Obituary for California SB1012
We’re taking a moment to reflect on a critical area of our policy work that we’ve dedicated significant effort to over the past few years. We have written and spoken about efforts to reform psychedelic policy in California, where MAPS was physically based for many years and where so many people and communities continue to carry a legacy of psychedelic activism forward. After two more attempts at psychedelic policy change were blocked during the legislative process this year, we wanted to memorialize MAPS’ longstanding support for such efforts in the state with a deep dive into some lessons learned.
The History of SB 1012
Following Measure 109‘s success in November 2020 in Oregon, California Senator Scott Wiener introduced SB519 in January 2021. California Governor Gavin Newsom eventually vetoed SB519 and its successor, SB58, citing concerns that decriminalization alone is insufficient to protect public health.
Unlike SB 519 and SB 58, which focused on decriminalization, SB 1012 was an attempt at establishing a regulated adult access program. SB 1012 made it through the Senate’s Business, Professions, and Economic Development Committee in April and the Senate Public Safety Committee in May. The bill, however, failed in Senate Appropriations a month later, most likely due to budget pressures the state was feeling across the board and the apparent lack of support from the committee mentioned earlier.
Like Colorado’s Proposition 122, SB1012 aimed to create a system to control and regulate the production, manufacturing, distribution, testing and facilitated the use of certain substances, including DMT, psilocybin, and mescaline (excluding peyote). Unlike Colorado or most similar proposals so far, which focus on plant medicine, the bill also anticipated adding a state-regulated scheme for MDMA; the program would start with psilocybin to create the regulatory blueprint and expand to the other substances after one to two years. Under this proposal, people 21 and older can purchase and be administered the substances in the presence of a facilitator. The bill would have also established a state board to license and regulate psychedelic facilitators and determine their training requirements and licensing fees.
MAPS appreciated how SB 1012 directly responded to Governor Newsom’s letter and was particularly excited and intrigued by the potential of a state program that offered regulated access to MDMA. Despite this novel proposal, a compromise made in the Senate Business and Professions committee, which required all facilitators to be “dual licensed” — meaning only those with specific medical or psychological licenses could be licensed facilitators — challenged our hopes for this bill.
We feared this small change would have a significant negative impact on the policy’s scope of impact. Requiring dual licensure may force a potentially avoidable — or at least delayable — conflict between state and federal frameworks. Two schemes that purport to offer indifferent medical care or professionalized therapy set them up for unnecessary competition and may draw additional scrutiny by encroaching upon federal regulatory territory. In contrast, allowing federal mechanisms like FDA approval to focus on measuring the efficacy of and approving medicines to treat specific diagnoses while permitting state programs to focus on regulating broader adult use would expand the impact and cohesion of both systems by creating a complementary ecosystem.
We were also concerned that a decision like this was being made in such a constricted and high-stakes political context. Making decisions about such foundational pre-qualifying elements for prospective facilitators in bill language by legislators instead of a board of experts prevents better-positioned professionals from evaluating the state’s and future program’s needs from a more holistic perspective. We see across the country how misunderstanding contributes to forced conflicts and outcomes where issues like legal liability, sourcing, training, or scope of practice are inadequately addressed. In practice, hastily crafted policies risk excluding a large body of potentially capable and ethical facilitators without necessarily increasing safety, and it risks making proposed programs unworkable or incoherent. At the same time, we acknowledge that one of the unfortunate realities of working through state legislatures is precisely this kind of confrontation and line drawing. We take each of these disappointments as valuable lessons for our strategy going forward.
While not the intention, this amendment also revealed the limitations of over-relying on clinical assumptions when designing novel psychedelic policy schemes. DMT and mescaline may indeed have therapeutic or psychological benefits, but almost no evidence exists demonstrating that they are best used in clinical conditions. In fact, given the primarily psycho-spiritual elements and traditional, ceremonial uses of those substances in particular, forcing them to cohere with a purely medical or psychological context feels culturally clumsy at best or, at worst, an extension of the ongoing oppression of non-western ontologies and systems of belief and healing. To an extent, this issue is also true for psilocybin, which has similarly extensive psycho-spiritual and cultural elements of traditional use. With psilocybin, however, there is at least some evidence showing clinical contexts may be appropriate. In any case, we’d like to challenge the assumption that clinical or medical contexts are the only ones in which safety can be achieved; this limits our collective imagination and does a disservice to the extensive knowledge in traditional and underground contexts.
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The Rise of SB 803
SB 1012’s demise in Senate Appropriations was not the end of California’s 2024 season of psychedelic policy reform. Senators Becker and Jones first introduced the Heal Our Heroes Act (SB 803) to the California legislature in February 2023 but revived it in an amended form in early June 2024.
SB 803 would have established the Psychedelic-Assisted Facilitation Pilot Program in three jurisdictions: the City and County of San Francisco, the County of San Diego, and the County of Santa Cruz. It would permit the public health officers (PHOs) of these jurisdictions to create programs that would oversee the approval of entities to operate psychedelic-assisted facilitation centers under the supervision of trained staff. In other words, these appointed physicians would install programs specific to those jurisdictions for licensed healthcare professionals (a similar limitation as was amended into SB 1012) to administer psilocybin or psilocin in a therapeutic setting. Only military Veterans or first responders aged 21 or older who pass a suitability screening would be able to receive such treatment.
Alas, the bill was doomed from the start — the urgency with which it emerged left the Assembly Health Committee a bit dumbfounded, even though supporters of these bills — including MAPS — have consistently cited an inherent urgency in these bills to provide reasonable access to these medicines to those whose lives it could save. Ultimately, the feedback received from the Assembly on SB 803 provided seemingly non-negotiable guardrails to develop a more comprehensive psychedelic policy for the state.
While being the most limited in scope of all the proposals, SB 803 was notable for a few reasons. First, it was introduced and supported by Republican representatives who might not seem like obvious proponents of a psychedelic policy proposal. Because SB 803 was focused on pilot programs at the local level, it would have obliged local government and public health boards to provide these services within state policy but without overarching constraints. Nevertheless, the Health Assembly analysis reveals a consistent desire for more comprehensive treatment guidelines in the regulated psychedelic-assisted therapy field, echoing Governor Newsom’s veto message of SB 58.
One primary concern noted in the Assembly’s analysis is the lack of oversight from local or state governments in establishing or overseeing the pilot programs of this bill. Though the bill did call for an opportunity for public comment and required the PHOs to collect data and submit a report with recommendations to the relevant governmental bodies, the analysis describes concerns with a lack of detailed regulation around facilitation centers, cultivation, and patient safety — specifically around screening and post-therapy integration, issues that continue to be seen as critical to a complete regulatory scheme. While we continue to believe integration services ought not to be over-professionalized because low-cost community integration options should be protected in peer-to-peer contexts, the bill states explicitly that cultivators, facilitators, and facilitation entities would be licensed by their authorizing jurisdictions, meaning there would be a certain amount of oversight inherent in these operations.
Ultimately, the field is rapidly evolving, and the requirement to codify every last detail in legislative language may be futile and unreasonable. In future iterations of bills proposing pilot programs, it seems essential to build sufficient flexibility so each city or county’s public health department can adapt the law to its own context. In a scenario like the one proposed by SB 803, the assigned PHOs may not be experts in psychedelics. Still, they would be required to consult on program design with experts in psilocybin facilitation. Especially in the case of state legislation, perhaps this hybrid internal-external expert design scheme offers a hint at workable standards for a broader statewide approach shortly.
Lessons for Future Psychedelic Reform
Though we appreciate incrementalism—on behalf of both the legislative champions and the cautious assemblies—we also acknowledge the limits of legislative language in the face of more detailed regulatory prescriptions after assembly approval. As we saw in Oregon and states like Colorado, regulatory professionals and task force members can fully organize themselves during the administrative rulemaking process to flesh out the nuances of legislation that can only provide so much detail.
California’s 2024 season offers more concrete information about how some legislators might be coming around to certain aspects of psychedelic policy reform — and what others aren’t ready for. It also offers a chance to reflect on the political and practical dynamics of proposals related to decriminalization versus regulated state frameworks, including the continued reliance on medical-forward schemes, even when they risk proposing measures that are inefficient in impact and unworkable in practice.
This appeal to clinical authority may be necessary. At the same time, the political establishment catches up to the reality of the need for a multiple-model ecosystem with risk reduction and cultural education. To that end, but within the political constraints offered by reality, we propose expanding the list of pre-qualifying professions from SB 1012 to include practitioners like chaplains and other bona fide ceremonial guides and integration facilitators. We also would have liked to see SB 803, even with its much more limited scope, to include all frontline health workers to expand beyond EMTs to include doctors, nurses, physicians’ assistants, therapists, and other physical and mental health care practitioners impacted significantly by the COVID-19 pandemic.
One way to synthesize these lessons could be to design a regulated access model to resemble other caretaking settings in which there are multiple members of a care team, each with varying degrees of experience and licensure, all involved in supporting an individual or community — that way the safety benefits of medical professionals could be combined with culturally-authorized or community-supported guides or facilitators. Properly designed, such a model could provide an optimal balance of medical and also simultaneously spiritual, psychological, peer, or community support and be adapted to different patient or participant demographics as politically feasible. We look ahead with hope to the 2025 season and beyond, learning lessons everywhere.