Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law enabling California doctors to prescribe psilocybin, MDMA, and any other Schedule 1 illegal drugs to patients if and when the drug is rescheduled to a lower tier in the federal Controlled Substances Act, or approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration for an exemption.

Not exactly the result we were looking for, but it does provide a stepping stone for future legislation. Here’s more: https://psychedelicspotlight.com/california-bill-doctors-prescribe-psychedelics-psilocybin-mdma-schedule-1-drugs/

The City Council in Portland, Maine, voted to deprioritize the local enforcement of laws against psychedelic plants and fungi, adopting a resolution that emphasizes treating the use and possession of all controlled substances as a public health matter.

The body voted 6–3 in favor of the resolution, which dictates that the arrest and prosecution of people for possession, use, cultivation for personal use, or sharing without compensation should be the lowest law enforcement priority for the city.  Check it out: https://www.marijuanamoment.net/maines-biggest-city-passes-legislation-to-decriminalize-psychedelic-plants-and-fungi/

A new study published in Molecular Psychology suggests that repeated low doses of psilocybin could increase resilience to stress and lower compulsive actions.

Using rats, researchers found that repeated low doses of psilocybin imparted resilience against the stress of multiple subcutaneous injections, and reduced the frequency of self-grooming (a proxy for human compulsive actions) while also increasing 5-HT₇ receptor expression and synaptic density in the paraventricular nucleus of the thalamus. Here’s more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-023-02280-z

Did you know that Czechoslovakia was once one of the largest producers of LSD in the world?

The history of LSD in Czechoslovakia is absolutely fascinating, but questions have always remained about why LSD was so popular in the former satellite state of the Soviet Union.

Some believe that it was because a large portion of the country was atheist and found psychedelics to be the most attractive form of satisfying their metaphysical needs.

Others believe it was the result of the state’s well-developed chemical and pharmaceutical industry, which allowed Czechoslovakia to become the only country in the Eastern Bloc capable of manufacturing LSD on a mass scale.

Worth noting: today, LSD is actually decriminalized in the Czech Republic. Users are allowed to carry up to 5 tabs of acid (deemed “personal amount”) without it being labeled a criminal offense. Here’s more: https://przekroj.pl/en/society/a-communist-lsd-trip-aleksander-kaczorowski