Welcome to the beginning of a dialogue. I am Gary Smith, I am 51 years old, I have been a practicing litigation attorney since 1994, and I am deeply interested in the law of psychedelics. What started me on this journey was my cannabis practice. Throughout the last decade I had the good fortune of my home state of Arizona creating a medical marijuana program. Although the mainstay of my law practice had been up until that point construction law and commercial litigation – I even authored two books on Arizona construction law – cannabis law has dominated my practice since 2011.
Being conscientious in my craft, I read a lot and I question everything. Cannabis being a mild psychoactive, lives in the broader family of naturally occurring (and lab synthesized) psychoactive substances we call psychedelics. My research brought me into contact with literature on these subjects. The more I read, the more I was amazed. For example, I discovered the early Mayan, Vedic, Egyptian, and Greek civilizations revered psychedelics. The lore of European witches is steeped in shamanic practices that employed a great many psychedelic substances, evidencing an amazing knowledge of botany. The Catholic Church, whose Inquisition once condemned to death (after torture) Mayans for their peyote use, today has subsects that employ entheogens as sacrament in their worship of Christ. Indeed, our idea of Santa Clause and flying reindeer come from Siberian shamanic use of psychoactive mushrooms. Even LSD, which the CIA once hoped to turn into an interrogation and mind control drug (it produced the opposite effects), showed hope as the first drug ever to possibly cure alcoholism – that is, until research got shut down. With a hat tip to Jack Herer’s experiences with cannabis, particularly his essential book The Emperor Wears No Clothes, I have found much like my beloved cannabis, psychedelics too have been subject to a false history and misapplication of science in the law.
Unsurprisingly, the last 50 years of the Controlled Substances Act and the costly and irresponsible War on Drugs wrought a dark age not only upon science, but too the law. Worse so actually. In the last 50 years there have been scant few lawyers authoring articles on the subject and no law schools addressing the topic in anything other than a unicorn-rare elective class. The topic has been taboo. Unlike the world of science, where clandestine labs can set up and research “without permission”, there is no band of psychedelic lawyers gathering in the shadows or under bridges. The law is woefully behind, but unlike our experiences with cannabis, still has time to catch up – if there is the will.
Through my book Psychedelica Lex and this website, I am hoping to build a community that will assemble the evidence necessary for legislatures and for courts to visit the question of psychedelics with fresh objective eyes that are opened to a wider world. The need for this long overdue dialogue, given the FDA’s fast tracking of studies on psilocybin and MDMA is made that much more urgent. Courtesy of research being conducted right now, these forbidden psychedelics are on the cusp of being made medically available. The broader use (beyond what already exists – and the size of this population is startling) of psychedelics is inevitable. However, governments are ill prepared to address whether and what sort of regulatory infrastructure to implement in the forthcoming braver new world. The wrong sort of knowledge and prejudicial beliefs that took these substances behind the wall should not be what shapes policy as psychedelics come out from behind the wall. The world needs better evidence for better arguments.
If you are a policy maker, a lawyer, a legislator, a scientist, a public influencer, you are especially welcome to the conversation.
Gary Michael Smith is an attorney and arbitrator and founding member of the Phoenix Arizona-based Guidant Law Firm. He is also a founding director and current president of the Arizona Cannabis Bar Association, board member of the Arizona Cannabis Chamber of Commerce, and contributing author to GreenEntrepreneur.