Just after my high school days and later in college, illegal drugs were seemingly everywhere.
Smoking weed, pot, bud, maryjane, marijuana — whatever you wanted to call it — was all the rage in the circles I moved in. Less prevalent — but still reasonably easy to obtain even in my still-backward Midwestern home state — were “magic’ mushrooms, i.e., psilocybin.
Also popular was LSD, or “acid” — especially after former Harvard professor Timothy Leary advised young people sick of the Vietnam War and a stifling, conformist society to “turn on, tune in and drop out.”
Of course, The Establishment in those days (late 1960s and 1970s) was totally against any drugs other than alcohol and cigarettes — you know: the legal drugs that kill thousands every year and ruin millions of lives.
But The Establishment (governing bodies on the federal, state and local level) at the time wasn’t about to let young people get their hands on marijuana or other mind-altering drugs that would threaten alcohol and cigarette industries’ profits -- or somehow “make them kids go crazy.”
Fast forward about 40 years: Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational marijuana in 2012. And today — just a decade later — there are 43 states that have OK’d either recreational and medicinal MJ or only medicinal.
Which, after a few years of being strictly medicinal, those states almost always eventually add recreational pot availability when voters and legislatures realize its tax advantages.
In the recent midterm election, Colorado notched another pioneering move in legalizing what was once a totally illegal drug and allowing its use in specific clinical settings.
Drugs like psilocybin will soon be able to be legally used in Colorado to treat a variety of ailments such as depression, alcoholism and PTSD in war veterans.
So no, unlike marijuana that is so ubiquitous now in Colorado that it seems there’s a pot shop on every other block, psychedelic drugs WON’T be accessible to just anyone with an over-21 I.D.
No, they will primarily be available to qualifying patients being treated in a licensed facility by trained caregivers. But the new law also allows for private growing of the substances by those 21 and older, so some street-level increase in psychedelic drug use is likely to be observed.
As we’ve seen over the last decade when MJ first became legal for sale to adults, the floodgates of research into the drug were finally opened, revealing a host of ailments that could be treated effectively with MJ.
And a much more natural way to treat those ailments than with the expensive, high-side-effect pills churned out by Big Pharma. But how many lives could have been positively impacted during those “illegal years” when research into MJ was stifled by its illegality?
We'll never know.
But now we have legal psychedelics in two states: Colorado this year and Oregon in 2020.
And as happened in many other states after MJ became recreationally legal, residents of those states will be closely watching to see how Colorado and Oregon create their systems for administering these now-legal, naturally-based psychedelic drugs.
It makes me proud — and very much amazed — to know I live in a state with a population that has an open mind about the real and potential medicinal advantages of these drugs.
The verdict on legalizing medicinal/recreational marijuana in Colorado is in, and it has been a big thumbs-up. Now we will see if legalizing psychedelics will result in similar positive therapeutic impacts and medical treatments through less constrained research.
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