In 2020, it looked as though the war on drugs would begin to end in Oregon.
After Measure 110 was passed that year, Oregon became the first state in the US to decriminalize personal possession of all drugs that had been outlawed by the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, ranging from heroin and cocaine to LSD and psychedelic mushrooms. When it went into effect in early 2021, the move was celebrated by drug reform advocates who had long been calling for decriminalization in the wake of President Nixon’s failed war on drugs.
Now, amid a spike in public drug use and overdoses, Oregon is in the process of reeling back its progressive drug laws, with a new bill that aims to reinstate lighter criminal penalties for personal drug possession. And while the target is deadly drugs like fentanyl, the law would also result in banning non-clinical use of psychedelics like MDMA, DMT, or psilocybin — drugs that are unconnected to the current overdose epidemic and the public displays of drug use.
By treating all drugs as an undifferentiated category, Oregon is set to deliver a major blow to advocates of psychedelic use who don’t want to see expensive clinics and tightly controlled environments be the only legal point of access. While regulated and supervised models for using psychedelics are showing growing promise for treating mental illness, decriminalized use allows for a much wider spectrum of user motivations — many of which have occurred for millennia — no less deserving of legal protection, from recreational and spiritual to the simple pleasure of spicing up a museum visit with a small handful of mushrooms.
“The biggest threat to psychedelics is from people who would claim to be for them in extremely limited contexts and against them in all others,” said Jon Dennis, a lawyer specializing in psychedelics at Sagebrush Law in Ontario, Oregon.
It would be one thing if arguments against the decriminalization of psychedelics were being made. But that’s not the case. Instead, the lumping together of psychedelics and opioids seems to have gone largely unnoticed, setting up personal use of psychedelics to become an unintended casualty of Oregon’s opioid crisis.
How Oregon decriminalized drugs
The idea behind drug decriminalization was that investing in health services and harm reduction are more effective and humane responses to substance abuse than incarceration. The hope was for Oregon to serve as inspiration for other states, and eventually the nation, to follow suit.
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