The times they are a-changing, folks.
Ten years ago, the only so-called “drugs” you could legally take in public were alcohol and tobacco.
Over the past decade, marijuana got added to that list across a variety of states in America as well as multiple countries across the globe, including Canada and Mexico.
And just last week, psychedelics were added to the list in California.
That’s right. In a landmark ruling last week, California bill SB519 to decriminalize possession of psychedelics passed the state senate by a 21-16 vote. Going forward, persons aged 21 years and older in America’s most populous state can legally possess psychedelics for personal use and social sharing.
That’s pretty wild…
We went from having just two legally accessible drugs for decades, to having more than half a dozen in just five years. And that half a dozen includes stuff like magic mushrooms that, for years, were frowned upon in society as “taboo.”
What’s going on here?
The scientific truth is emerging.
You see… things like marijuana and magic mushrooms weren’t always considered “bad for you”… and the emergence of their negative stigma was not rooted in good science, but rather in bad politics.
Let’s rewind 70 years.
Back in the 1950s, a group of pioneering psychiatrists in California led by Humphry Osmond were actively experimenting with psychedelics. They found that the hallucinogenic drugs had immense therapeutic potential.
But, for various reasons, psychedelics and marijuana became staples of the emergence of “hippie culture” in the 1960s. And the government didn’t like hippie culture. It was a direct threat to their power. So, then-U.S. President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” – which was basically just a war on hippie culture to preserve government power – and in 1970, both marijuana and psychedelics landed on the U.S. government’s Schedule 1 drug list.
Everyone listened to the government, and over the next several decades, the world just assumed that marijuana and psychedelics were “bad for you” – even though early science said the opposite.
But things started to change in the early 2010s.
It was around this time that the academic world began to re-explore the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, amid a broader movement to legalize and destigmatize marijuana.
And what the academic world uncovered was stunning…
A pair of recent Johns Hopkins studies have found that the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms” (something called psilocybin) can significantly help with smoking cessation and reducing alcohol dependence.
An even more recent Johns Hopkins study published in 2020 found that psilocybin can relieve anxiety and depression levels in people with life-threatening cancer diagnoses four-times better than traditional antidepressants on the market.
That finding corroborates a previous NYU study, which found that psilocybin causes a “rapid and sustained” reduction in anxiety and…
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