It’s time for California to end the racist and expensive war on drugs. Here’s how

Psychedelics reform is coming in hot, with key wins at the ballot box this month. Washington D.C. approved psychedelics decriminalization and Oregon approved both its psilocybin mushroom therapy model and broad drug decriminalization.

The cities of Oakland, Santa Cruz, Denver and Ann Arbor have also decriminalized psychedelics, and similar efforts are underway in over 100 other cities. Last week, California State Senator Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, announced that he will introduce a bill to decriminalize psychedelics in California’s next legislative session.

With Wiener’s announcement, Californians are about to learn why doctors, scientists, therapists and community activists are calling for safe access to psychedelics. Because of the state’s size and market heft, how we approach this will impact national and global drug policy reforms.

That’s why, as a psychedelics legalization advocate, I’d urge California to think bigger. Instead of focusing on psychedelics, we should start by decriminalizing all drugs for low-level possession. To unpack this, let’s discuss why legislation that takes a psychedelic-exceptionalist approach falls short.

The current mainstreaming of psychedelics is the result of a perfect storm of science and culture. Scientific and medical research into psychedelics in the 1950s and 60s was wiped out with President Richard Nixon’s war on drugs but gained traction again in the 90s. Today, it’s reached a tipping point. Why? Because psychedelics are therapeutic medicines for public health problems that are at crisis proportions.

Since COVID-19 hit, there’s been a dramatic rise in anxiety and depressive disorders, substance abuse and suicidal ideation in this country. Today, one out of three Americans have signs of clinical anxiety or depression. Prior to COVID-19, it was one out of five.

Last year, nearly 70,000 Americans died from drug overdoses — and it’s getting worse. Studies from public and private institutions worldwide show the benefits of psychedelics for treatment-resistant depression, drug and alcohol addiction and PTSD, among other conditions. The US Food and Drug Administration’s grant of Breakthrough Therapy designation to MDMA and psilocybin, and its approval of Ketamine last year, marks federal endorsement for certain psychedelics as therapies.

The legalization of cannabis has also played a pivotal role in the public’s openness to psychedelics. Cannabis has gone from demonized and on-the-fringes to socially acceptable for its medicinal value. It is now found, neatly-packaged, in homes across the US.

The designation of cannabis as an essential product by local and state jurisdictions earlier this year meant further sloughing off of old anti-cannabis attitudes, which has made more people question the reason for cannabis’ illegality to begin with. Today, the vast majority of Americans believe cannabis should be legal for either medical or adult-use, a message voters carried to the polls with five more states legalizing cannabis in some form this last election.

Despite this, the War on Drugs is still going strong. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration still lists cannabis, MDMA and psilocybin and other drugs, including LSD, heroin, mescaline and DMT, as Schedule I. This means they carry the highest criminal penalties. Every year, taxpayers are funding a $47 billion drug war, and millions of people in the U.S. are still being arrested and incarcerated for drug-related offenses.

The majority of Americans are sick of it. It is well understood that the drug war is a war against people of color and other marginalized groups. This fact, along with Black Lives Matter movement, has brought the US to a pivotal point of racial and cultural reckoning that is driving criminal justice and drug policy reform.

Today, the call for major drug policy reform is no longer limited to impacted communities and advocates, it’s in the political center stage.

It is within this social and political moment that California will craft its psychedelics legislation. The nuts and bolts of what legalization and regulation should look like is a many-layered discussion that policymakers and policy-changers will construct in coming years.

For this reason, the broad decriminalization of all drugs — and not just select psychedelics — must be part of any future legislation. Psychedelic exceptionalism is a narrow view that only those with privilege can hold comfortably. For a reform movement that holds public health and healing as a driving force, any meaningful legislation must include broad decriminalization.

Otherwise, we will carry the drug war mantle forward.