After Colorado became the first state to the sale of recreational cannabis to any adult in 2014, it took just 10 years for about of the country to follow suit. More than 100 million adults in the US went from having no legal access to the drug to being able to waltz into their local dispensary, buy some weed, and take it home to get as stoned as they please. Now, , co-director of the RAND , sees the same kind of early activity in state psychedelic policy, including budding to legalize sales, that he saw in cannabis right before the wave of legalizing commercial sales took off.
While the medicinal use of psychedelics gains more attention and as toward research, the prospect of retail psychedelics has quietly landed on our doorstep. “State policymakers, whether they like it or not, are going to start confronting these conversations,” said Kilmer. And yet, public conversation about how a retail psychedelic market might actually work has been all but nonexistent.
So far, most debate over how to expand legal access to psychedelics has focused on segmented approaches like , religious , or supervised . But even in a world with all these models firmly in place, plus more general drug across the board, there would still be plenty of people who would not be able to access psychedelics. Not everyone will or can get a prescription for their psychedelic of choice.
Most people won’t be able to afford supervised programs, which run for a minimum of about for a single, low-dose session.