You Can Now Take ‘Shrooms’ Legally in Denver
‘Magic Mushrooms’
Denver Colorado has become the 1st American city to make tripping on shrooms, legal. It’s not quite Amsterdam yet though, you won’t be able to walk into any dispensary and buy magic mushrooms because selling shrooms is another story, but you will no longer be called a criminal for possessing or consuming psilocybin (the ingredient in shrooms that makes you trip) in the city.
In an incredibly narrow vote, Denver passed I-301 with 51% majority, making possession of mushrooms containing psilocybin, ‘decriminalized’ for people 21-years-old or older, and perhaps, more importantly, it prohibits the city and county of Denver from “spending resources on imposing criminal penalties… for the personal use and personal possession of psilocybin mushrooms.
Cindy Sovine, a chief political activist to decriminalize psilocybin told reporters after the vote, “we’re not talking about legalization, we’re talking about not putting people in jail,” Sovine said. And that’s perhaps the bigger point. nearly 500,000 non-violent Americans are currently locked up in prison, for simple drug possession. The United States has the highest imprisonment rate of any country in the world.
Many pro-legalization organizers say their only goal in the mushroom measure is to keep people out of jail in Denver for using or possessing the drug to cope with depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and other conditions. But Psilocybin has been federally outlawed since the 1960s, when it was widely known as a recreational drug. The ban stopped most medical research, but small studies in recent years have found the substance can have positive effects on anxiety and depression for cancer patients.
Decriminalizing a substance that the Federal government considers a Schedule 1 controlled substance’ is an important step toward reducing our prison populations, even if it is just one city, it begins to set a precedent for the other states, just as the decriminalization of Cannabis let to it’s regulation and sale in Colorado and Washington in November of 2012.
