How psychedelics legalization debates could differ from cannabis

Andrews et al. correctly note that: ‘The current push to broaden the production, sale, and use of psychedelics bears many parallels to the movement to legalize cannabis in the United States’ [1]. More than two dozen local jurisdictions have deprioritized the enforcement of some psychedelics laws, and voters in two states—Oregon and Colorado—have passed ballot initiatives to legalize supervised use of psilocybin [2]. The Colorado initiative went further and also legalized a ‘grow and give’ model for dimethyltryptamine (DMT), ibogaine, mescaline (excluding peyote), psilocin and psilocybin [3].

This is just the beginning, and there are many ways to legalize the supply of psychedelics for non-clinical use [4, 5]. Voters in Massachusetts will soon consider an initiative fairly similar to Colorado's [6], and an increasing number of bills to legalize some form of psychedelics supply are being introduced in state legislatures, including some that would allow for retail sales [4]. Few of these particular bills, if any, will pass, but it would be naïve to think that more states will not head down the road of legalizing some forms of supply for non-clinical purposes.

Despite the parallels with cannabis legalization noted by Andrews et al., policy discussions concerning psychedelics will probably differ from what we saw (and are seeing) with cannabis in important ways. Psychedelics can produce very different effects and the current market dynamics are disparate. Whereas cannabis consumption is driven by frequent users, it is the opposite for psychedelics. One recent analysis finds that: ‘Those who reported using [cannabis] five or fewer days in the past month account for about five percent of the total use days in the past month. For psychedelics, that figure is closer to 60 percent’ [4].

To conclude, I would like to endorse another point made by Andrews et al.: ‘Effective regulation of cannabis has been particularly challenging because of limited coordination across state and federal levels of government’. Indeed, the US federal government largely sat on the sidelines while a commercial cannabis industry developed in legalization states. The question confronting federal policymakers is whether they want to stay on the sidelines and watch psychedelics follow in the footsteps of the for-profit cannabis model [4, 14]. If not, now is the time to act.

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