Barely a month after an Oregon law that recriminalized possession of personal-use amounts of drugs took effect across the state, organizers in Portland say they’re working toward putting an initiative on the city’s 2026 ballot that would protect people who use certain psychedelic drugs from arrest and criminal consequences.
As drafted, the Portland Psychedelic Health Act would designate the enforcement of laws against certain plant- and fungi-based substances—for example psilocybin, ayahuasca, mescaline and DMT—as the city’s lowest law enforcement priority. It would, advocates say, effectively decriminalize at the local level what’s sometimes known as a “grow, gather, gift model,” with commercial activity still forbidden.
The reform would cover cultivation, foraging, preparation, possession and gifting of what it calls “natural psychedelics,” which it refers to as “non-toxic and non-addictive.” The measure would not apply to the peyote cactus, which is an ecologically threatened species in the wild.
The proposal would also create a Psychedelics Advisory Panel that would issue entheogen-related guidance to the city. It’s “designed to increase safety, education, and best practices in the city, statewide, and beyond,” according to a campaign description of the initiative.
“This Act recognizes that Portlanders have long consumed natural psychedelics for personal, health, and spiritual reasons, and that they will continue to do so,” the description says. “In addition to creating more safety and education around psychedelics, this Act protects the possession and use of these natural substances, making them the lowest priority for law enforcement in our city.”
In an interview, Nate Howard, a Portlander and a lead organizer of the campaign, told Marijuana Moment that momentum is strong, with “funding largely secured” and a wide network of partners on board, including strategists, past politicians, campaign consultants and financial contributors.
Howard said the plan “has been shaped over a multi-year process by hundreds of stakeholders—mostly local, but also people from around the country and the world, with special input from the National Council of the Native American Church.” (In addition to its conservation status, peyote is also excluded from the proposal “to honor and respect its sacred status in Native American cultures,” the campaign says.)
Howard also referred to David Bronner, the CEO of the soap company Dr. Bronner’s who has given financial and ideological support to the psychedelics movement in Oregon and other states, as a “patron saint” of the campaign. Dr. Bronner’s previously gave $1 million to support Oregon’s successful statewide legalization of therapeutic psilocybin.
Organizers of the new Portland ballot measure plan to officially unveil the full text of the proposal at a symposium this weekend, with a final version expected to be submitted to officials sometime mid-month. Howard is set to moderate a panel featuring Bronner at the symposium, he said.
Signature gathering to qualify the proposal would begin in early 2025. The campaign would need to collect roughly 40,000 valid voter signatures to place the measure on the ballot.
Howard noted that city leaders could theoretically expedite the reform “if they would like to refer [the measure] to the voters sooner, which both could be nice for us and save the city money” as opposed to having to go through the process of verifying signatures on initiative petitions.
In addition to effectively ending enforcement by local law enforcement of laws against natural psychedelics, the ballot measure would also create the Portland Psychedelics Advisory Commission, a body that would advise the city on “on safe and responsible practices, harm reduction, public education, and the strategic integration of natural psychedelics into public health initiatives,” according to the campaign-provided synopsis, “as well as monitor and recommend policies to ensure that natural psychedelics are used responsibly and that this act helps address Portland’s addiction and mental health crises.”
The effort, led by the Portland Psychedelic Society Action Fund, follows several past pushes for reforms around entheogens, including a 2021 campaign by a separate group, the Plant Medicine Healing Alliance, to have local lawmakers pass a resolution decriminalizing the cultivation, gifting and ceremonial use of a wide range of psychedelics.
That resolution sought to make it so that activities such as gifting and community-based ceremonies involving entheogenic substances like ayahuasca and ibogaine would be made among Portland’s lowest law enforcement priorities.
Another group, Decriminalize Nature Portland, said in 2020 that it would also be pushing lawmakers to enact a more limited policy change. Activists initially started collecting signatures for a ballot initiative in 2019, but they redirected efforts to target the City Commission. The plan did not come to fruition, however.
Meanwhile, not far north of Portland, city leaders in Washington State’s capital of Olympia voted unanimously this past August to pass a resolution locally decriminalizing psilocybin and certain other psychedelic plants and fungi. It’s the latest locality in that state to pass such a measure following similar changes in Seattle, Port Townsend and Jefferson County.
As for Oregon more broadly, law enforcement as of last month began enforcing recently reinstated laws against simple drug possession, though they’ve also been implementing deflection programs aimed at helping more people enter recovery and avoid criminal charges and jail time.
The changes are part of a process of rolling back certain elements of Measure 110, which voters passed in 2020 and which briefly legalized possession of small amounts of all drugs as part of an effort to minimize drug war harms.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia/Workman.
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