The Illinois Compassionate Use of Natural Plants and Fungi Act

Here at Tripping with Nate, I typically flag and interpret news, talk about concepts and ideas about psychedelics, and try to portray as many different perspectives and ways of understanding the developments in the world of psychedelics as possible. It isn’t very often that I have the opportunity to break actual news, but here it goes:

This week, Illinois will become the fourth state to introduce major drug policy reform regarding psychedelics.

In the last edition of the newsletter, I named five principles that I felt were neccesary for fair, just and workable reform. Since then, I’ve been contributing to a really awesome team of folks who have written a law that I think meets those principles very well. It’s called the Illinois Compassionate Use of Natural Plants and Fungi Act, and it will be introduced to the Illinois legislature this week. You can attend the virtual town hall at this link: Town Hall with Representative LaShawn Ford

Jean Lacy, founder and all-around dynamo from the Illinois Psychedelic Society, has been a lead coordinator of putting this together, and I cannot even fathom the amount of work she’s put into this. I’ve also really enjoyed working with Vilmarie Narloch and Geoff Bathje, both founders of the Sana Healing Collective, among other things. The final product is one to be proud of, in my opinion, and I believe can serve as a model for how to liberalize psychedelic policy while avoiding many of the major pitfalls that could create significant problems. Jean invited me to co-moderate the above panel with Representative Ford and other architects of the law, including Mark Peysakhovich and Vilmarie Narloch, along with Sam Chapman, who was a leading proponent of the prop 109 campaign that created Oregon’s successful 2020 psychedelic ballot initiative.

This bill will, in short, do the following:

1) Decriminalization: Removes criminal penalties for growing, possessing and consuming small quantities of any plant or fungus-based psychedelic (excluding peyote out of respect for the wishes of the Native American Church).

2) Legalization: Creates a legal, regulated framework for growing, selling, processing and consuming psilocybin and psilocybin containing mushrooms. This includes direct sales of mushrooms to citizens at approved "psilocybin service centers" who may take them with them and consume as they wish.

3) Supervised use: Creates an oversight board and entails a rule-making process to ensure that citizens who wish to use psilocybin in a supportive environment will be able to hire a credentialed, qualified professional. Any citizen can do so, not simply people with diagnosable mental health conditions, and they may work with professionals from various backgrounds. People seeking treatment for mental health specifically will be treated by professionals who are state licensed as a mental health provider AND certified as a psychedelic supervisor.

I believe this is a fair summary, though with any law, the devil is in the details. There will be a lot of work that goes into it as it winds through the legislative and then hopefully, the rulemaking process.

Below, you can find my prepared remarks on the bill that I will be presenting Wednesday.

Why right now is the perfect time for major reform

There has been a great deal of activity on the psychedelic reform front in just the last two years. Just over a year ago Oregon made history and became the first state to pass major drug reform into law, doing so by a popular vote of its citizens. The people of Oregon chose to end criminal penalties for personal amounts of drugs generally, and specifically created a process to allow for legal administration of psilocybin services within two years. Since then California, New York and Washington State have proposed versions of their own psychedelic reform bills.

It is worth considering why so much energy is being put towards this right now.

As many in this audience could surely attest, psychedelics are a very hot topic right now. In the popular press, and on social media, psychedelics are becoming ubiquitous in discussions of mental health. Last year alone, more than 2 billion dollars were invested in various companies and startups involved in psychedelic pharmaceutical development, service provision, and training for psychedelic facilitators. Additionally, in our academic institutions, the science of psychedelics is growing in a very big way.

Major psychedelic research centers have sprung up in the last few years in London, New York, Austin, Berkeley, and just north of us in Madison. Psychedelics are helping neuroscientists better study the brain, basic science is developing regarding the impact of psychedelics on human psychology and the processes of change, and clinical research into Psilocybin is in the third phase of the three phase FDA approval process which, if successful, would make psilocybin a legally available medicine. In fact, psilocybin was granted breakthrough therapy status by the FDA due to the strong results of initial clinical trials.

With all these developments developing with increasing speed, one might ask why Illinois should make these changes now, rather than waiting to see how things play out along these previously mentioned fronts. There are several reasons why the time to act is now.

First, we have to dispense with the very idea that we are moving swiftly or rashly. When Nixon signed the controlled substances act in 1970, he rashly and without supporting evidence based in science or fact created a fundamental absurdity, one that made cultivation, possession or consumption of certain plants and fungi freely growing on God’s earth into major crimes punishable with the loss of one’s freedom. This resulted in the abrupt ending of scientific research and decades of wasted time as these potential healing substances could not be investigated.

This has proven to be a devastating incursion into the autonomy of a free people, and a major source of injustice. It has failed by any measure. The best time to begin to unwind this monstrosity was 1970. The second-best time is now.

Psychedelic drugs, while not without risk, do not present the same dangers as legal drugs such as tobacco or alcohol, or even socially acceptable non-drug activities such as horseback riding or motocross.  In terms of risk, there is not a reasonable argument to be made that psychedelic drugs should be against the law. In terms of individual autonomy, the case is clear that psychedelic prohibition end immediately.

Second, we must not let prohibition 1.0 lead into prohibition 2.0. By this I mean that we must not let prohibition by legal coercion become prohibition by corporate coercion. As I mentioned, there are currently billions being spent on determining the future of psychedelic drugs, and much of that is being spent with the intention of abusing the US patent process in order to choke access to only proprietary, overpriced compounds rather than the safe and effective natural plants and fungi that currently exist widely.

Pre-emptively and justly ending prohibition of psychedelic plants and fungi ensures that whatever innovations corporate scientists make will be valued on their own merits and will not take advantage of an unethical appropriation of what are fundamentally public goods.

Third and finally, we are in dire need, as a culture, for creative and new solutions to our crises of mental health and social dysfunction, both of which have been amplified by the harrowing pandemic we’ve all experienced. As we have elected to, in this legislation, value autonomy as a fundamental good, this bill allows for individuals to exercise a great deal of choice regarding how they encounter psychedelic medicines. They may safely purchase psilocybin and use it in a manner of their choosing. They may also elect to utilize psilocybin in a safe and supervised setting, with trained and experienced facilitators. They may do so for reasons of personal growth, or for treatment of a mental health condition. In the event that a person seeks treatment for a psychological challenge, they will be able to choose to work with a facilitator who is also a credentialed mental health professional.

There are many challenges to face as we begin the process of unwinding our failed and disastrous policy of prohibition. As we do so, we must, in a free society, place autonomy front and center. We must ensure that all people have access to high quality, unbiased information about substances so that they may make their own truly informed decisions. We must make sure that people have safe options for how they obtain and use their preferred substance, without coercing them into unnecessarily expensive or restrictive settings that they do not want. We must ensure that those who wish for support can receive it safely and with care that is informed by the best available scientific evidence.

This bill, the Illinois Compassionate Use of Natural Plants and Fungi Act, is a tremendous step in the right direction.

Help spread the word! Click below to share this post to bring awareness to this process. The best way to ensure this law makes it though in anything like its current form is for people to get involved!