The Oakland City Council in California voted unanimously to decriminalize the cultivation and storage of plants or mushrooms with hallucinogenic properties (entheogens), and the preparation and use of various formulations based on them.
However, this decision does not make it legal to sell them or do anything with them on a commercial basis. The council's resolution states that the city will no longer spend significant money on operational investigations, investigations and lawsuits related to single individuals who use plant-derived hallucinogens. According to the NPR portal, the identification and investigation of cases of cultivation, sale, and storage of entheogens will have the lowest priority of law enforcement agencies.
Proponents of the decision appeal to the fact that people who use hallucinogens do not pose a threat to society, although the police spend a lot of money on their identification and prosecution. There are also a number of studies that note the significant therapeutic effect of the active substances of entheogens in mental disorders and as palliative therapy in hopelessly ill patients. The third important argument is that decriminalizing soft drugs eliminates all the risks and negative aspects of the black market for such substances, and also brings money to the government coffers through taxes, as happened with marijuana in some states. The latter is still under question in Auckland, but a legal entheogens market may appear in the future.
Opponents note that the effect of psychoactive substances of plant origin on the human body has not been sufficiently studied, and the experience of their use shows a great risk from the unpredictable actions of a drug addict who was left without an outside observer - the so-called "sitter". Auckland became the second city in the United States to allow the use of herbal psychoactive substances, but in its predecessor, Denver, the ban was lifted only from mushrooms of the Psilocybe genus. Earlier in the United States, marijuana was fully legalized in 11 states, and in another 15 it is allowed for medical use.
Vasily Parfenov