Cannabis News

New Jersey Lawmakers Approve Bill To Legalize Psilocybin Therapy

Published

2 weeks ago

November 24, 2025

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New Jersey lawmakers have advanced a bill provide adults with regulated therapeutic access to psilocybin with appropriate health conditions, with the intention of continuing to work to enact it in the 2026 legislative session.

More than a year after the House Health Committee first took up and amended the legislation — sponsored by Reps. Herb Conaway (D), Clinton Calabrese (D) and Anthony Verrelli (D) — the panel met Monday, taking testimony and benefiting from it.

“We’re all broke in one way, shape or form,” Verrelli (D), one of the bill’s sponsors, said at Monday’s hearing. “This bill gives people another chance to heal and improve. And if they get better, it gives them an opportunity to improve their communities, their families and their lives in general, to break that cycle of trauma, whatever it looks like.”

The committee amended the legislation last year to match the Senate version. To the disappointment of the defenders, however, this meant removing provisions that would have more broadly legalized psilocybin for adult use.

The plan, which included the personal legislative provisions that were originally introduced in the same form as the one proposed by lawmakers in the 2024 session, has recently been released in amended versions. Those ingredients would make it legal for adults to “possess, possess, use, ingest, inhale, process, transport, deliver without consideration, or distribute without consideration” four grams or less of psilocybin.

The amended measures, however, would significantly expand legislation introduced in late 2020 to reduce penalties for possessing an ounce of psilocybin. That reform Governor Phil Murphy (D) signed it into law in 2021

Stacy Swanson, who testified on behalf of Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions (VETS), emphasized at Monday’s hearing that “the invisible wounds of war don’t just affect the veteran, they affect the entire family.”

“This bill does not legalize recreational drugs,” he said. “It creates structured access that is clinically supervised, with the necessary integration and monitoring.”

In its modified version, The invoice It would charge the Department of Health (DOH) with regulating and licensing the manufacture, testing, transportation, delivery, sale and purchase of psilocybin. There would be five types of licenses: manufacturer, service center operator, testing lab, facilitator, and psilocybin worker.

The Psilocybin Advisory Committee would establish appropriate medical conditions for use, propose guidelines for psilocybin services and dosage, craft safety studies and informed consent practices, and oversee the education, training, and conduct of facilitators.

The stated goal would be to develop a long-term strategic plan for safe, accessible, and affordable access to psilocybin for those 21 and older.

Toward this end, a social equity program would include implementing grants to help low-income people cover the costs of psilocybin services. DOH would direct the implementation of programs for technical assistance, fee reduction and other support services.

Jesse McLaughlin, state advocacy director for Reason for Hope, said Monday hearing that psychedelic medicine represents “the next big step forward in psychiatry” and we need to prepare our healthcare system for it.

“Psilocybin therapy is time-intensive, labor-intensive and different from the way psychiatric care is delivered today,” he said.

To access psilocybin services under the bill, a patient with a qualifying condition would have to obtain a referral from a licensed health care professional. Services would also include mandatory preparation and integration sessions before and after psilocybin administration.

The Assembly bill is in the hands of the Appropriations Committee. The Friend the Senate has already cleared two panels in that chamber—Health, Human Services and Elderly Committee and Budget and Credit Committee.

A survey of New Jersey residents released last year bears this out A majority of state residents agree with making psilocybin available for therapeutic usealthough they were not specifically asked about the specific legislation.

The poll, by Stockton University’s William J. Hughes Center for Public Policy, found that 55 percent of respondents supported legalizing psilocybin for medical use under the supervision of a physician. Only 20% of respondents were against, and 24% were not sure. A percentage of respondents refused to answer the question.

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It’s Marijuana Time tracking hundreds of cannabis, psychedelic and drug policy bills in state legislatures and Congress this year. Patreon supporters by pledging at least $25/month, you’ll get access to our interactive maps, charts, and audio calendars so you never miss a development.

Learn more about our marijuana bill tracking and become a Patreon supporter to gain access
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In other New Jersey drug policy news, Voters earlier this month chose U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) to be the state’s next governor.and now there’s a clearer path to the marijuana reform that consumers and advocates in the Garden State have long awaited: the option to grow it at home.

Meanwhile, as New Jersey’s first marijuana lounges opened this summerregulators shared information on where to find the sites and offered advice on the responsible use of cannabis in licensed businesses, including rock culture classics like “puff, puff, pass.”

New Jersey officials have also completed the curriculum for a no-cost marijuana training academy to help entrepreneurs interested in entering the cannabis industry.

Separately, in May, New Jersey Senate President Nick Scutari (D) introduced a bill that would recriminalize the purchase of marijuana from unlicensed sources-A last ditch effort to combat the illegal market and direct adults to licensed dealers.

In March, a former New Jersey Senate leader unsuccessfully ran for this year’s Democratic nomination for governor. “It’s time” to allow medical marijuana patients to grow their own cannabis plants for personal use. He also pledged to expand amnesty for people affected by the criminalization of marijuana, if elected, and supported the establishment of cannabis consumption halls.

The comments by Sweeney, the longest-serving Senate president in the state’s history, diverge from what the current governor has repeatedly said about home growing, arguing that the state’s adult marijuana market needs to mature more before allowing home growing.

That claim appears to be contradicted by dozens of small marijuana businesses and advocacy groups in New Jersey recently He asked Parliament to allow adults to grow their own cannabis.

user photo CostaPPR.

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The forgotten story behind autoflowering cannabis

Published

14 hours ago

December 6, 2025

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Many of the things that are common in modern cannabis come from a time when curiosity about the plant could lead to real problems. With the market now dominated by hybrid genetics, it is a common belief that it is almost impossible to bring anything back to an original cultivar. However, many of these initial building blocks came from the first wave of cannabis exploration, when a handful of growers traveled across continents in search of unique local varieties. Nevil Schoenmakers was one of them, and what he spotted on the side of a highway during a trip to Turkey left a mark on the history of cannabis that has never been erased.

On the way to Turkey
Dwight Diotte of D9 Canna Consulting still remembers those early years. A time when the modern industry was just an idea and the world of cannabis lived in the shadows between one country and another. Everyone in that circle followed clues more than maps, and it all felt like a treasure hunt with pocket knives and curiosity.

So how did cannabis ruderalis enter the cannabis world. The story begins with a road trip. Nevil was moving through Eastern Europe on one of his journeys to find his seed when he saw something strange on a highway in Hungary. The plants, already in flower, stand out against the July heat. He stopped so suddenly that his car screeched. Then he ran across like someone who had just seen a myth pass by.

He took some branches and dried them in the car heater. He soon realized that what he found was something special. He paused again, and turned around. Turkey could wait. What he had just discovered demanded attention, “and perhaps saved him from a more dangerous detour,” Dwight notes. The Cold War was still very real and the borders of that region were not yet friendly to roving plant hunters.

Sparking the seeds of something new
By the time Dwight saw Nevil the following year in the Netherlands, the seeds of the mystery were already on the table. They were tiny, dark and impossible to germinate with the usual tricks. Dwight remembers gently cracking the pebbles and soaking them as Nevil thought animals might do in the wild. “It felt less like horticulture and more like archaeology,” Dwight recalls.

Once they sprouted, the surprise came quickly. These were no ordinary plants. They went from seed to flower oblivious to the light of day and seemed determined to complete their cycle, encouraged or not. The concept of autoflowering did not yet exist. “Nevil saw the plants blooming on the fifth or seventh node and understood that something new was on the table.”

This was the birth of the modern ruderalis work, although at the time no one was thinking in neat categories. “We were trying to understand what we found.”

Claiming ownership
Dwight wandered between Canada and Europe during those years and witnessed it all. He helped raise funds for what would later become the famous Cannabis Castle, watched the early grow in action and watched Nevil push ruderalis as far as he could before returning to his passion for long-flowering cannabis. “The Finola project was created in the mid-90s and its founders claimed credit for the autoflowering breakthrough, even though the genetics went back to the same region that Nevil had explored, if not the same plants as Nevil himself,” Dwight said.

Everyone involved in that era seemed to reinvent themselves every season. The seed companies changed their names. Growers moved between projects. Some developed legendary cultivars. Others disappeared completely from public life. Through it all, Nevil remained a figure who kept one foot in research mode and the other in business reality. When the Dutch tightened regulations in the nineties, the landscape changed again, and a series of legal dramas followed across continents. “A few years later the dust settled and life moved on, but the seeds of his legacy had already been planted.”

According to Dwight, many of the fog lines that dominate the shelves today have their origins in Nevil. “It’s the same in the autoflowering category. Even after turning his attention away from ruderalis, he produced work that breeders talk about in low tones and reverence.”

Heritage
Dwight still grows ruderalis for fun. He says that plants teach him things. He says that even after forty years they still amaze him. “Nevil Schoenmakers always worked with what he found and let the plants say what they wanted to be. But the evidence is hard to ignore. When the first little black seeds were opened in Hungary, the industry of the future cracked with them. And even today, every time an autoflower appears on a legal shelf anywhere in the world, a small part of that moment is still on the side of the road in Eastern Europe.”

Cannabis News

World Health Organization Won’t Ease Coca Leaf Ban, Even As Review Found Prohibition Is More Dangerous Than The Plant

Published

15 hours ago

December 6, 2025

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“It is unacceptable for humanity to demonize a sacred medicinal plant. It was a political decision rather than a scientific one.”

By Mattha Busby, Filter

The The World Health Organization had a historic opportunity to ease the strict global ban on the coca leaf-ban, campaigners said, “racist and colonial” the roots. But the agency has decided not to.

WHO expert review he determined in September how millions of people in the Andes consume the coca leaf daily as part of a long-standing cultural practice without significant negative effects, and conversely that coca control strategies are associated with significant public health harm.

And yet, on December 2nd, the WHO’s Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (ECDD) recommended that the plant be kept in Annex I of the United Nations drug treaties—the most restrictive category of control—because coca leaves can be converted relatively easily into cocaine.

“The simplicity of extracting cocaine from cocaine and its high yield and profitability are well known,” ECDD wrote. “The Commission has also examined evidence of significant increases in the cultivation of cocaine and the production of cocaine-related substances in the context of significant and growing public health concerns about the use of cocaine. In this context, the Commission believes that the reduction or elimination of international controls on the coca leaf may pose a particularly serious risk to public health.”

The commission noted a 34 percent year-on-year increase in cocaine production in 2023, with some countries experiencing historically high levels. But supporters of reform emphasize that coke is not cocaine. They point out that the WHO review supports the plant’s medical potential and the lack of evidence of problematic coca leaf use anywhere in the world — two key criteria a drug must meet to be placed on a less restrictive schedule.

“It is unacceptable for humanity to demonize a sacred medicinal plant”, Jaison Perez Villafaña, guardian of wisdom or mother From the Arhuaco community in Colombia, he said The filter. “It was a political decision rather than a scientific one. Coca leaf (help) is not to blame for the fact that humans with economic interests turned it into cocaine”.

The ECDD said it recognized that “the coca leaf has important cultural and therapeutic value to indigenous peoples and other communities and that there are exceptions to the traditional use of the coca leaf in certain national settings.” A coalition of indigenous coca leaf producers and consumers he wrote The WHO in October asked the UN body to “clearly distinguish” between traditional coca use and cocaine-related issues.

Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, called the WHO’s suggestion that keeping coca on Schedule 1 would limit cocaine production “ridiculous”, saying the decision exposed the “moral and scientific failure” of drug control worldwide.

“While we might expect them to emerge from political institutions embedded in drug war narratives, there was a sense that the more objective, scientific and nominally independent corners of the UN would maintain a level of pragmatism and principle, even if their recommendations were later rejected by UN political entities.” he wrote It’s LinkedIn.

“The dangers of cocaine powder or smoked crack cocaine, creations of the global North, which is also by far the largest market for both, depend on the traditional use of coca, chewed or in tea, which only occurs in the South,” added Rolles. “It is the global South where the burden of the failed war on cocaine and the criminalization of entire cultures is felt most acutely.”

In 2020, following a WHO recommendation, the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs voted to ease international controls on cannabis, recognizing its medical value after decades of “referral madness”. For reform advocates, the decision represented a slow and delayed shift to evidence-based programming. That is why there was hope that the UN system could also separate the coca leaf — which contains less than 1 percent of the alkaloid cocaine — from the refined powder that feeds global demand.

However, coca will continue to be treated as if it has the same risk profile as cocaine, after a WHO review confirmed that coca chewing has not caused any documented deaths, is not associated with high addiction or “abuse” potential, and has possible therapeutic applications, from anti-inflammatory effects to modest improvements in post-meal glucose.

“The WHO decision is deeply disappointing and disturbing,” Ann Fordham, executive director of the International Council on Drug Policy, said in a press release. “This was no ordinary study, it was a critical test of the UN drug control system. The Commission has demonstrated that it cannot objectively assess the evidence or consider the human rights implications of prohibition. Instead, it has chosen to reinforce the racist and colonial foundations of international drug control. This decision makes it clear that the system is broken and resistant to meaningful reform.”

Experts have long argued that the logic behind the coca ban is selective and ignores existing treaty precedent. Plants such as ephedra used to manufacture methamphetamine, psilocybin-containing mushrooms, and cacti that produce mescaline remain unscheduled at the plant level, although they are used to produce controlled substances.

While open persecution of coca chewers has eased in the Andes, the ban still shapes daily life in parts of the region, from farmers losing crops to stopping aerial fumigation campaigns, eradication forces and communities caught between the networks that dominate the cocaine trade. In a September study, an independent group of experts hired by the WHO said that studies that showed exposure to harmful glyphosate-based pesticides such as Roundup, a probable carcinogen, by aerial spraying of coca crops by authorities “increased the number of abortions and increased the number of medical consultations related to dermatological and respiratory diseases in communities”.

The review added that another study showed that forced coca eradication encouraged coca growers to increase production through the use of toxic agrochemicals “on more or subsequent coca plots, increasing exposure to these chemicals.”

Villafaña and other indigenous leaders have warned that these pressures are cultural violence. Coca is central to Andean communities’ spiritual practice, conflict resolution, work, ceremony, and community health; however, using it outside of the narrow “traditional” exemptions puts people at risk of criminal penalties.

“It would be useful for us as a culture,” said Villafaña, “if the world recognized it as a sacred plant and did not demonize it.” But, he added, the decision would not otherwise affect his community, as its members will continue to chew coca as they have always done.

This the article Originally published by the author the filteran online magazine that deals with drug use, drug policy and human rights from a harm reduction perspective. Keep the filter on Bluesky, X or Facebookand sign up for their newsletter.

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We are full of plans

Published

2 days ago

December 5, 2025

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Marc Salvany and Ad van der Vorst:

“We are full of plans,” Agrolux director Marc Salvany told the more than 40 participants who attended the Six Days track cycling event in Rotterdam last Wednesday, invited by Agrolux. They were given a look behind the scenes (and the route), and a moment was set aside to find out how the new management sees the future of the company. “We want to honor the legacy of the Agrolux brand, a brand that many of you have known for so long.”

Paying homage to the brand
Last Wednesday, while the riders on the Ahoy track were cycling around the unbearably slow or lightning-fast track, a special moment was happening in the middle of the cycling track: the introduction of the revamped Agrolux.

Since the end of September, Agrolux has been independent again, and the group has big ambitions for the beginning of this new era. Although it may seem counterintuitive, they will not focus on selling as many devices as possible. Marc explained that it is much more to strengthen relations with the sector and customers. “Many producers have been working with Agrolux for years. These are the long-term partnerships we believe in and the ones we want to continue, because together we can achieve success.”

CEO Ad van der Vorst added that in recent years the company has not been properly organized to support this long-term market vision. “But we’re excited about the horticulture industry, we see it as having tremendous potential, and we’re excited to tackle it.”

In recent months, the team has grown and is investing heavily in product development and innovation. “New software and more modular and sustainable products,” said Ad. But more about that at Fruit Logistic in Berlin, because it was also possible to see it by bike, of course.