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Over the weekend, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed Senate Bill 58 (SB 58), nixing the state’s attempt to become one of a handful that are loosening restrictions on plant-based hallucinogens. The legislation was an effort to increase access to psychedelic therapy and remove penalties for people seeking these drugs.
The bill would have decriminalized the possession of small amounts (4 grams) of certain plant-based psychedelics for adults over the age of 21: mescaline, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and psilocybin, the hallucinogen found in magic mushrooms. The bill also would have allowed possession of related drug paraphernalia and the home cultivation of psilocybin-containing mushrooms for personal use.
State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) introduced the bill in late 2022, and believes it would have improved mental healthcare without affecting public safety. “Should we be threatening people with arrest and incarceration for using mushrooms? Of course we should not,” says Weiner. “If you want drugs to be unsafe, the most effective thing you can do is criminalize them and push everyone within the shadows where they're where they're less likely to ask for information and help.”
In a letter explaining his decision, Newsom wrote: “Psychedelics have proven to relieve people suffering from certain conditions such as depression, PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and other addictive personality traits. This is an exciting frontier and California will be on the front-end of leading it.” But, he continued, the state would first need “regulated treatment guidelines” that include dosing information, rules to protect patients from being exploited during treatment, and ways to make sure they have no underlying psychoses. “Unfortunately,” he continued, “this bill would decriminalize possession prior to these guidelines going into place, and I cannot sign it.”
Psychedelics can lead to serious negative consequences for some users, including psychosis and suicidal ideation, and one of the bill’s most vocal opponents was the Coalition for Psychedelic Safety and Education, a group that includes parents whose children died following psychotic episodes after taking hallucinogens. In news interviews and op-eds, they’d argued that they aren’t opposed to decriminalization, but they want the government to implement first responder training and systems for tracking the health effects of psychedelics first. (WIRED was not able to reach a representative from the group for comment.)
Despite the fact that psychedelic decriminalization measures have passed in several local jurisdictions within California, support at the national level remains hotly contested. (Forty-nine percent of American voters support decriminalization, according to the 2023 UC Berkeley Psychedelics Survey.) Newsom, who has positioned himself as one of the Democratic Party’s most visible leaders, had a lot at stake when this bill landed on his desk. “While we firmly believe that Californians should not face incarceration for the use of psychedelic medicines, we understand the challenging position Governor Newsom is in,” says Jeannie Fontana, founder of TREAT California, which is organizing a ballot initiative that aims to devote $5 billion in state government funding for psychedelics research and mental healthcare.
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Newsom’s choice to veto the bill was “likely the product of his personal political calculus and ambitions,” says Josh Hardman, founder and editor of Psychedelic Alpha, an independent newsletter and resource hub covering drug development, law, and culture. But, he says, “it’s not all negative.” In his letter, Newsom acknowledges the scientific and anecdotal evidence of psychedelics’ potential benefits, and urges further policy discussion. “He hasn’t slammed the door shut,” Hardman believes.
A few other states have already eased their rules on plant-based psychedelics. Oregon legalized supervised psilocybin use and decriminalized personal possession of small amounts of drugs in 2020. Two years later, Colorado legalized psilocybin treatment centers and decriminalized plant-based psychedelics for personal use. Within California, cities like Oakland, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and San Francisco have made personal use and possession of psychedelics the lowest law enforcement priority, to discourage police from arresting people for actions the state considers criminal.
Weiner attempted a similar bill, SB 519, in 2021, but it stalled out before the California State Assembly could vote on it. That version included a longer list of substances, which was likely its downfall. Synthetic drugs with ravey reputations, like MDMA and LSD, were nonstarters for the California Police Chiefs Association, which threatened to lobby against any bill that included them. In response, Wiener made the difficult decision to narrow the list.
This time around, the bill garnered more bipartisan supporters, largely powered by veterans. Jesse Gould, a former Army ranger and founder of the Heroic Hearts Project, says that many veterans seek out psilocybin and MDMA for treating otherwise-intractable cases of post-traumatic stress disorder. However, because these drugs are illegal in most states, psychedelic-assisted therapy is not licensed there. Often, Gould says, veterans “have to take their mental health into their own hands” to find an underground source. “They’re considered criminals for trying to save their own lives,” he says.
Placing veterans front and center “has been a very conscious project,” says Hardman. Veterans garner respect and sympathy across the political spectrum, and their reputation for patriotism lends an aura of credibility. “It’s unexpected,” says Gould. “If this straight-laced person is advocating for magic mushrooms, that’s weird.”
Since the passage of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, funding for psychedelics research has been limited. Federal funding wasn’t available again until 2021, when Johns Hopkins University was awarded a $4 million grant. University-based research groups often work in partnership with organizations like the Heroic Hearts Project or MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
Overall, those studies have shown psilocybin’s promise for treating mental illnesses. Three separate trials conducted by teams affiliated with the Usona Institute, COMPASS Pathfinder, and the University of Zurich all suggested that a single dose can treat major depressive disorder, and that the effects last for weeks (or potentially longer) after the dosing session. Another recent study found that self-administering psychedelics helped people treat obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms, even without facilitated therapy. And psilocybin, at least in medical settings, has a low abuse potential.
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Some researchers believe that the use of these substances should be restricted to supervised therapeutic settings. “I think these medicines need to be treated with great respect,” says Fontana. “But respect doesn’t mean abstinence. It means making sure people are educated.”
Jennifer Mitchell, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, dreams of a public education campaign on psychedelic safety modeled on harm reduction campaigns for the opioid epidemic. She wants people to know that they won’t get in trouble for taking friends to the emergency room, and to understand the potential effects (good and bad) of psychedelics before trying them. “If those posters were all over bus kiosks, and high school classes had even 10 minutes of talking about psychedelics,” Mitchell says, “that would be an easy first step.”
Notably, while SB 58 would have allowed the cultivation of your own modest mushroom stash at home, it would not have decriminalized large-scale manufacturing or the commercial sale of hallucinogens. Graham Pechenik, a patent attorney and founder of Calyx Law, a firm focused on the cannabis and psychedelics industries, fields lots of calls from entrepreneurs who hope to launch psilocybin startups, only to let them down. “There’s no legal way of doing this in California,” he says.
Hardman says that decriminalization efforts like SB 58 often falter on the supply side, and that had it passed, it would not have been able to “create a psychedelic market in California.” Today, many underground psilocybin businesses sell their products—dried mushroom, capsules, psilocybin-infused chocolates—along existing cannabis delivery lines. “We know people are already breaking the law left and right,” says Ryan Munevar, the campaign director of Decriminalize California, which advocates for the legalization of psilocybin for adult recreational use.
All of these drugs remain illegal under federal law, where they are considered Schedule 1 substances, meaning the US Drug Enforcement Agency has deemed them to have “no currently accepted medical use and high abuse potential.” And whenever state laws run up against federal regulations, things get complicated. In 1996, California passed the Compassionate Use Act, allowing the medical use of cannabis. In 2016, California’s Proposition 64 legalized it for adult recreational use. But cannabis remains a Schedule 1 drug, creating roadblocks for government-funded research or loans and agricultural aid for growers, and risking conflicts with federal agencies. This stepwise legalization process appears to be playing out again with plant-based psychedelics, “unfolding in the same pattern,” Pechenik says.
As it stands, the DEA can shut down state-run psychedelic treatment centers. On September 21, US Representative Robert Garcia (D-California) introduced the federal VISIONS Act, which aims to protect state-legal psilocybin use from federal law enforcement.
Others would like to push decriminalization efforts beyond therapeutics and veteran care. Pechenik believes that responsible adults should be able to access psychedelics “for their own purposes—not necessarily for medical use, but for consciousness expansion.” Decriminalize California is collecting signatures to get the legalization for recreational use of psilocybin on the ballot in 2024. “Is it medical? Is it religious? Did they stumble across it on the playa at Burning Man? Go for it,” says Munevar.
Earlier this year, Illinois legislators introduced a bill to legalize psilocybin products, and two initiatives related to psychedelics have been certified for the Massachusetts ballot. Other states like Connecticut, Minnesota, and New York are following suit.
Hardman thinks that Wiener will likely resurrect a California bill next year, focusing more tightly on therapeutic use. And last week, Newsom did sign legislation that gives advocates some hope: AB 1021 will automatically bring California law into harmony with federal law if Schedule I drugs like MDMA or psilocybin are reclassified to have fewer restrictions. This would ensure that California healthcare practitioners and pharmacists could legally prescribe and supply these drugs within the state.
In the meantime, Pechenik calls the governor’s SB 58 veto “a dreadful shame, and a real setback for California’s leadership. While there is still much to learn about best practices for the therapeutic use of psychedelics, nobody should be criminalized or jailed for using them responsibly.”
