like Mexico City and Bangkok had nothing like the issues I've seen on the streets of our wealthiest cities such as San Francisco.
The problem is statecraft based on ideologies which don't consider efficacy as a core value
Here's an example, in San Francisco there's a homeless RV park where the city is spending $140,000/year per space https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-homeless-crisis-rv...
We could simply give people proper housing at a small fraction of that cost but there's a deep ideological commitment to it being "unearned" and because of these cultural ideologies we end up with the worst solutions at the highest prices.
These myths of rugged individualism, isolated self improvement, the race to the bottom idea of equality, one of the only political groups that really calls horseshit on that is the left.
Doesn’t seem to be working in California. In reality, it seems like the only solution to drug problems is a culture that ostracizes drug users while harshly punishing drug merchants.
https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/SB-58-Veto...
he's not anti-mushrooms but he's anti-unfettered access to mushrooms without guidelines in place. I don't know if it's the right call or not but mushrooms are something that's not really fit for general consumption; cannabis being fairly benign and understood is a different issue altogether and one that makes sense to have fairly unfettered access to at a population level.
In the deep south there's black people that get lifetime terms for $20 in weed
Except I've never met anyone with an abusive or addictive relationship to psilocybin. I just haven't seen it. Seriously, when was the last time you heard of a family giving someone a mushroom intervention?
It’s not really Newsom’s fault since he is not SF city council but people won’t notice that.
Anything seen as being soft on or pro drug will be toxic to him.
No principle need be served by these actions. He can even be aggravating his supporters with them, its not like they'll vote for someone else.
The important thing is getting his name in the news. Bonus points for doing it in some context that makes him seem a little more "centrist" or can be spun that way in the upcoming campaign.
Does Biden go down easy, or hard? Don't think Newsom would be flapping his wings like this if he didn't see the big rooster's perch being empty soon. Think he's been told he'll be the Party Choice already.
They’ve even been presented with equally or even more right wing candidates and have rejected them for Trump. It’s not even about the politics. It’s about their desire for a strong man ruler.
He’s categorically denied over and over again that he’s interested in forcing Biden into a primary and I think it’s a misread to see this as anything more than a governor doing their job. He’s never left any ambiguity in his answers on this topic.
Besides, there is no political way that, should the position become vacant, Biden would choose a white man to replace Harris.
A politician’s denials don’t mean much.
He can easily say that the the polls are showing that most Americans seeing Biden as mentally and physically unfit for President and would even vote for Trump, so he is reluctantly stepping up to save the country from Trump.
It’s also very common for inside knowledge on an exploratory committee to be leaked to the press ahead of a run. Serious candidates hire a team to strategize months before making an announcement and it never stays silent because the exploratory committee itself tends to leak in order to gauge the early reaction. We’ve seen neither of these things from Newsom.
Anyway, I think national voters are mainly unfamiliar with Newsom, and once he gets exposure he'll be well received. His performance on Hannity is one example of this.
Stop watching Fox news.
You can't blame a governor for crime rates anyway. Nor can you draw much correlation to things like policing. It's idiotic and a juvenile view of how and why crime happens. These things happen from so many societal factors and it isn't politicians causing or preventing it.
But it's been a republican culture war wedge issue for a few years lately. Seems like you fell for the con.
> You can't blame a governor for crime rates anyway.
dems made small value crimes not felony, it is strong incentive for crime rise, and strong motivation for police to not go after such cases.
Call me when the murder rate reaches the 1990s peak. They haven't. I'll say again, American cities are much safer than they've been in my living memory.
> dems made small value crimes not felony,
This is a horse shit explanation. Firstly, that was a ballot initiative passed by will of the voters, probably because California prisons, like most US prisons, have been overcrowded and we have insanely high incarceration rates exceeding pretty much every other nation, which is not appropriate. Secondly, I think people who have looked at this will tell you it had no impact on crime rates. Unless they work for Fox news etc.
that path is easily manipulated and compromised, because majority of voters don't have capacity to carefully review all propositions. And yes, population blindly supporting dems are also accountable for their actions.
Not interested to discuss your other statements, because I see them as low quality.
Are you seriously blaming the Democrats for the invention of misdemeanour crimes? Or for adjusting the threshold between misdemeanour and felony according to inflation?
Texas has misdemeanour theft to a far higher threshold than California… oops.
Stop watching Fox News.
From the guidelines.
For those interested in diving deeper on the topic of crime in California: [0]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/crime-trends-in-california/ [1]: https://data-openjustice.doj.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2023...
That's pretty much it. I get so tired of internet discussions where people do not understand this, and I lost my patience to "converse curiously" with people who choose to remain ignorant of this in order to justify fear or anger or dehumanizing hate.
I've had countless discussions, including on HN, where you can cite this and people will sooner say that crime statistics are false, and specifically falsified in a way that destroys their argument, than admit being wrong or not having a complete perspective.
When this happens, simply refrain from commenting until you regain that patience. This forum only remains civil if we all make our best effort to keep it that way.
Eg. American political discourse has gone so crazy that people can openly support fascism and it's acceptable. I don't think it ought to be.
that's has to be verified, if any affordable housing was approved in reasonable distance from his current house. Approving affordable housing in other's backyard is obviously not YIMBY.
But seeing him debate Hannity had something click for me. He is pretty sharp, and has some qualities that national democrats have seemed to lack. I started to think he may have a better chance at the presidency than people give him credit for. I start to think a lot of people haven't really gotten to know him, self included.
Time will tell how that plays out.
His personal life is a potential liability, though. He’s a pretty well-known philanderer and that’s exactly how the right knows how to attack opponents.
nah, it's the cali is a shithole thing.
Of course, in an oligarchy (which we are) that has a lot of pull.
The “shithole” state nonsense is just copium.
Why is every single member of Congress vastly richer after a few years in office?
I don't think that means he's running for president in 2024. I think it means he's auditioning for a cabinet position to be able to keep his name in the news until 2028.
aka my constituents want to profit from this so let's pump the brakes until they can get that configured
He doesn't care about what's good for California - only what's good for his presidential campaign in 2028.
I feel like this thread is so full of disillusionment of politics that there's zero trust. Which I get but how would a well intentioned politician avoid this suspicion of corruption?
By thoroughly explaining the actions. I think this decision feels under justified
Seems pretty thoroughly explained to me.
You can certainly disagree with his view/action, but his position and his reasons seem crystal clear.
Are there even other ones besides psilocybin that’s used for potential medical stuff? Is it even researched beyond the very early days? Is that even the point of this shift to decrim?
I’m sure if they make a policy to decriminalize it after x months a team of doctors could put together basic safety guidelines for adults
Normatively, I agree with you, but descriptively, that's false. Legislatures can criminalize almost anything they want as long as what they criminalize doesn't offend the constitution.
Modern shrooms are stronger than they were in the past due to selective breeding and growing. Around 4x stronger. Educating the consumer on this will be difficult, the "I usually eat an 8th" crowd will be who is going to be helped more. Their are commercial tests for this very thing, to the point where once you know how strong a strain is you will be able to dose it according to volume of ground product. Complicating this is the fact that if you eat an orange then it makes the product even stronger. No clue how to solve all this, just know it is a real issue.
Other side of this is that ketamine therapies are being ran out of old dentist offices with zero therapeutic guidelines TODAY. They are selling snake oil and letting folks not get the break throughs they deserve.
I founded the Decriminalize Nature movement in NYC and established a non-profit lobby group w funds from Doctor Bronners, and found that the political apparatus is looking to get its people paid.