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Oregon’s Appetite for Psilocybin Is Being Fed Outside the Law in the Mushroom Underground

Three thousand five hundred dollars.

That’s how much it’s going to cost to swallow 4 grams of psilocybin mushrooms and undergo a six-hour therapy session at EPIC Healing Eugene—if and when the clinic gets its license to run a “psilocybin service center” and its owner, Cathy Jonas, gets her facilitator license after undergoing 300 hours of training and passing a state-mandated test.

Together, those two licenses will cost her $12,000 a year. On top of that, she must spend thousands on a security system, liability insurance, and a 375-pound safe. All in, Jonas estimates she’ll spend $60,000 to open her service center and, at $3,500 a session, she expects to barely break even. “They have really made this hard,” Jonas, 56, says.

Two and a half years ago, Oregon voters approved Measure 109, making Oregon the first state in the nation to legalize the supervised use of psilocybin mushrooms. But that freedom comes with fine print. The program requires users to trip only in the presence of a trained facilitator in a service center using psilocybin grown by state-approved manufacturers and tested by state-licensed labs.

All of that adds costs. The result is a price tag that’s going to astonish the fungi-curious. A single session—5 grams, six hours—will cost more than the median Oregonian’s biweekly take-home pay.

Still willing to pony up? Sorry, get in line. At press time, no service centers—the only places you’re allowed to take psilocybin legally—had been licensed by the Oregon Health Authority. Three manufacturers, one testing lab, and just four facilitators had been licensed as of April 25.

In other words, the ballot measure created an appetite that the regulated system seems unprepared to satisfy. The outcome? The legalization of psilocybin mushrooms in Oregon is spurring an expansion of the decades-old illegal market.

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Anthony Fauci Still Is Not Being Honest with You

Dr. Anthony Fauci is not happy with what he regards as the popular distortions of his pandemic record.

In a sprawling exit interview with New York Times reporter David Wallace-Wells, the outgoing director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — whose remit extended well beyond his station — makes little effort to hide his bitterness. Confronted with the criticism that so much of the public-health guidance in this period was less about epidemiology and more reflective of the Biden White House’s “economic, political, and social” priorities, Fauci bristled at the implication:

Certainly there could have been a better understanding of why people were emphasizing the economy. But when people say, “Fauci shut down the economy” — it wasn’t Fauci. The C.D.C. was the organization that made those recommendations. I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations. But show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the C.D.C.’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that. But I never criticized the people who had to make the decisions one way or the other.

On a human level, Fauci’s irritations are understandable. He resents the suggestion that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could or even should behave like a political body, which is why it was absurd for the Biden White House to hold fast to the notion that Congress had provided the CDC with the authority to, for example, abrogate the rights of American property owners by implementing a moratorium on eviction.

That’s not Fauci’s fault exactly, but nor did the doctor register his dissatisfaction with the mid-pandemic status quo that so empowered him. We don’t have a document with Fauci’s signature on it authorizing the shuttering of schools and businesses. We do, however, have an extensive record of his public statements indicating that shuttering schools and businesses was the right course of action.

“If you have a situation where you don’t have a real good control over an outbreak and you allow children together, they will likely get infected,” Fauci warned in April 2020. The doctor proffered this definitive observation in response to a reporter who asked him if Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to allow in-person education on school grounds was wise. “People under 25 have died of the coronavirus disease in the United States of America.” What conclusion would a school administrator who, like so much of the nation, hung on Fauci’s every word in the early stages of the pandemic take away from this admonition but that in-person education was an unnecessary risk?

As early as May of that year, Fauci all but ruled out the prospect of a safe return to schoolrooms the following autumn. “The idea of having treatments available, or a vaccination, to facilitate the reentry of students into the fall term would be something that would be a bit of a bridge too far,” he insisted.

That summer, Fauci engaged in a public-relations campaign with the aim of scaring young people into withdrawing from the outside world in areas of the country with high Covid-19 transmission rates. “You have a responsibility to yourself, because I think thinking that young people have no deleterious consequences is not true,” he scolded America’s youth. “We’re seeing more and more complications in young people.”

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The US and the War Crimes in the War on Terror

For the past two decades, the International Criminal Court has concentrated on the war crimes and criminals who have operated in Africa.  Over the past month, however, the court has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner or Children’s Rights.  Our own Department of Justice is even considering a federal indictment of Syrian leaders responsible for the torture and execution of an American human rights worker, Layla Shweikani.  The war crimes of Syrian President Basher al-Assad are well known, but this would mark the first time that the United States has criminally charged Syrian officials with human rights abuses. There is no indication, however, that the ICC or the Department of Justice will take on the war crimes committed by the United States during its Global War on Terror in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington.

The mainstream media has been giving increased attention to the issue of war crimes as well as the 20th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, but there has been no attempt to link the issues.  The war itself could be labeled a war crime or a “crime against the peace,” which was the charge against Germany introduced at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945 and 1946.  The most prominent war crimes were the Central Intelligence Agency’s detentions and renditions program as well as the sadistic program of torture and abuse, which have been devoid of any accountability whatsoever.  One of the leaders of the program, Gina Haspel, even became Donald Trump’s CIA director.

Nor has there been any focus on the U.S. military’s role in renditions and detentions, including the detaining of individuals suspected of involvement in 9/11.  There are many reasons for closing down the wartime prison at Guantanamo Bay, but the obvious one deals with prisoners there who have never been charged with a crime over a period of 20 years and/or were subjected to numerous forms of torture and abuse.  It was Vice President Dick Cheney who convinced President George W. Bush to locate the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba in an effort to put it out of reach of the U.S. legal system.  A federal appeals course is still dealing with the issue of whether the Gitmo prisoners have due process rights under the Constitution, but the relevant opinions have not been released because they reportedly contain classified information.  Once again, we are witnessing the application of security classifications to hide embarrassing information.

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Entire Warner Robins Narcotics Unit placed on leave over misconduct investigation

The Warner Robins Police Department has put its entire drug unit on administrative leave over an investigation into allegations of misconduct.

In a press release sent shortly before noon on Monday, the Houston County District Attorney said on the evening of April 11, they were notified of allegations involving members of the department’s Narcotics Investigation Unit.

The next day, the DA’s office began an investigation and notified Warner Robins Police Chief Roy Whitehead.

According to officials, Whitehead placed the department on administrative leave “out of caution” and no charges have been filed at this point in the investigation.

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A BBC Instruction Manual For Kids To Propagandize Their Parents

The day before yesterday, the BBC carried a piece titled “Earth Day: How to talk to your parents about climate change.”

The article begins addressing their target underaged readers:

You want to go vegan to help the planet, but you’re not paying for the shopping. You think trains are better than planes, but your dad books the summer holiday.

Young people are some of the world’s most powerful climate leaders and want rapid action to tackle the problem.

Big changes are difficult, especially when they involve other people. Where do you begin? For this year’s Earth Day, we spoke to people who have successfully had tricky climate chats at home. Here are their top tips:

The piece is broken into three sections targeting what they imply are evils of our times.

The first section focuses on “How to talk about going meat-free.”

The section begins by claiming that “eating less meat is one of the best ways to reduce our impact on the planet, say scientists.”

The piece introduces us to 17-year-old Ilse who has dyed her hair bright red, and her parents, Antonia and Sally.

The BBC claims that the family ate meat twice or even thrice a day, but when Ilse was 13, she “decided to do more about climate change and read that cutting out meat was a good start.”

Sally and Antonia were understandably skeptical about the plan initially. They were concerned about not getting enough protein and the fact that Ilse was too young to make that decision.

But they still complied with Ilse’s wishes and began with a one-day-a-week trial, they proceeded to scale up, and after a year, went totally meat-free.

Sally says that seeing the emotional impact of the topic on her daughter helped to persuade her it was the right thing for her family.

The BBC reveals that Ilse is part of ‘Teach the Parent’, a U.K.-based campaign that “encourages these conversations between generations.”

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Bill Maher: Why Aren’t Major Black Celebrities Asking Why Black People Are Killing Each Other In Cities Like Chicago?

HBO host Bill Maher on Friday said Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson was “excusing horrific behavior” in a speech he delivered following several shootings in Chicagoland last week and questioned why black celebrities with large fanbases do not have opinions on these issues.

“Most of the shootings [in Chicago] are young black men killing other young black men. Is that not correct?” Maher asked.

“Yeah that’s correct,” guest Glenn Loury responded.

“Okay, much more than what the cops do. Why doesn’t anybody talk about that? Why aren’t there a hundred giant black celebrities who would have the respect of those people saying what are you doing to yourselves? Why are you killing each other?” Maher asked.

“It dishonors our community. Come on, we’re better than this,” Loury said.

“Right,” Maher responded. “It’s never addressed.”

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Despite SCOTUS Ruling Limiting Its Authority, EPA Tries To Unilaterally Regulate Carbon Emissions Again

After a bruising defeat at the Supreme Court, the Biden administration is back to crafting regulatory limits on power plant emissions. A forthcoming rule from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would require that carbon-producing coal and gas power plants slash their greenhouse gas emissions by 2040, reports The New York Times.

These emissions limits would be so strict that coal plants likely have to adopt carbon capture technology to meet them while gas plants would have to switch to burning carbon-free hydrogen gas, say administration officials to the Times.

The yet-to-be-made-public rule is currently being finalized by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

Since coming into office, President Joe Biden has been working on a rule to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. This has been a liberal priority going back to the Obama administration, which tried and failed to get Congress to enact an emissions cap-and-trade scheme in 2009.

Undeterred, in 2015, Obama’s EPA implemented very similar regulations to those that were found in the 2009 legislation, claiming that the Clean Air Act had given it the power to regulate carbon emissions all along.

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