Will Legalized LSD Follow the Cannabis Path?
Although Robert Johnson’s Rolling Stone article predicting the future of legalized LSD is based on American realities, the Canadian parallels are clear.
“In California (the world’s largest legal cannabis market)*, small cannabis businesses and legacy growers are going extinct. Plummeting wholesale prices, shortsighted regulations, and wildly excessive taxes are crippling the very craft growers who built the California cannabis industry, while large-scale corporate cannabis operations wait vulture-like in the wings,” Johnson wrote. “Even post-‘legalization’, we’re still arresting and incarcerating people (and disproportionately people of colour) for cannabis crimes. Is it any wonder that the psychedelic community wants to avoid this fate?”
As ever, most cannabis writers in the United States refuse to look north for answers, even though the Canadian experience is often a crystal ball for what will happen there. Last year, rumblings that Canada’s cannabis industry needs to be fixed got even louder.
“If these shortcomings are not fixed, Canada’s young cannabis industry may never grow to its full potential,” wrote Shane Morris.
Ex-Fire and Flower executive Nathan Mison also called for the federal government to loosen cannabis rules. “Our primary focus has been on health and displacing the black market, but that should expand,” Mison said.
Will the same thing happen in the legalized LSD market, if that ever happens?
How Legalized LSD May Be Closer Than You Think – LPC
The idea of legalized LSD in Canada isn’t that far-fetched. Earlier this year, the Canadian government set up a Special Access Program that allows patients access to otherwise-controlled substances including psilocybin and MDMA. If this sounds familiar, it’s because that’s essentially how medical cannabis started in Canada. Researchers are finding that these drugs can help with mental illness and PTSD among other conditions. If the safety is there – as is the public’s appetite – can full legalization be far behind?
The thing is, Johnson says, once a drug becomes legalized, the larger corporations swoop in leaving the legacy growers behind.
“Critics argue cannabis legalization has only meant ‘legal’ for those who can afford expensive cannabis business licences, patients who can pay for medical cards, or consumers who can afford weed that’s taxed at 50 per cent of its wholesale price. Will ‘legal’ psilocybin only be available through a doctor’s prescription? Will ‘legal’ mushroom cultivators need to pay a flat tax and excise tax, in addition to cultivation, manufacturing, processing, distribution and retail taxes, in order to get on the good side of the law—and then see their businesses crushed by that tax burden?”
Again, the writer only has to look north. Small cannabis producers in Canada are finding ways of competing with the bigger companies. For example, one Manitoba cannabis syndicate is cutting costs by pooling resources to do their own processing, keeping it local while keeping it small at the same time.
That’s not to say that many of the rules in the Cannabis Act need to be changed, including marketing rules and perhaps taxes and excise fees. It’s clear that if LSD legalized does follow the same path to legalization as cannabis, there is a lot to be learned in that respect from the cannabis experience.
*California is slightly larger in population than Canada, but given cannabis’ illegal status federally in the United States, this Rolling Stone claim deserves an asterisk.
Read the full story at Rolling Stone
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