Massachusetts Lawmakers Approve Psilocybin Bill To Legalize For ‘Therapeutic, Spiritual And Medicinal Purposes’

With a psychedelics legalization initiative pending before lawmakers ahead of a potential vote on the November ballot, a Massachusetts legislative committee has advanced a separate bill that would legalize psilocybin therapy in the commonwealth and set up a framework to license facilitators who would supervise medical, therapeutic and spiritual applications of the drug.

The measure, H.3605 from Rep. Nicholas A. Boldyga (R), would require the state Department of Public Health to establish a licensing process for both facilitators themselves and “independent training schools” to instruct them. Would-be facilitators would need to complete no less than 20 hours and no more than 300 hours of training from a licensed school, of which a minimum of 20 would need to be in-person practical training.

The legislature’s Joint Committee on Public Health voted to advance the bill with a favorable report on Wednesday.

Facilitators would also need to be 21 or older, Massachusetts residents, high-school graduates and free of felonies for the past five years prior to applying for a license. They would be allowed to possess up to five grams of psilocybin under the proposal. In psychedelic mushrooms, that weight would not include the “water and fungi material that is part of the psilocybin.”

Participants 18 years or older, meanwhile, “may use psilocybin during facilitated sessions, by a properly licensed psilocybin facilitator, for therapeutic, spiritual and medicinal purposes,” the bill says.

Health regulators would make further rules and regulations around licensure.

Facilitators would need to pay a $155 biennial licensing fee, which the advocacy group Bay Staters for Natural Medicine notes would be significantly less than licensing costs in Oregon, the first U.S. state to legalize facilitated psilocybin services.

Licensing will be akin to how the state already regulates licensed counselors. The bill also waives fees for officers, EMTs, paramedics, and veterans with an honorable discharge

This bill is good policy AND good politics #massachusetts#psychedelic

— Bay Staters for Natural Medicine (@baystaters) February 8, 2024

Regulators in that Oregon licensed the country’s first state-regulated psychedelic facilitator last April. Many have complained that the services can cost thousands of dollars, however, which the Massachusetts bill’s low licensing fees are designed to combat.

The measure advanced this week is one of three psychedelics reforms that sponsor Boldyga filed last year, including others to reschedule MDMA pending federal approval and set a price cap on therapeutic access.

The development comes on the heels of local leaders in the city of Medford adopting a resolution to deprioritize arrests around psychedelic plants and fungi and also urge county prosecutors to stop pursuing cases of possession, cultivation or distribution of the substances.

Medford is the eighth Massachusetts city to adopt such a policy, along with Salem, Somerville, Cambridge, Easthampton, Northampton, Amherst and Provincetown.

The activist-backed legalization initiative now before state lawmakers, meanwhile, would create a regulatory framework for lawful and supervised access to psychedelics at licensed facilities. It would also legalize the possession and gifting of psychedelics such as psilocybin and ayahuasca, but it would not otherwise provide for commercial retail sales of the substances.

After activists collected an initial batch of signatures from voters, the legislature now has the choice of enacting the reform, proposing a substitute or declining to act entirely. If lawmakers decide not to legalize psychedelics by May 1, activists would then have until July 3 to submit at least 12,429 additional valid signatures to put the proposal before voters on the November 2024 ballot.

Separately, Gov. Maura Healy (D) last month drew attention to testimony around a veterans-focused bill that she’s introduced to create a psychedelics work group that would study the therapeutic potential of substances such as psilocybin.

Another bill would authorize the Department of Public Health to conduct a comprehensive study into the potential therapeutic effects of synthetic psychedelics like MDMA.

Rep. Mike Connolly (D) also filed a bill in 2021 that received a Joint Judiciary Committee hearing on studying the implications of legalizing entheogenic substances like psilocybin and ayahuasca.

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Photo courtesy of Wikimedia/Mushroom Observer.

Cambridge City Council Decriminalizes Psychedelics And Urges Police To End Drug Arrests More Broadly

Cambridge, Massachusetts has become the latest city to decriminalize a wide range of psychedelics following a City Council vote on Wednesday. But lawmakers also used the opportunity to push for broader reforms that go beyond the entheogen-focused measures approved in other municipalities across the country, calling on police to stop arresting people for possessing or using any illicit drugs.

Local legislators approved the resolution 8-1, making Cambridge the second city in Massachusetts to adopt the psychedelics and drug policy change. The Somerville City Council advanced a similar decriminalization measure last month.

The text of the ordinance states that, like many cities and states across the country, Cambridge has “begun in recent years to recognize that criminalizing users of substances such as cannabis is neither a just or effective legal approach.”

Watch the Cambridge City Council meeting below, starting around 55:44:35: 

“Drug policy in the United States and the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ has historically led to unnecessary penalization, arrest, and incarceration of vulnerable people, particularly people of color and of limited financial means, instead of prioritizing harm-reduction policies that treat drug abuse as an issue of public health,” it continues.

Congratulations to Cambridge, Massachusetts! Cambridge City Council votes 8-1 to #DecriminalizeNature! The second city in #Massachusetts to decriminalize in 2021. Great work @DecrimNatureMA and @BayStaters! Go team Nature! pic.twitter.com/uE9dZ7DKgp

— Decriminalize Nature (@DecrimNature) February 4, 2021

In order to resolve the problem, the measures stipulates that enforcement of laws against possession and cultivation of entheogenic plants and fungi like ayahuasca, ibogaine and psilocybin mushrooms should be among the city’s lowest priorities. It also directs the county prosecutor to drop cases related to the possession and use of controlled substances.

It states that “the arrest of adult persons for using or possessing controlled substances shall be amongst the lowest law enforcement priority for the City of Cambridge.”

Further, the measurerequires the city manager to direct staff that work with the state and federal government to advocate for decriminalizing entheogenic plants and fungi. Additionally, it says the city government cannot use funds to “assist in the enforcement of laws imposing criminal penalties for the use and possession of entheogenic plants by adults.”

On Monday, I’m introducing a Cambridge City Council resolution seeking to end criminalization of entheogenic plants & substances like mushrooms.

It’s a step towards understanding substance use through the lense of public health and not the so-called “War on Drugs” pic.twitter.com/QYVTdERLOs

— Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler 🌹 (@VoteJivan) January 31, 2021

One council member said during Wednesday’s meeting that while he was skeptical of the proposal when it was introduced, he appreciated that activists brought it forward because it provided an education on the issue, especially “for older people like me.” He said “it made a difference” and it became “very clear” why the policy change was necessary.

The Boston Globe reported on Thursday that a Massachusetts state representative is planning to file legislation to “create a committee of public officials, scientists, criminal justice experts and others to study whether Massachusetts should decriminalize natural psychedelics and legalize their administration in therapeutic settings statewide.”

The panel could also “study whether to decriminalize possession of small amounts of other currently illicit substances,” the outlet said.

In the meantime, Cambridge joins a growing number of cities across the U.S. that have enacted psychedelics decriminalization. Most of the reforms have advanced legislatively, though Washington, D.C. became the first jurisdiction to decriminalize via the ballot in November.

Four other cities—Oakland, Santa Cruz, Ann Arbor and Somerville—have also decriminalized possession of plant-and fungi-based psychedelics.

In Oregon, November’s election saw the passage of a historic initiatives to legalize psilocybin mushrooms for therapeutic purposes and more broadly decriminalize possession of all drugs.

Much of this reform progress can be traced back to Denver, which became the first city in the country to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms in May 2019. Since then, activists in more than 100 cities have expressed interest in pursuing psychedelics decriminalization.

In Oakland, the first city where a city council voted to broadly deprioritize criminalization of entheogenic substances, lawmakers approved a follow-up resolution in December that calls for the policy change to be adopted statewide and for local jurisdictions to be allowed to permit healing ceremonies where people could use psychedelics.

After Ann Arbor legislators passed a decriminalization resolution in September, a county prosecutor recently announced that his office will not be pursuing charges over possessing entheogenic plants and fungi—“regardless of the amount at issue.”

Meanwhile, lawmakers in California, New York, Virginia, Washington and other states are considering psychedelics and drug policy reform bills for the 2021 session.

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Photo elements courtesy of carlosemmaskype and Apollo.