Dissecting Drug Policy with Ethnobiologist Brian Pace, PhD

As America’s mental health struggles continue unabated, psychedelic substances like psilocybin are becoming more thoroughly researched and accepted as legitimate treatments for mental health disorders such as post traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression for the first time since they were outlawed in 1968. Many are saying we are in the midst of a “Psychedelic Renaissance”. Through a ballot initiative in 2020, Oregon became the first state to both decriminalize and legalize psychedelics for use in therapy. Even President Joe Biden has gone on the record to say that psychedelics will likely be legalized for use to assist in therapy within two years. The question has become: is trusting a profit-driven pharmaceutical industry which has been known to deceive consumers to be the sole distributor of these powerful drugs the best decision in our current healthcare model? 

Ethnobiologist Brian Pace PhD is on the front lines of this psychedelic renaissance (although he wouldn’t call it that). Originally from Portland, Oregon, Pace is the Politics and Ecology Editor at Psymposia - a leftist watchdog publication focusing on drug policy. Additionally, he teaches the course Psychedelic Studies at Ohio State University - the only university with a license from the DEA to grow psilocybin mushrooms for research purposes. Pace speaks with AIR about how the current trend of ideas around legalizing psychedelics through the American healthcare system may spell bad news for access and privacy. 

You may be wondering, what are psychedelics?. As the Alcohol and Drug Foundation puts it, “psychedelics are a class of psychoactive substances that produce changes in perception, mood and cognitive processes”. They can occur naturally in plants and fungi (examples: mescaline from peyote cactus and psilocybin from mushrooms) as well as artificially in labs (example: LSD). The plant medicines are often referred to as herbal cleansers rather than psychedelics because of their ability to penetrate the body’s systems, putting users in a state of gratitude and increase the capacity of neuroplasticity in the brain

Thanks to his time studying in Mexico and Central America, Pace knows that psychedelics have been used since ancient times by indigenous peoples as sacred medicines for spiritual ceremonies. Psychedelics entered American mainstream society in the middle of the 20th century, quickly gained popularity, and were just as quickly demonized through the War on Drugs - which decimated communities, draining their resources and fueling prison and policing policies of mass incarceration which disproportionately affected Black and Brown populations. This mass incarceration has carried slavery into the modern era by exploiting the loophole in the 13th Amendment which outlawed slavery except as punishment for a crime. Now, Pace is trying to make psychedelics safer through education and conversation rather than the failed strategies of stigmatization and criminalization. “What I do is try to change the way we have conversations about drugs… because drugs won the war a long time ago”. 

Pace sums up the qualities of psychedelic uses with the words of Dr. Igo Hartogsohn: meaning magnification, boundary dissolution, and hyper association. All that is to say that psychedelics can be used to magnify positivity in one’s perception and dissolve artificial boundaries one draws between themselves and other life forms such as fellow humans, animals, and plants. This is incredibly promising given the present state of the world and its human-induced climate catastrophes and geopolitical violence. As Pace puts it “imagine focusing less on building parking lots and more on building parks, effectively reorienting our society towards public opulence and politics of pleasure. The end goal is a world in which individuals can express themselves to their fullest”. 

How do we get there? There are effectively two camps when it comes to the future of psychedelic usage in America: 1) legalization through the current healthcare model for use in therapy with professionals and 2) decriminalization so people can use them privately as they see fit. Currently, only one state - Oregon - is on track for legalization. They have also voted to decriminalize all drugs and instead fund rehabilitation clinics. Individual cities such as Santa Cruz, Oakland, Seattle, Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Denver have decriminalized psilocybin. Pace is not opposed to using psychedelics with a therapist, but he is opposed to making psychedelics solely legal for use by approval of the FDA, through the American healthcare system which is corrupted by profit seeking pharmaceutical companies. He raises questions about profit motives, accessibility, corruption, trust in authorities, and freedom of choice. 

On the other hand, it is the belief at the foremost psychedelic research facilities such as the Heffter Research Institute and Johns Hopkins that using the American healthcare model is the only way for society to consider and access the benefits which psychedelics can provide. Pace is quick to point out that the only legalization that is happening currently is in his home state of Oregon where Measure 109 was passed in 2020 after a grassroots campaign put it on the ballot for a direct vote by the citizens rather than the lengthy process of rescheduling psilocybin federally and gaining approval by the FDA.

 Interestingly enough, Emanuel Bronner - activist and founder of Dr. Bronner’s soaps - sounded the alarm that one of the major companies poised to profit from the FDA gambit of federal legalization of psilocybin, COMPASS Pathways, was opposed to Measure 109 in Oregon. If Compass Pathways was truly interested in getting psilocybin treatment to as many people that need it as possible, one would assume that they would support Measure 109. Pace’s response to this is that at Psymposia they have “noticed there’s a gap between the rhetoric and the actions of the same people who are manufacturing this rhetoric. Many people in this space are offering a liberatory hand when they are not actually interested in liberating.” Instead they are trying to have the exclusive right to produce and profit off of natural substances which can be grown or found by anyone. Psymposia has reported on COMPASS Pathways’ attempts to patent psilocybin. 

The fact is that many of the companies like COMPASS Pathways, who are poised to make a splash in this new market of psilocybin therapy were nowhere to be found before a profit margin was seen as plausible and people wanted to utilize the benefits of psilocybin without living in fear of draconian drug laws. Now, if psilocybin is legalized through the American healthcare system, many psychedelic activists - like Pace - would be excluded from using it because they lack health insurance. Pace puts it bluntly, “In the United States we don’t even have guaranteed health insurance, nevermind mental health treatment, and forget about novel mental health treatment like this”. He adds, “there is a lie going around in the psychedelic community, particularly among those pushing a corporate strategy. That lie is that it’s necessary to commercialize psychedelics in order to improve access. It’s a simple fact that anyone who has successfully attempted to grow psilocybin mushrooms will often end up with a significant surplus. There’s no doubt that psilocybin legalization in the current system, which creates artificial scarcity of products that are not naturally scarce, will be for the fortunate few - not the many.”

Pace points to an example we can learn from in Ohio’s medical cannabis program - a shining example of crony capitalism; “we have this highly controlled medical cannabis industry in Ohio with 24 pot barons… if you would have run a cannabis microenterprise when it was illegal and were caught, you don’t even get a chance to get in on it. There is also a $50,000 application fee. With only 24 licenses in the state, a lot of politicking goes on. Agri-Med has a license. Before they had a license, I got a cold call from a guy affiliated with Agri-Med who wanted to meet with me that same day and be a part of his application. I assumed he got a hold of me because I used to teach at the Cleveland School of Cannabis. Regardless, he was like ‘I’m going to get one of these licenses. I know the governor.’ That was the entirety of his plan. It had nothing to do with the strength of his application…  We have learned something from cannabis decriminalization and legalization around the country. We have learned that historically excluded demographics are still excluded from the billions of dollars in profits.” Patients are paying the price of this flawed system as one must pay approximately $250 to even be able to be prescribed medical cannabis. Then one must be able to afford the products which are widely regarded as overpriced. Inaccessibility is always the result when the formula is medicalized legalization. 

It’s obvious that psychedelics are incredibly powerful substances, and Pace is quick to point out that they are not “some unambiguous good or panacea”. It’s like any form of technology that can be used for good or bad. The question is if the U.S. government or the pharmaceutical industry can be trusted to regulate them responsibly. M.K. Ultra, the psychedelic experiments conducted on unwitting participants by the U.S government from 1953-1973, still has not been properly addressed in Pace’s opinion. Moreover, Pace makes the point that on numerous occasions the CIA has been credibly accused of funneling cocaine and heroin into the United States. He adds, “we have seen with the opioid epidemic that many people started using at the same time as Purdue Pharma’s concerted campaign to push their opioid drug OxyContin. The reality is, in the state of Ohio which is currently third in the nation in cases of opioid substance disorder, everyone knows somebody who is affected by opioid dependency”. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that about 2 million Americans are addicted to opioid pharmaceutical drugs, and at least 1 million are addicted to illegal drugs like heroin. Pace adamantly argues against a “strict medicalization and some kind of authoritarian control over psychedelics”. 

There’s also a question of freedom of choice at play. Pace says that the psychedelic central dogma is “set, setting, and dosage”. So how much does using them in a treatment center through your health insurance company influence your experience? “I’m willing to bet that it’s non-zero,” Pace says. Many people would rather use psychedelic medicines in a place of their choosing rather than some office in a strip mall. Pace is also willing to bet that “the process of medicalizing psychedelics will prevent some of the radical shifts in consciousness and awareness that we know are possible with psychedelics''. He adds “there are community alternatives that have, admittedly, both drawbacks and benefits, but I think the solution to most of these problems is more generalized education about psychedelics”.

If medical legalization is not the ideal path forward for psychedelics according to Pace, then what is? In addition to Measure 109, Oregon also passed the grassroots ballot initiative Measure 110 in 2020 which lessened the charges for drug possession and increased the number of drug rehabilitation facilities in the state. Essentially this ballot initiative has reorientated drug policy toward public health and away from the prison-industrial complex and its War on Drugs. Pace sees this as a first step in remediating the damage done by the War on Drugs. In this post-Measure 110 world, Drug possession will be treated like a parking ticket rather than a violent crime in the state of Oregon.

 For psychedelics, this means that they will effectively be able to be used in a similar way to that which they have been used by indigenous cultures for ages: without the permission of the state. In Pace’s opinion, this is a true psychedelic renaissance. Pace sees this as a way to “re-sanctify” psychedelic experiences which can “evolve to more permanent interactions for transformation, observance, and celebration”. In the meantime in places other than Oregon, people can still celebrate amidst the struggle for justice. “Having spent time in the Amazon, slogging around oil pits that were left by Texaco and working on techniques to remediate that pollution, I learned there is a place within resistance for celebration. Otherwise, what are we fighting for?” he says. The same lesson can be applied in this fight.

Both models - medical legalization and decriminalization - could coexist if Pace had it his way “but if we are able to be having this conversation in the context of access and full decriminalization of drugs similar to what happened in Oregon, it’d be a lot better conversation. We could be talking about how to maximize people’s experience in an inclusive way that doesn’t ignore the history of racist applications of drug laws”. Ideally, he says, “medical facilities where people receive treatment with psilocybin would be held in collective responsibility, but there would also be access so that one could choose their own adventure individually”. He asserts that the way to make this happen is for citizens to exercise their rights, not ask for them. Waiting for approval by the FDA and licensing for pharmaceutical companies to sell psychedelics is not in the equation. As Pace would say, “medicalization can be seen as a prohibition 2.0”. Grassroots ballot measures, on the other hand, certainly are in the equation and are the solution we need. “It comes back to the old adage that all politics are local,” Pace says. 

Now is a critical time for the future of legality and accessibility of psychedelic substances. In order to keep up to date on the fight for equity and inclusion in this space, follow along with Psymposia’s online publication at www.psymposia.com as well as on their podcast PlusThree.