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posted by chromas on Thursday May 09 2019, @11:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the ? dept.

Denver votes to become first U.S. city to decriminalize 'magic mushrooms'

Denver will become the first city in the United States to decriminalize magic mushrooms, based on final unofficial results on Wednesday of a ballot initiative about the hallucinogenic drug.

The initiative called for Colorado's capital to end the imposition of criminal penalties for individuals at least 21 years of age for using or possessing psilocybin, widely known as magic mushrooms.

The Denver Elections Divisions will certify results on May 16, but the final count on its website on Wednesday was 50.56 percent of voters in favor and 49.44 percent against.

If the initiative is approved, psilocybin would still remain illegal under both Colorado and federal law. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration classifies the drug as a Schedule 1 substance, meaning the agency has deemed that it has a high potential for abuse with no accepted medical application.

Also at NYT:

"It's surreal," said Travis Tyler Fluck, a field organizer for the campaign to pass the measure, suggesting that Denver had a sizable population of "psychedelic constituents." "People just don't see it as a threat," he added. "Compared to the 'sinister' LSD, magic mushrooms are tame."

Oof. 🚲 🍄

Previously: Denver, Colorado Will Vote on Psilocybin Decriminalization Initiative on May 7

Related: Study Suggests Psilocybin "Resets" the Brains of Depressed People
Shrooms Safest, Comparatively Speaking


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  • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday May 10 2019, @03:10AM

    by JNCF (4317) on Friday May 10 2019, @03:10AM (#841687) Journal

    I'm not claiming that radical questioning of government while under the influence of these drugs is universal (just widespread enough to scare the powers that be), and I'm not sure what you mean by "an anarchist country" (well, I do, I'm just being pedantic), but I think these drugs make you more open to questioning the status quo and arriving at extreme conclusions. I also think anarchism and communism are extreme conclusions about government; the state is nothing, or the state is everything. Theoretically the extreme groupman communist state that has never actually existed is supposed to converge with the stateless society; the government, we're told, becomes unnecessary as a specific structure when everybody universally embodies it perfectly, we just need an authoritarian government to help us transition into that state of being. I don't think anarchism and communism in their pure forms are really obtainable goals, and as we move in one direction on that continuum the extremes of the continuum are redefined in reference to where we currently are. A limit can only be approached, never reached.

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