For those of you not familiar with California politics, this has nothing to do with him running for President. The Prison Guard union is one of the strongest in the state. They are against decriminalization because it means fewer inmates, which is bad for their union members.
The Legislative Counsel’s digest at the top is a very accessible summary of the bill. The meat of the summary being:
(1) Existing law categorizes certain drugs and other substances as controlled substances and prohibits various actions related to those substances, including their manufacture, transportation, sale, possession, and ingestion.
This bill would, on and after January 1, 2025, make lawful the possession, preparation, obtaining, or transportation of, specified quantities of psilocybin, psilocyn, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and mescaline, for personal use, as defined, by and with persons 21 years of age or older. The bill would provide penalties for possession of these substances on school grounds, or possession by, or transferring to, persons under 21 years of age.
The bill would require the California Health and Human Services Agency to convene a workgroup to study and make recommendations on the establishment of a framework governing the therapeutic use, including facilitated or supported use, of those substances. The bill would require that workgroup to send a report to the Legislature containing those recommendations on or before January 1, 2025.
Given that last paragraph about HHS coming up with guidelines, I’m skeptical of his reasoning. The rest of the bill looks well written as it was probably created by the nonpartisan Legislative Counsel, an office of the legislature.
Absolutely shameful. Clearly decriminalization is the correct thing to do here. Adults should be able to do what they want. ( Within reason, clearly fent should not be publicly available. )
Zero connection between the desires of our people and what our government does.
And this is yet again why I'm on the left and not a liberal.
Drug problems are solved by better access to quality health care and not punitive policing
This action commits state resources and funds to snatching people up, so it's not like we can't afford the better way - we're just allocating our people and efforts to ineffective methods.
Chasing around users to lock them in cages for 20 years is way more expensive than actually solving the problem of abuse. The only reason a better way stays impossible is because there's an ideological commitment on the part of mainstream political beliefs to keeping it impossible.
This has nothing to do with the center left versus the far left and everything to do with the fact that Gavin Newsom personally wants to run for president.
(Sarcastically) Agreed! There’s lots of hit pieces against Newsom getting lots of air time! On Reddit there were 3-4 different ones on most news subs and then the Israel-Palestine news took over everything on Reddit.
Man I need to get off social media as it’s completely overrun with moneyed/political interests.
>Drug problems are solved by better access to quality health care and not punitive policing
Really? Can you point anywhere where drug problems are "solved"?
Portugal used to be the poster child for this, but opinion is shifting because it hasn't solved anything[0]. We are trying the same in Canada, with similarly mediocre results.
> João Goulão — head of Portugal’s national institute on drug use and the architect of decriminalization — admitted to the local press in December that “what we have today no longer serves as an example to anyone.” Rather than fault the policy, however, he blames a lack of funding.
> Twenty years ago, “we were quite successful in dealing with the big problem, the epidemic of heroin use and all the related effects,” Goulão said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But we have had a kind of disinvestment, a freezing in our response … and we lost some efficacy.”
The story turns out to be much the same as a common trope for those who wish to undo successful policies here in the US: under-fund them as sabotage, and then call them failed when the lack of funding causes lower efficacy. Additionally, prohibitionist policies and the policing drug use has been rising (see 24,25,26 at https://substanceabusepolicy.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1...) over the second half of the time drugs have been decriminalized, so the rollbacks in societal gains need to be taken with a grain of salt.
To add to that, while Portugal is now often brought forward as the “poster child” now that efficacy stats benefit the “law & order” types, a lot of Western European countries have way more compassionate laws and regulations on drugs and far outperform the US both in stats as well as the boots in the ground situation on the streets.
As per usual this is presented as a “uniquely American” issue, when in reality many other countries have found solutions to mitigate the issue.
Perpetually spending more and more money is not a solution. I'm also not surprised to see the architect blame funding as opposed to admitting their policy failed.
Again, we are trying to do the same in Canada, and while overdoses are decreasing, these policies are not solving the crisis. In some places they are making it worse.
I feel like many of these solutions are fueled first by ideology, and only then by the evidence.
On the right, people criticize and blame the users, rant about personal responsibility, and try to lock drug users and the mentally ill up and throw away the keys. This is failed policy.
On the left, people invest in legalization and treatment as a personal ideology and don’t seem to be willing to admit when their policies fail. It almost seems like a failed policy conflates to some kind of personal failure that cannot be examined or criticized. And instead of policy failure, it’s always a funding issue, no matter how many times consistent results emerge. This is looking more and more like failed policy too.
I’ve seen it in Van, Portland, Sacramento, Seattle, San Francisco and LA, and it’s pretty consistently not only not getting better but getting much worse.
Ultimately, neither approach seems to be working very well. And in the meantime people are living lives of hopelessness and despair in tremendously awful conditions.
Are there no other options available than these two counter positions? I think we should be having more of an open dialogue about how to solve the problem and be more ready to examine the evidence, even when it doesn’t support our positions, for the greater good of those suffering, and I often see conversations on the topic break down into the tit for tat I’m seeing here. These kinds of conversations are the default, and solve nothing.
Neither Portland nor Seattle have received funding to tamper drug addiction to the necessary degree to provide indication that such a policy would work or not, which leads me to believe your other examples also did not get such funding, thus negating your entire argument, sans the failure of the lock em up policy, of course.
But in doing so you’re doing precisely what I’ve referenced as leading with ideology.
You are making assumptions about funding being the issue based on what you think should work and then attacking my argument by justifying your belief with assumptions to support the conclusion you want instead of letting the data and the facts lead.
For what it’s worth, draconian penalties against drug use, possession and trafficking actually do work. Countries like Singapore and many middle eastern countries have death penalties for drug smuggling and life sentences for simple possession and these places genuinely have very low drug usage in society. As a civilized society it’s really not worth killing people over this though.
You’re going to perpetually spend on crime caused by junkies, it’s serious financial burden on the healthcare system and a social burden on families. You’re much better off spending a fraction of that money on rehab.
Treatment works best when people are motivated to get clean. It doesn’t work when they are not. Moreover, the likelihood of good long-term outcomes decreases dramatically when addiction is comorbid with other serious mental illness.
Sadly, I don’t believe that most mentally ill, homeless addicts are going to get better. It’s a terrible situation, and I don’t know of a solution.
I don’t think anyone does.
I would also note that most rehab facilities for substance use disorders espouse an abstinence-based approach to treatment. That approach simply doesn’t work. The standard of care for opioid use disorder is medication assisted treatment, which is both evidence-based and far more effective than abstinence-based programs. The difference in outcomes is stark, particularly since dropout often results in death.
Bottom line, though, from my perspective: you can’t effectively treat people unless and until they are motivated to enter into and engage with a treatment program. “Junkies” of the type you describe rarely fit that bill. Drug courts are a good step in the right direction, but they need to take a more evidence-based approach to their operations.
I wish there was an easy solution to this problem, but there isn’t.
In Los Angeles I can easily find needles in the streets and large encampments of people on drugs.
In say Tokyo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, I cannot. The money and resources we're throwing at the problem is being ineffectively allocated and structured because we're spending more and it's doing less.
By solved here I mean if we spend billions on a problem we shouldn't be getting increasingly large sprawling encampments as a result.
Even poorer cities with plenty of problems of their own like Mexico City and Bangkok had nothing like the issues I've seen on the streets of our wealthiest cities such as San Francisco.
The problem is statecraft based on ideologies which don't consider efficacy as a core value
We could simply give people proper housing at a small fraction of that cost but there's a deep ideological commitment to it being "unearned" and because of these cultural ideologies we end up with the worst solutions at the highest prices.
These myths of rugged individualism, isolated self improvement, the race to the bottom idea of equality, one of the only political groups that really calls horseshit on that is the left.
Just handing out housing doesn't solve the problems that lead to homelessness except in a very small minority of cases, which are also the cases most likely to resolve with less drastic interventions by giving hand ups.
Portugal is not a wealthy country and one of the areas where funding has dropped significantly below adequate levels is the support infrastructure around decriminalization. As with all austerity politics, there are loud reactionary voices who prefer the punitive approach.
To my great sadness, I have known too many people who I consider to be addicts and abusers of drugs, both illegal and prescription.
Except I've never met anyone with an abusive or addictive relationship to psilocybin. I just haven't seen it. Seriously, when was the last time you heard of a family giving someone a mushroom intervention?
I mean they aren't even bothering to go after opiate users in CA at least based on anecdotes I've heard. Maybe official decriminalization is a step too far for newsom.
There is a big difference between opiates, which are widely abused, and psychedelics, which have far lesser risk of abuse and are generally safer physically to consume.
I agree with caesil that this is posturing to support his presidential run, whether for public perception or lobbying/fundraising reasons.
> Drug problems are solved by better access to quality health care and not punitive policing
Doesn’t seem to be working in California. In reality, it seems like the only solution to drug problems is a culture that ostracizes drug users while harshly punishing drug merchants.
he's not anti-mushrooms but he's anti-unfettered access to mushrooms without guidelines in place. I don't know if it's the right call or not but mushrooms are something that's not really fit for general consumption; cannabis being fairly benign and understood is a different issue altogether and one that makes sense to have fairly unfettered access to at a population level.
someone that commits a drug crime that results in a 20 year sentence wouldn't benefit from decriminalization at all. I feel like you'd have to get caught with several metric tons of mushrooms and be clearly involved in a massive distribution enterprise to pull 20 years
Absolutely. If he runs Republicans are going to saturate the airwaves with the hordes of drug addicts living on the street in San Francisco. That won’t play well anywhere.
It’s not really Newsom’s fault since he is not SF city council but people won’t notice that.
Anything seen as being soft on or pro drug will be toxic to him.
No principle need be served by these actions. He can even be aggravating his supporters with them, its not like they'll vote for someone else.
The important thing is getting his name in the news. Bonus points for doing it in some context that makes him seem a little more "centrist" or can be spun that way in the upcoming campaign.
Does Biden go down easy, or hard? Don't think Newsom would be flapping his wings like this if he didn't see the big rooster's perch being empty soon. Think he's been told he'll be the Party Choice already.
Gavin Newsom cannot be reelected as Governor of California. There is no Senate election the year his term is up, and he appointed both Senators he would be running against so that seems like an unlikely avenue anyway. It seems like the only career progression he has is to go national.
I don't think that means he's running for president in 2024. I think it means he's auditioning for a cabinet position to be able to keep his name in the news until 2028.
Newsom has "California" next to his name, which is disqualifying for a presidential run as far as I can see it. Too many independents with the opinion that "Newsom made Cali a shithole"
Anyway, I think national voters are mainly unfamiliar with Newsom, and once he gets exposure he'll be well received. His performance on Hannity is one example of this.
I am a California voter who only votes Democrat, and I have voted for Newsom, but I wouldn't say I particularly like him. I don't know anyone who does. Are there people who really like him?
Yeah, that's a common opinion of Newsom that I hear all the time. I'd say it's pretty close to my opinion too.
But seeing him debate Hannity had something click for me. He is pretty sharp, and has some qualities that national democrats have seemed to lack. I started to think he may have a better chance at the presidency than people give him credit for. I start to think a lot of people haven't really gotten to know him, self included.
that's has to be verified, if any affordable housing was approved in reasonable distance from his current house.
Approving affordable housing in other's backyard is obviously not YIMBY.
there are many negative results of his management one can observe without talking to conservatives: pge bills and blatant crimes rise are some of them.
> While violent and property crime rates increased in 2021, both remain relatively low
That's pretty much it. I get so tired of internet discussions where people do not understand this, and I lost my patience to "converse curiously" with people who choose to remain ignorant of this in order to justify fear or anger or dehumanizing hate.
I've had countless discussions, including on HN, where you can cite this and people will sooner say that crime statistics are false, and specifically falsified in a way that destroys their argument, than admit being wrong or not having a complete perspective.
> I lost my patience to "converse curiously" with people
When this happens, simply refrain from commenting until you regain that patience. This forum only remains civil if we all make our best effort to keep it that way.
No, just someone who remembers the discourse about violent crime in the 90s, eg. It was much worse than today. American cities are universally much safer than when I was a kid. It makes the claim ridiculous.
You can't blame a governor for crime rates anyway. Nor can you draw much correlation to things like policing. It's idiotic and a juvenile view of how and why crime happens. These things happen from so many societal factors and it isn't politicians causing or preventing it.
But it's been a republican culture war wedge issue for a few years lately. Seems like you fell for the con.
> in 90s it was worse, then it got better, then current dems consistently making it worse again.
Call me when the murder rate reaches the 1990s peak. They haven't. I'll say again, American cities are much safer than they've been in my living memory.
> dems made small value crimes not felony,
This is a horse shit explanation. Firstly, that was a ballot initiative passed by will of the voters, probably because California prisons, like most US prisons, have been overcrowded and we have insanely high incarceration rates exceeding pretty much every other nation, which is not appropriate. Secondly, I think people who have looked at this will tell you it had no impact on crime rates. Unless they work for Fox news etc.
> that was a ballot initiative passed by will of the voters
that path is easily manipulated and compromised, because majority of voters don't have capacity to carefully review all propositions. And yes, population blindly supporting dems are also accountable for their actions.
Not interested to discuss your other statements, because I see them as low quality.
Are you seriously blaming the Democrats for the invention of misdemeanour crimes? Or for adjusting the threshold between misdemeanour and felony according to inflation?
Texas has misdemeanour theft to a far higher threshold than California… oops.
How is that relevant? GP was talking about the threshold for misdemeanor vs. felony crimes, and the fact that the threshold is higher in Texas than in California.
Criminals will do more crimes if they not stopped by measures. Measures can be punishment and police enforcement or citizens being able to self defend. In California dems are aggressively reducing both.
This is your conspiracy theory version of you got from conservative media. They're using perception of crime as a wedge issue, just like they used to do with abortion, or do currently with gay and trans bashing. They won't do anything different, and certainly nothing that works better. They just want you angry and afraid.
I don't watch conservative media, I just see more and more posts on r/bayarea about carjacking or blantant assaults and robbery, then I was thinking about buying gun and applying for ccw, and found about SB2 bill which prohibits ccw in most reasonable places.
I don’t think an attack like that works on the national level, he’s very polished in his media appearances and his public persona.
His personal life is a potential liability, though. He’s a pretty well-known philanderer and that’s exactly how the right knows how to attack opponents.
> His personal life is a potential liability, though. He’s a pretty well-known philanderer and that’s exactly how the right knows how to attack opponents.
I disagree. Californians have enjoyed a lot of supremacy at the national level. Nancy Pelosi was the House speaker for quite some time, Kevin McCarthy was elected House speaker. State representatives are pretty immune to this kind of criticism. If someone who managed San Francisco tried to run for national office I think what you said would happen, but I think more than just independents would call them out.
We are not an oligarchy and that term has a specific meaning you seem to not understand. In the US you don’t become wealthy because of your control of government (an oligarch) you control the government due to having first acquired wealth. This is a plutarchy, which American is a lot closer to being.
I’m very skeptical of this, I think he’s slowly raising his profile for a 2028 run.
He’s categorically denied over and over again that he’s interested in forcing Biden into a primary and I think it’s a misread to see this as anything more than a governor doing their job. He’s never left any ambiguity in his answers on this topic.
> He’s categorically denied over and over again that he’s interested
A politician’s denials don’t mean much.
He can easily say that the the polls are showing that most Americans seeing Biden as mentally and physically unfit for President and would even vote for Trump, so he is reluctantly stepping up to save the country from Trump.
Typically, folks who are running or thinking about running don’t directly answer questions about it.
It’s also very common for inside knowledge on an exploratory committee to be leaked to the press ahead of a run. Serious candidates hire a team to strategize months before making an announcement and it never stays silent because the exploratory committee itself tends to leak in order to gauge the early reaction. We’ve seen neither of these things from Newsom.
By "run" I just meant that he'd appear in the set of people that might be considered (by Biden) if for any reason it turns out he wants Harris replaced.
Then go up to my first reply. Newsom isn't going to run for a position he has a 0% chance of winning and will piss people off trying. He probably wants a cabinet position.
I guess it would have the benefit of giving him exposure, and I'm not sure if there's a better cabinet position otherwise, but does being secretary of state actually help with making a case for people to like him for presidency? How much of the credit does he get if things go well vs. the blame if things go poorly?
Trumps baggage doesn’t matter as much because he has a cult that will vote for him literally no matter what.
They’ve even been presented with equally or even more right wing candidates and have rejected them for Trump. It’s not even about the politics. It’s about their desire for a strong man ruler.
“California should immediately begin work to set up regulated treatment guidelines - replete with dosing information, therapeutic guidelines, rules to prevent against exploitation during guided treatments, and medical clearance of no underlying psychoses,"
aka my constituents want to profit from this so let's pump the brakes until they can get that configured
Total outsider to this political landscape but is it possible the law was very badly written that it needed the veto and a statement that's essentially 'go back and fix this'?
I feel like this thread is so full of disillusionment of politics that there's zero trust. Which I get but how would a well intentioned politician avoid this suspicion of corruption?
Stepping into this thread no one's really talking to that nuance of motivation though. It's all about underhanded motives. Which is concerning because a country won't function without some level of trust in it's leadership.
Sounds like he wants medical mushrooms via doctors not decriminalize psychedelics
Are there even other ones besides psilocybin that’s used for potential medical stuff? Is it even researched beyond the very early days? Is that even the point of this shift to decrim?
I’m sure if they make a policy to decriminalize it after x months a team of doctors could put together basic safety guidelines for adults
You're supposed to have to demonstrate harm to criminalize something, not demonstrate safety to legalize it. That's why other herbs and the shit they sell at GNC are so unregulated. The only difference here is their profit.
What you’re missing is the massive legal category of “prescription drugs”. In some countries, you can just go to the pharmacy and buy Lipitor or Viagra or levothyroxine or antibiotics without a prescription. The United States is not one of those countries. Requiring a drug to be prescribed in a medical setting is the default legal stance in this country, except it takes years of waiting on the FDA to even get that far.
> You're supposed to have to demonstrate harm to criminalize something
Normatively, I agree with you, but descriptively, that's false. Legislatures can criminalize almost anything they want as long as what they criminalize doesn't offend the constitution.
There are many fungi, or chemicals derived from them, that are used in medicine. Penicillin was from fungi. They're using turkey tail mushroom in combo with other cancer treatments. I think PSK (anti-cancer theraputic in Japan, I think) was originally from shiitake. Lions mane mushroom has been studied as a nootropic for stroke recovery. Relishi, chaga, cordesepes, and others are out there too, although I'm not sure to what degree they have been studies or employed in mainstream medicine.
Modern shrooms are stronger than they were in the past due to selective breeding and growing. Around 4x stronger. Educating the consumer on this will be difficult, the "I usually eat an 8th" crowd will be who is going to be helped more. Their are commercial tests for this very thing, to the point where once you know how strong a strain is you will be able to dose it according to volume of ground product. Complicating this is the fact that if you eat an orange then it makes the product even stronger. No clue how to solve all this, just know it is a real issue.
Other side of this is that ketamine therapies are being ran out of old dentist offices with zero therapeutic guidelines TODAY. They are selling snake oil and letting folks not get the break throughs they deserve.
I founded the Decriminalize Nature movement in NYC and established a non-profit lobby group w funds from Doctor Bronners, and found that the political apparatus is looking to get its people paid.
This is 100% the doing of the Prison Guard union.