Psychedelics Are Therapeutic, Not Criminal
By Sgt. Carl Tennenbaum (Ret.), San Francisco Police Department
For over three decades, I served San Francisco, the city where I was born and raised, as a police officer. From solving robberies to enforcing traffic laws, hostage negotiation to undercover narcotics operations, I saw it all. But I never saw—even in the dense, urban Tenderloin neighborhood where I worked for years—psychedelic substances such as psilocybin nor ibogaine posing a serious risk to public safety. No overdoses. No epidemic of addiction. And no large scale trafficking.
What is dangerous to public safety is the mental health crisis that plagues our city—and our state. Sadly, police officers and other first responders who suffer severe trauma at work disproportionately suffer from mental health issues. I’ve watched as stories pour in about police officers and combat veterans who swear that psychedelic assisted therapy has saved their jobs—and even their lives. That’s when I started to do my own research and realized the great promise that psychedelics hold for the treatment of mental illness, including post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and the most intractable, treatment-resistant forms of depression. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has even designated psilocybin as a “breakthrough” therapy for the promise that it holds to be a significantly more effective treatment for depression than existing medications.
Psychedelics are therapeutic, not criminal. That’s why I support Senate Bill 58, which would remove criminal penalties for the use of psilocybin and certain other natural psychedelic medicines. Enacting this law will help our police focus limited resources on solving serious crimes, rebuild trust between police officers and their communities, and give people struggling with mental health conditions access to the treatment they deserve without fear of arrest or incarceration.
Whether we are talking about a police officer shot in the line of duty, a combat veteran who returned home from war consumed by PTSD and plagued by thoughts of suicide, a firefighter who can’t get out of bed in the morning because of the severe depression she developed after running into a burning building to save a life, the last thing we should do for people who risked everything to keep their community safer is to make them risk their freedom simply to use a natural medicine that has helped others like them heal.
