SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the sales-of-Pink-Floyd's-The-Wall-are-up dept.
Denver's Initiative 301 would decriminalize the use and possession of mushrooms containing the psychedelic compound psilocybin by making shrooms Denver's "lowest law enforcement priority". The vote is on Tuesday, May 7, alongside general elections for mayor, city auditor, city clerk and recorder, and all 13 city council seats. The initiative is supported by Decriminalize Denver, the Denver Green Party, and the Libertarian Party of Colorado. Opponents include the Centennial Institute, a conservative think tank from Colorado Christian University.
Will Denver Vote to Decriminalize Magic Mushrooms?
In 2005, Denver residents voted to become the first major U.S. city to legalize possession of small amounts of marijuana. Two years later, they voted to decriminalize cannabis entirely. For the city's elections this spring, they're being asked if they want to do the same thing for psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms.
If passed, Initiative 301 would decriminalize the possession and use of a drug that is illegal in all states and at the federal level. No matter the result, it marks the first time in United States history that the legal status of psilocybin has been challenged, and it's putting Denver once again at the center of a debate on drug policy.
[...] State laws would remain unchanged, meaning state prosecutors could continue to bring psilocybin cases to court in Denver. While this type of decriminalization law may reduce drug arrests, drug policy experts consider it more of a symbolic gesture that could precede full legalization, much as cannabis laws did in the mid-2000s.
That fact hasn't been lost in Denver's debate over the issue. Opponents say decriminalization of psilocybin could eventually lead to full legalization, putting Denver—a city already known for its embrace of recreational marijuana—down the path toward becoming a drug haven.
Denver residents will also vote on Initiated Ordinance 300: Denver "Right to Survive" Initiative that would overturn an "urban camping" ban:
A "yes" vote is a vote in favor of adding "Article IX - Right to Survive in Public Spaces" to the Denver Revised Municipal Code, thereby allowing the following activities in outdoor public places without limits or penalties enforced by the city or county, law enforcement, or any other entity:
- resting;
- sheltering oneself;
- eating or exchanging food; and
- occupying one's own legally parked vehicle or a legally parked vehicle with permission of the owner.
Finally, the Denver Airport Employees Minimum Wage Increase Initiative would require private employers to pay Denver airport employees $15/hour by 2021.
At least 15% of Denver voters have taken advantage of early voting.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sshelton76 on Monday May 06 2019, @07:18PM (27 children)
Heaven forbid they do this and turn into a drug infested shit hole like Portugal.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radical-drugs-policy-is-working-why-hasnt-the-world-copied-it [theguardian.com]
I don't do drugs recreationally not even weed, but trying to criminalize people putting things into their bodies just isn't the right way to address the problem.
When the problem with an approach can be presented in such a way that even my 5 year old is certain that we're on the wrong path, you know something is seriously wrong with your approach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJUXLqNHCaI [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday May 06 2019, @07:36PM (22 children)
I agree entirely.
I wonder what the goal of the war on drugs is? If it is to stop people taking recreational drugs it has been an abject failure, as lots of people choose to take drugs still, and that doesn't look like changing anytime soon.
I live in a country where something like 25% of the population either smoke pot regularly, or have smoked pot regularly at some point.
It is still illegal to do that, but for some reason we seem to be OK with potentially criminalizing a quarter of the population.
That makes no sense to me at all.
We also have this stuff called "synthetic cannabis" which has killed about 50 of us in the last year, but somehow real cannabis is bad.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @08:21PM (5 children)
The opponents are mostly conservative religious types. Why do they want these substances banned? Because without the outlet of drugs, most people turn to religion. What people don't understand about Marx's statement about 'religion being the opiate of the masses' is that it is true. And like all large organized drug pushers they want the wealth, power and control that comes from being the only dealer in town.
It is as simple as that.
With the exceptions of occasional caffeine and alcohol consumption I am also not a drug user. I have spoken in depth with many people who are drug users. Some recreational, others addicts, as well as people who recovered on their own and are now clean. Some do it as a form of experimentation or creativity enhancement. But many use it as a form of escape or a coping mechanism for a world that doesn't care about them, and that they either do not fit in or cannot comfortably understand.
If people REALLY cared about solving the drug epidemic, rather than finding a way to exploit people, they would work on the underlying issues. Pain management, mental health, social anxiety, and making people feel like they had a place in the world and people who give a fuck that they are happy and healthy. There are outliers who won't be helped even with all of this, but 90 or more percent of people I know who have used or currently use drugs fall into this group. It's not for fun, it's how they survive life. Any 'fun' itself is just trying to destress for the next week of work and trying to keep from sliding down the slippery slopes of either insanity or poor job performance leading to termination.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Monday May 06 2019, @09:06PM (1 child)
You're running the risk of a total flamewar claiming that Marx may have been right about anything.
OK, you should be safe.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @02:35PM
[1 page history of WWII and soviet russia]
[rage]
[mao]
[basic misunderstandings of us tax structure (5 pages)]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @10:06PM
Religion has been declining in the West for a long time now. Screwing with the drug laws won't change that.
Join a Peyote church. [peyoteway.org]
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday May 06 2019, @11:39PM (1 child)
You've missed two important aspects of illicit drug use, while alluding to one of them briefly:
MJ is clearly a legitimate and effective choice for pain management without the serious side affects (addiction and death) that the paid-for Capitalism-approved pharmaceutical solution causes. The Sacklers should burn in the lowest levels of Hell while being sodomized repeatedly by Satan's planet-wide cock. The amount of pain and tragedy they've caused far outweighs the drug war, and I find them quantifiably worse than the "dirty despicable drug dealers" that tormented us with costly urban warfare for the last 30 years.
Many classes of drugs are used in spiritual practices. In some of these cases, escaping is exactly what you're NOT supposed to do. It's to be used to attain higher states, and then work with them constructively. Not sit on the couch, eat potato chips, and laugh at Cheech and Chong till your sides hurt. All of that is subjective of course and doesn't require you to believe in it. I would just caution you against throwing this type of usage into the "Escapist" box. Shamanism takes natural substances pretty seriously in the goals of healing people.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @12:53AM
For those like me that had to google 'The Sacklers' :
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-pain [newyorker.com]
Mr edIII is entirely correct in his statement.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bob_super on Monday May 06 2019, @08:51PM (15 children)
> I wonder what the goal of the war on drugs is?
No small part of it : legal drug pushers (tobacco, alcohol...) are very good at lobbying against competition.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday May 06 2019, @09:09PM (14 children)
I'm sure you're right about that, but if anyone is set up to sell pot it would be the booze barons.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Monday May 06 2019, @09:16PM (10 children)
Pot is easily grown at home, and resold to neighbors.
Shrooms might be too.
That's a lot harder market to capture if it's legal.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday May 06 2019, @09:28PM
That's true. I had not thought of that.
When I was a kid, people would grow pot in bush near where I lived. The police would go in every summer and cut the plants down, then remove them by helicopter, nicely spreading the seeds.
That particular valley is still well known as a place to go to pick your own. Not great quality from what I hear, but the price is right.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @09:56PM
Noobs can grow more shrooms than they can use very easily at home. Unless you are that guy who advocates taking 30-50 grams dried shrooms at a time.
With experience and better equipment you can easily grow 10 times more than what a noob can. [shroomery.org]
Professional mushroom farmers switching to psilocybin shrooms would collapse the price from pretty low to pretty much nothing. Shiitake and other gourmet mushrooms will be more expensive because you can actually eat them every day without tripping balls.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @11:15PM (2 children)
Beer isn't too hard to brew either, but most people just want to run by the store for it. I suspect pot will end up like that too, and mushrooms even more because I'm given to understand that the active compounds can vary much more widely with some 'shrooms than they do with pot. Around here, there's *amanita muscaria* that grows wild, and that one is said to have quite a wide range of active ingredient depending on when and where it's picked. Access to such things grown in a controlled environment would be much better for those who don't want to roll the dice on a trip that's too intense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @03:21AM
Almost all of the shrooms that people grow are slight variations of Psilocybe cubensis. These have about 0.6% psilocybin and psilocin by mass. [erowid.org] The dried shrooms can be ground into a powder to normalize the psilocybin levels. The powder can be added to gel capsules to make it easy to consume and measure. Most users are going to start off using a small dose and increase as needed.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday May 07 2019, @04:31AM
Yea, I don't have a green thumb. Nada, zilch. One might even say the opposite if there's such a thing. I can't even rear cacti in a pot, they just die off... and those are supposed to be minimal maintenance.
Gimme the drone delivery service please!
(Score: 2) by TrentDavey on Tuesday May 07 2019, @02:56PM (4 children)
In Canada it is not illegal to sell cannabis seeds nor is it illegal to sell mushroom mycellium since each of these do not contain any psychoactive chemicals. You can mail-order a nice little kit with everything you need to grow a few mushrooms (and there are bigger kits). You need to keep them at the right temperature and mist them with water everyday and keep every step clean/sterile since .. well, you are encouraging the perfect conditions for fungus growth. One company here has been in business since the last millennium.
This is a good step forward. I recommend reading Michael Pollan's "How to Change Your Mind" for a history of psychotherapy, its current research stage and 3 informative trip descriptions of his.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday May 07 2019, @04:26PM (3 children)
Do you have links to vendors of either sort? I'll be driving through Canada soon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @04:56PM
be careful. if you do shrooms you may quit working for Microsoft. :)
(Score: 2) by TrentDavey on Tuesday May 07 2019, @05:23PM (1 child)
I got mine here: http://www.magicmushroomkit.ca/ [magicmushroomkit.ca]
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday May 07 2019, @07:00PM
It's just for the bunker. Such things will be valuable if the balloon goes up.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday May 06 2019, @11:59PM (1 child)
Exactly why I refuse to purchase commercial pot now in Northern California.
It used to be a patchwork of small time medicinal growers selling to the local dispensaries when it was illegal. Before the medical, that patchwork of small growers formed the illegal markets up here. The economy up here is undergoing no small shift because the money is no longer funneling into these small groups of people that spent money locally. 20 years ago there used to be entire fake businesses with desks, computers, W4's, time cards, etc. You could pay $10k per month to get a $4.5k job that took care of all of your taxes and provided you with a nearly impeccable back story. On top of that, you had a lot of local exchange in the economy for supporting that market. The jobs? Obviously living wage+ when you had the associated risks, and the economy has noticed those disappear.
20 years later and it's all gone. The courts and law enforcement have already shut down all the small growers legally by refusing permits and engaging in a different type of drug war. The drug war now is against the middle class and small workers, not to mention the area it is being grown. Only "well capitalized and connected people" have any chances now, and the many of the people doing the work before legally cannot do the work now in a legal environment. That's why expunging old convictions is so damn important.
It's all corporate now with rich people getting richer. So fuck them with a cactus sideways. I go out of my way to purchase ILLEGAL weed, which is ironically, much cheaper than the heavily taxed corporate weed. Friends and family are all growing what is legal in our backyards and selling it to locals.
If you care about your communities and want to stick it to the man, DON'T SMOKE HIS WEED.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Tuesday May 07 2019, @08:00AM
WOW! It's the exact opposite here.
The black market is extinct here.
We issue permits for new stores by the bucket load.
See my post below.
Our stores are clean, well stocked, CHEAPER than the street was, and are popping up like latte stands.
Jay Inslee pardoned thousands of convictions, i am unsure if we expunged all old convictions, but we did pardon all the active ones and hadn't been enforcing pot laws for several years once it became apparent where legislation was heading.
Most of our growers ARE the old illegal growers. And the stores are small stores started by average people.
Check some out...(Satori and Cannabis and Glass are my favorites)
https://potguide.com/washington/marijuana-stores/spokane/ [potguide.com]
I'm disappointed in CA. I expected them to lead the way, but apparently it's the PNW that's destined to be the ones.
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pslytely Psycho on Tuesday May 07 2019, @07:44AM
NOOOO!
Cannabis should be sold by people who know the product.
This is why:
One of our best high end stores.
http://www.satorimj.com/welcome-to-satori-north.html [satorimj.com]
Links to around 25 stores around town, I see most of the newer ones aren't listed here yet. We have around 35-40 stores here.
https://potguide.com/washington/marijuana-stores/spokane/ [potguide.com]
Seriously, we have great stores, great product, great prices (frequently LESS than the nearly completely dead black market had) and they usually start at about $15 an hour for budtenders. (our minimum wage is $12)
Now, we streamlined a bit and gave the liquor board control, rather than create more bureaucracy, but all they did is set the rules and allowed weed to be its own thing. The booze brigade are the wrong people to be developing this market, they fought against it, and deserve none of the benefits.
Society didn't fall into ruin, neighborhoods weren't destroyed, cats aren't sleeping with dogs, and crime went down.
The trope of the burn out stoner doesn't shop at these stores, since they require cash and not the stereo out of that BMW in the parking lot next door. It's grandma, mom and dad, the young professionals, cops, bureaucrats, politicians, teachers (who need it more than anyone!), basically everyone except the burnt out stoner.
And it's thankfully far too late to put the weed genie into the booze bottle. At least here.
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Monday May 06 2019, @10:30PM (3 children)
>I don't do drugs recreationally not even weed
What about alcohol, tobacco, or caffeine? Those are after all no less drugs than those demonized by the "drug war", they're just far more widely accepted in our society. And tobacco is one of the most addictive and health-damaging of the popular drugs out there, while alcohol is among the most dangerous in terms of people doing really stupid shit that endangers both their own life and those of bystanders (and is also none too kind to your health in excess).
The rest of your post seems spot on, I just felt the need to point out that a massive amount of drug use is already widely accepted and legal in this country, we just commonly make a baseless semantic distinction between those drugs, and the ones that are illegal.
(Score: 2) by sshelton76 on Tuesday May 07 2019, @12:54AM
Well ok you got me there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @02:59PM (1 child)
Reminds me of something my Daddy once said when someone once brought up the tobacco/alcohol being legal thing.... Aren't the ones we've got already bad enough?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday May 07 2019, @11:42PM
Yes they certainly are. In fact they're among the worst of the bunch, so why not legalize the much safer ones to give people better options?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Monday May 06 2019, @07:34PM (8 children)
Ooh, local politics for your friendly neighborhood DeathMonkey!
I will be voting Yes to legalize the mushrooms.
I think I'll be voting No on 300. The urban camping ban is bullshit. But 300 is so vague and ill-defined it's just going to end up wasting time in the courts and might even be used against the folks doing the actual homeless outreach.
I didn't know there was a minimum wage bill on the ballot but I'll probably vote for it.
I'm planning on voting this week so would be legitimately interested in input.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday May 06 2019, @08:07PM (7 children)
Vote early and often.
Voting doesn't close by the end of tomorrow?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @08:16PM (3 children)
If you did less psilocybin you'd have a better grasp of time.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by takyon on Monday May 06 2019, @08:22PM (2 children)
It's a May 7, 2019 election, anon shitstain.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @11:05PM
I read somewhere that drugs make you temperamental.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday May 06 2019, @11:44PM
Yes, but what time is it now? :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday May 06 2019, @09:10PM (2 children)
Damn, now that's some useful input!
For some reason I thought I had until the 15th but they're definitely due tomorrow.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday May 06 2019, @09:21PM (1 child)
The curse of early voting? You see it start but don't remember when it's supposed to finish.
Good luck at the ballot box.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Tuesday May 07 2019, @08:29AM
That's an interesting observation.
We get our ballots in the mail, and drop them off at voter boxes at the libraries, post offices and other places. Usually, I get the ballot and research it on my first day off, fill it out and drop it off on my way to work after my 'weekend*', but there have been at least two instances when I was busy and put it off, resulting in exactly that. Forgetting when the final due date was. One I made by hours, and another, well, I missed it by days.
It's nice to have time to research, ballot in hand, but it's also easy to put it off and forget.
At the same time it actually made a voter out of me. When Reagan was declared the winner, I was not even off work yet, at that point I said fuck it, and didn't start voting again until we went to the all paper mail in system. Yeah, I know the popular vote doesn't actually elect a president, but it seems pointless to vote at all when 'the big one' is called before you even have the chance to cast a ballot for the criminal of your choice.
Just my anecdote, have a good one T.
*weekend for me varies quite a bit, frequently being midweek.
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Monday May 06 2019, @08:29PM (1 child)
This could pave the way for sufferers of migraine and cluster headaches [duckduckgo.com] (AKA suicide headaches) to find some relief.
It's criminal to make sufferers wait for drug companies to develop hyper-expensive and less effective drugs when we know a treatment that works now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @09:35PM
Fuck yeah 4-oh-psylocibin cured my wife migraine in one dose, they never came back, she is to hurt so bad that she would puke...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday May 08 2019, @07:24AM
https://www.denverpost.com/2019/05/07/psychedelic-magic-mushrooms-denver-election/ [denverpost.com]
We'll see, but it looks on track for a narrow loss. Some people may be emboldened by that 48% level of support though. Maybe the initiative would have succeeded in a presidential election year.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]