Scott Wiener
State Sen. Scott Wiener aims to decriminalize a variety of plant-based psychedelic drugs like “magic mushrooms” with new legislation he announced Monday.
Senate Bill 58 would decriminalize the possession and personal use of psilocybin, psilocyn, Dimethyltryptamine, mescaline — excluding peyote — and ibogaine for people 21 years and older.
“The war on drugs has been a complete failure,” Wiener said at a news conference outside of San Francisco’s War Memorial on Monday. “We need to treat drug use as a health issue and stop treating it as a criminal issue.”
Wiener, D-San Francisco, said the clinical use of such psychedelic drugs has been shown to help treat depression, anxiety, PTSD and drug addiction.
The bill is sponsored by Heroic Hearts Project, an organization that helps veterans find psychedelic therapy, among other things.
Michael Young, a U.S. Army veteran and Heroic Hearts spokesman said he came back from Afghanistan “spiritually broken, lost and unable to find my way back to normalcy.”
“Psychedelics helped heal the unseen scars from my 10 years of service in the War on Terror,” Young said Monday.
Wiener said similar efforts have been successful in Washington D.C., Oakland, San Francisco and Santa Cruz, and via ballot measures in Oregon and Colorado.
This is his second attempt to pass decriminalization legislation in the California Senate. Last year, Wiener’s SB519 made it out of the Senate but eventually stalled in the Assembly.
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