Advocates supporting a psychedelics legalization ballot initiative in Massachusetts have released a new ad promoting the reform as a pathway to provide a critical alternative therapy option for people with serious health conditions.
With less than a month until Election Day, the veteran service organization (VSO) Heroic Hearts Project aired the ad, which features a health professional and a cancer patient discussing the need to provide regulated access to psychedelic substances such as psilocybin.
“In palliative care, we treat pain both mental and physical. We have good options for physical pain, but mental distress is harder to treat,” psychiatrist Roxanne Sholevar says. “Now, research shows that natural psychedelic medicines with psychotherapy may offer relief for those suffering.”
The patient, Judi Fitts, closes the ad by stressing that the novel treatment option is about “regulated therapy,” rather than retail sales. “Psychedelic medicine is humane. The science is real,” she says.
While the ad itself doesn’t mention the upcoming vote on a psychedelics legalization ballot measure in Massachusetts, a press release about it does link the educational campaign to the initiative, known as Question 4.
“Massachusetts has a chance to take a bold and necessary step forward in providing critical mental health care for veterans, first responders, and other populations such as palliative care patients” Jesse Gould, a veteran and founder of the Heroic Hearts Project, said. “There is a veteran suicide epidemic going on; 17 veterans commit suicide every day, and we cannot afford to leave effective, humane, and researched care options off the table.”
Sholevar, the psychiatrist and researcher, added that “psychedelic-assisted therapy displays incredibly promising research to treat many conditions that are often considered treatment-resistant.”
Meanwhile, Gov. Maura Healy (D) in January drew attention to testimony around a veterans-focused bill that she’s introduced, and has since been enacted, to create a psychedelics work group to study the therapeutic potential of substances such as psilocybin.
Enactment of the HERO Act followed a Massachusetts joint legislative committee’s decision to advise the legislature not to pass the broader statewide psychedelics legalization initiative. Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin certified in July that that activists collected more than enough valid petitions for that proposal to go before voters.
Lawmakers were required to consider the psychedelics measure, spearheaded by the campaign Massachusetts for Mental Health Options (MMHO), after the state certified advocates had submitted enough valid signatures in an initial petitioning round last year.
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In May, the Special Joint Committee on Ballot Initiatives issued a majority report that formally recommended against passing the measure as drafted.
The campaign first filed two different psychedelics reform initiatives in August, and after the state attorney general determined that they both met the constitutional requirement for ballot placement the following months, activists decided to pursue the version that included a home cultivation option.
Eight cities across Massachusetts have enacted policies to locally deprioritize enforcement of laws against psychedelics, an effort that has been led by BSNM: Salem, Somerville, Cambridge, Easthampton, Northampton, Amherst, Provincetown and Medford.
The Cambridge City Council and Somerville City Council also voted to endorse the statewide psychedelics ballot measure in August.
Separately, a different Massachusetts legislative committee advanced a bill in February that would legalize psilocybin therapy in the Commonwealth and set up a framework to license facilitators who would supervise medical, therapeutic and spiritual applications of the drug.
Rep. Mike Connolly (D) also filed a bill in 2021 that received a Joint Judiciary Committee hearing on studying the implications of legalizing entheogenic substances like psilocybin and ayahuasca.
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