The California State Senate has sent a bill to the Assembly that would make possession of drugs like LSD and magic mushrooms legal.
The Senate voted 21-16 in favor of SB 519 Controlled Substances: decriminalization of certain hallucinogenic substances on Tuesday. The bill's author, State Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco, said the war on drugs has failed.
“Drugs, mental health, addiction, these are hard issues. And these are issues that we have, frankly, not grappled with as a society,” said Wiener.
Republican Melissa Melendez of Riverside was one of the 16 state senators who voted against the bill.
“I don’t know why in the world we would be contemplating legalizing a drug like ketamine, [which is] used to incapacitate young women and girls for the purposes of raping them,” said Melendez.
Ketamine is listed as a date rape drug by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), an arm of the federal government that funds research on drug abuse. In April, the head of NIDA Nora D. Volkow called for the US to research “public health–based alternatives to criminalization, ranging from drug courts and other diversion programs to policies decriminalizing drug possession” in a Health Affairs blog.
“People with substance use disorders need treatment, not punishment, and drug use disorders should be approached with a demand for high-quality care and with compassion for those affected,” Volkow wrote.
Possession of drugs including LSD, magic mushrooms, DMT and MDMA would no longer be a criminal offense but selling those drugs would still be illegal should the bill pass the Assembly.