Growing, owning and ingesting “natural” psychedelics will no longer be a crime in the central California city of Santa Cruz, after the city council in the beachside community voted Tuesday to order local police to stop enforcing laws against the plants, according to a report by the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
The decriminalization decision covers only plant-based psychedelic substances such as psilocybin “magic” mushrooms, ayahuasca and peyote. Synthetic psychedelic drugs such as LSD and MDMA remain fully outlawed.
For that matter, nothing about the Santa Cruz decision changes the fact that even “natural” psychedelics remain illegal at the federal level. And even at the local level, laws against the drugs remain on the books. But the unanimous Santa Cruz city council vote simply makes enforcing those laws the lowest possible priority for law enforcement.
“The drug war needs to be ended in small deliberate steps,” Sean Cutler, co-founder of the advocacy group Decriminalize Santa Cruz, told the Sentinel. “We acknowledge that the U.S. government has spent 50 years indoctrinating Americans to believe that alcohol is good and everything else is bad, evil, for poor people.”
The Santa Cruz resolution applies only to people at least 21 years old, and “solely for the personal use and personal possession” of the psychedelic plants.
In 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted a “breakthrough therapy” designation to psilocybin for treatments of certain types of clinical depression. The Santa Cruz resolution came after testimony from residents who said that use of psychedelics had proven useful in treating their own mental health issues, according to the Sentinel report.
Santa Cruz follows the nearby city of Oakland, California, as well as Denver, Colorado, as the third U.S. city to effectively decriminalize psychedelic plants. Chicago, Illinois, is reportedly considering a similar resolution which if it takes effect would make that city the largest to end criminal penalties for “natural” psychedelic possession and use.
Photo by OpenClipart-Vectors / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
