New York City Bar Association, March 27, 2024 Description:This program will examine the rapid changes in psychedelic law and policy in the five years since Denver voters passed Ordinance 301.  In May 2019, Denver voters approved Initiated Ordinance 301, a ballot initiative that decriminalized the personal use and possession of psilocybin mushrooms. The following month,… Read More Psychedelic Law Reform: Five Years After Denver I-301

Looks like I completely forgot to post a link to the video recording of the program in which I presented “Research, Referendum, Litigation, and Legislation: Picking the Locks on the Doors of Perception” at the National Institutes of Health on September 14, 2023. https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/education-and-outreach/exploratory-workshop/2023-workshop/index.html My presentation begins at 35:30 minutes in. (I make some additional comments throughout… Read More My presentation at the full-day “Exploring the Ethical and Practical Considerations of Psychedelics Research,” an Exploratory Workshop conducted by the Office for Human Research Protections in the National Institutes of Health

Interesting article from Montreal.Increasing access to psilocybin as civil disobedience. …and here’s the New York Post getting in on the action, with an article which I consider obviously intended to trigger a crackdown by NYPD on the totally brazen psilocybin mushroom market here. So here’s the thing: psychedelics have relatively few externalized costs relative to… Read More The market doesn’t sit still – an ongoing blogpost

Part of why I consider psychedelic law special is the dual identity of psychedelics as sacraments and drugs simultaneously, subject to completely different legal restrictions. This contradiction should be a subject of interest in policymaking, since it indicates that psychedelics are a technology whose effects are beyond our current comprehension. How can a “medication” induce… Read More Drug and sacrament

Dateline: June 18, 2023: In the June 1, 2023, episode of The New Amsterdam Psychedelic Law Show I spoke with attorney Jon Dennis about his proposal for an alternative access route to psilocybin under the Oregon Psilocybin Services Act and then more generally about First Amendment Law and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), arriving… Read More Psychedelics and the law of religion

Following is most of the outline for the presentation I gave to staff attorneys yesterday in a Continuing Legal Education class. It includes much of the material that appears in the pdf included in my post from May but it includes in addition comments on the Colorado, New Jersey, and New York bills. One of… Read More My presentation on psychedelic law to attorneys in the New York City Council

On May 26 I taught what I expect will be my last Continuing Legal Education class for a long time, if not longer. Here’s a link to the program. I’m sharing the PowerPoint presentation here:

If there are Second Amendment Sanctuaries maybe there should be Psychedelic Sanctuaries. If necessary we could get a Constitutional amendment to recognize freedom of consciousness, the predicate to all other freedoms as the premise of wisdom, the premise of our system of government.

I’m going to try a new approach here, prompted by what I read as concern in the psychedelic sector media about the prospect of market capture through intellectual property rights (which I assume could be a collaborative efforts to some degree among the pharmaceutical interests, governmental prohibitionists, and conservative social actors). I don’t know if… Read More Strategic realism

In this episode of the New Amsterdam Psychedelic Law Show I speak with São Paulo-based attorney Guilherme Kfouri as part of my quest to connect with psychedelic lawyers all over the world. Guilherme describes evolutions in Brazilian drug law, including recognition of the indigenous use of ayahusaca, the spread of ayahuasca use into urban environments,… Read More Psychedelics in Brazil: legitimacy and legality