Ten years ago voters in Colorado approved a ballot measure called Amendment 64 that legalized cannabis for adult, recreational use. This not only created a booming avenue of tourism for Denver – which became the Las Vegas of legal weed – but sparked a domino effect of similar reforms across the US, eventually leading 19 states (and DC) to legalize recreational marijuana, and increase the number of medically legal states to 37.

Since then, Colorado has racked up $13.2bn in cannabis sales, which has gleaned $2.2bn in taxes and fees for the state.

Recently Joe Biden announced he would be pardoning all federal marijuana offenses, encouraged governors to do the same, and asked for a review of its schedule 1 status, where it is placed alongside heroin and LSD as having “no medicinal value”.

It has been a decade of remarkable change. Instead of birthing a huge new American industry, back in 2012, many conservative pundits and politicians predicted legal weed would plunge Denver into a post-apocalyptic chaos.

Former Colorado governor and current US senator John Hickenlooper – who, like nearly every other Colorado politician, strongly opposed legalization – confessed that time had proved his anxieties to be unfounded.

“Today, I go into the US Senate on a regular basis and say that we can prove that since we legalized marijuana there has been no increase in teenage experimentation, no increase in driving while high,” Hickenlooper said at a recent event marking the anniversary and citing a state health survey of 40,000 participants. “Just to be clear, I smoked pot when I was 16 … and I feel pretty darn sure now that [legalization] is a much better societal decision than what I grew up in.”

As Denver mayor in the 2000s, Hickenlooper aggressively opposed civic marijuana reforms and was labeled a hypocrite for making his fortune as a brewpub owner. His replacement in 2011, Mayor Michael Hancock, was arguably even more anti-cannabis, labeling it a “gateway drug”, and predicted: “We will lose our attractiveness to companies, employers who want to come to our state.”

However, he began his opening remarks at last Tuesday’s celebration with the joke “it’s great to be here at the losers rally for Amendment 64.”

After explaining his opposition to the measure at the time – citing addiction issues in his own family – he said “I was wrong 10 years ago. I’m a convert today. This can be done right and responsibly.”

Hancock also boasted that “today I am the chair of a national mayors committee for sensible cannabis policy. I have testified in Congress that it’s time to legalize marijuana.”

Similarly Hickenlooper called for federal marijuana reforms, and announced the creation of a marijuana taskforce in the Senate to mirror the one created in Colorado with Amendment 64, in preparation for federal legalization.

“We knew it was a matter of when, not if,” the current Colorado governor, Jared Polis, said. “It’s always exciting as an elected official to be riding the wave of history.”

Polis was a congressman at the time of Amendment 64, and a strong advocate for legalization, known for once flying a hemp flag on the US Capitol dome. Polis is currently campaigning not only for re-election as governor, but for the federal passage of a banking bill that would allow cannabis businesses access to loans, bank accounts, tax deductions (currently they have none) and interstate commerce, something advocates have tried, and failed, to pass for nearly a decade.

“When I was a member of Congress we started a cannabis caucus and only had a few members, and the safe banking bill only had a few sponsors,” Polis told the Guardian. “Now it’s passed the house with a strong bipartisan majority and it likely has 60 votes in the Senate.”

Before Amendment 64, even progressive Democrats like Barack Obama were mocking the idea of legalization with jokes and eyerolls. Fast forward a decade and the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, stands in a field of hemp in a campaign ad, boasting that hemp could replace tobacco as a Kentucky cash crop.

When Gallup first began polling on this issue in 1969, only 12% of Americans supported legalization of marijuana. At the time of Amendment 64’s passage in 2012, about half the country was in favor of the change. As of 2021, that number climbed to 68%. Another Gallup poll shows 16% of Americans regularly consume the plant, nearly double from 2013.

But not everyone is happy.

Kevin Sabet, former White House Office of National Drug Control Policy adviser and CEO of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, said that people like Hickenlooper and Hancock who have flip-flopped on this issue “are playing politics”.

“The legalization of marijuana has harmed public health and public safety, a point few supporters of legalization are willing to acknowledge,” Sabet said in an email to the Guardian. “Legalization has also allowed another addiction-for-profit industry to take root in America.”

Sabet blames marijuana legalization for other drug law reforms, such as the decriminalization of psilocybin in Denver, personal use of a variety of drugs in Oregon, and of opioids in Canada, saying “those who initially supported the legalization of marijuana in Colorado likely didn’t expect to be voting on the legalization of psychedelics 10 years later.”

Decriminalization is different from legalization: it only removes penalties for possession of drugs, unlike legalization, which establishes a commercial framework for production, transportation, sale and taxation of substances.

While full federal legalization often appears inevitable to advocates, legal marijuana is still a bogeyman in conservative politics.

Dr Mehmet Oz recently attacked his opponent for Senate in Pennsylvania in a campaign video, picturing Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman with a bong coming out of his head, following his support for legalization and his pardoning those with low-level marijuana convictions. And if you watch Fox News long enough you’re sure to see stories about marijuana psychosis, marijuana being more addictive than alcohol, or, Tucker Carlson’s favorite, blaming mass shootings on legal weed.

It’s true that in the early days of legalization in Colorado, edible products had inconsistent dosages and were far more potent than most cannabis newbies could reasonably handle, leading to Maureen Dowd freaking out in a Denver hotel room and emergency rooms filled with panicked tourists every night.

Fearing a surge in underage use, Governor Hickenlooper launched his “Don’t Be a Lab Rat” PSA in 2014, installing large metal cages with a hamster water-bottle inside near schools, intending to illustrate the lack of science around THCs impact on developing brains.

Edibles have since been regulated for consistency in Colorado, and are now capped at 10mg of THC a dose. And while underage use remains higher in legalized states than prohibition states, it never increased following legalization.

However, concerns around high THC products, regulation of consumption lounges and equity in the industry for women, people of color and low-income entrepreneurs, remain for those on both sides of this issue.

When asked whether the wave of legalization will continue, even Sabet said: “Given the industry’s financial incentives to commercialize marijuana nationwide, I expect them to continue pressuring lawmakers to liberalize our federal marijuana laws.”

But he added: “I imagine at some point we will look back and say ‘what were we thinking?’ and begin to reverse our loose regulations on marijuana like we have for tobacco. No one would’ve imagined 40 years ago we would have banned smoking from restaurants and airplanes – yet here we are. American attitudes can change quickly.”

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The World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland – where the financial and political elite gather to more or less decide the fate of the world – looked a little different this year.

For the first time since the cold war, Russia was blacklisted from the event, its typically lavish party house replaced with a gruesome multimedia exhibit on the promenade titled Russian War Crimes. Due to Covid concerns – which has kept the event out of commission for the last two years – the forum was held in the spring instead of the typical January, so world leaders were cheated out of their ski breaks in the Swiss Alps.

And to the surprise of many, psychedelic drugs were one of the hottest topics of discussion on the streets of Davos.

Like the Russian War Crimes exhibit, the Psychedelic House of Davos was one of several satellite events happening in conjunction with the World Economic Forum (though not directly associated with it). As with every year, each building along the promenade of downtown Davos hosted different countries – including India, Poland and Ukraine – businesses such as the Wall Street Journal, and industries like blockchain and cryptocurrency, which put on weeklong parties with speakers, panelists and networking mixers, all designed to seduce world leaders into supporting their agenda.

“We spark curiosity with the neon sign out front,” said Maria Velcova, one of the organizers of Psychedelic House of Davos. “Once people get curious and brave enough to come down here, they realize that this isn’t some underground electronic dance party. They find themselves meeting world-renowned scientists, clinicians, policymakers, people from for-profit and non-profit sectors, and experts from leading academic institutions.”

While psychedelic treatments for mental health problems have garnered wild enthusiasm from the media and parts of the scientific community, news of this booming new industry’s presence at Davos this year was a bit too surreal for some to handle.

After a headline on Bloomberg news declared “Forget Burning Man, Psychedelic Shamans Are Heading To Davos”, late-night comedian Stephen Colbert quipped in his opening monologue, “Oh good, just what billionaires need: a looser grip on reality.”

Colbert was specifically referring to event speaker and “shamanic investing” expert Silvia Benito, whom Bloomberg described as having “deep expertise in ayahuasca and experience managing family investments”.

“Hopefully at the same time,” said Colbert. “‘We split your investments between high yield stocks, medium yield bonds and the sense-memory of your wronged ancestors, who will appear to you as a wolf with your father’s voice. Now walk with me into the fire, where we will itemize your deductions.’”

While the weeklong event did feature plenty of “woo-woo” fodder for late-night comedians, such as sound healing ceremonies, psychedelic breathwork and immersive art installations designed to “stimulate immersive hepatic reprogramming”, the Psychedelic House of Davos was dominated by a sober catalog of lectures and panels.

Science, investment and ethics made up the bulk of topics discussed, while the audience included an eclectic range of burner psychonauts, big pharma investors and humanitarians from around the globe concerned about the escalating mental health crisis.

“I am a firm believer that psychedelics have the ability to unlock novel approaches to disorders notoriously difficult to treat, like PTSD, alcoholism, opioid addiction and pain,” said Kevin McKenzie, co-founder of Carvin Medicines, a Swiss drug company entering the psychedelic drug market. “Hosting this in Davos at the same location as WEF is a genius strategy – it brings fresh eyes and bright minds to psychedelic drug development, which builds credibility for these medicines.”

It’s difficult to identify any one moment that inspired the sudden recent popularity of psychedelic drug therapy – after all, the treatment seemed poised for breakthrough in the 1950s. But many point to author Michael Pollan’s massively popular 2019 book How To Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence.

That same year, Denver’s decriminalization of psilocybin created a domino effect of legislative reforms across the US, leading Oregon to decriminalize all drugs in 2020. Just last week Senators Cory Booker and Brian Schatz sent a letter to the NIH and FDA requesting they identify regulatory roadblocks keeping psychedelic research from moving forward.

And earlier this year, the health minister of Australia approved $15m in funding to research whether MDMA can be an effective tool in treating PTSD and alcoholism.

Often the world of psychedelic science finds itself in a catch-22 triangle of needing more research before politicians will change drug laws, yet needing more funding to do the necessary research, while investors need the laws to change before they will risk funding the research. Still, a handful of recent developments have kept this momentum alive.

Last year the UK psychedelic company Compass Pathways completed the first randomized, double-blind trial of psilocybin for the treatment of depression, given to 233 patients across Europe and North America. Those treatments were administered by trained therapists, while MindBio Therapeutics just completed phase one of their research around LSD microdose therapy, which, for the first time, allowed participants to self-administer the drug at home.

“It’s all changed very quickly and dramatically when it comes to the business interest in psychedelics,” said chemist and documentarian Hamilton Morris, after his presentation at the Psychedelic House of Davos. “And that’s led to increased interest from the public and academia, and increased pressure for government funding of psychedelic research. Until recently there’s been virtually no funding for this kind of research, either government or commercial.”

Funding is still relatively scarce – it costs about $2.6bn to bring a single drug to market – but the marriage of high finance and the science of highs is beginning to seem inevitable.

Billionaires like Peter Thiel (PayPal), Bob Parsons (GoDaddy) and dozens of others have already invested heavily in psychedelic companies. In 2021 alone, 45 different investments led to a $595m windfall into the psychedelic medicine industry, leading Elon Musk to flirt with the trend when tweeting last month: “I’ve talked to many more people who were helped by psychedelics & ketamine than SSRIs & amphetamines.”

A Vice News journalist, Shayla Love, was somewhat of a wet blanket at the Psychedelic House of Davos – which at times felt like a pep rally for the industry – by bringing attention to concerns around unethical business practices, overpromising the efficacy of psychedelic treatments and instances of sexual abuse against patients while under the influence of drugs in clinical trials.

“Psychedelics in the last two or three years, particularly since Michael Pollan’s book came out, have had extremely positive coverage,” she said during a panel discussion. “And unfortunately a lot of the people who write about psychedelic studies may not have a background in science, and present too simplistic a conclusion on this research. I’m not working in opposition to anyone, but I do report on these issues as they arise and as I see them. I think the coverage has been overwhelmingly positive and there’s room for more nuanced approaches.”

By the end of the week, Hamilton Morris said the Psychedelic House of Davos felt more or less like any of the other dozens of psychedelic business and science conferences popping up all over the world these days.

While he’s a little burnt out on them and wants to get back to his chemistry lab, he admits coming here due to “some degree of morbid curiosity, because I never thought I’d see something like this at Davos. It has a reputation for being the international epicenter of avarice and business, things that seem superficially antithetical to the world of psychedelics.”

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In the summer of 2019, 23-year-old Elijah McClain was stopped by the Aurora, Colorado, police while walking home, after someone called 911 saying he looked suspicious.

The incident quickly turned violent, with three police officers piling on the 140lbMcClain, twice putting him in a chokehold that has since been banned. After vomiting, coming in and out of consciousness and pleading for breath, paramedics arrived and injected McClain with an excessive dose of ketamine, a powerful sedative.

He immediately went limp and went into cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital, dying a few days later.

The three police officers and two paramedics have since been charged with criminally negligent homicide, and the family of McClain – who was Black – was recently awarded $15m in a civil lawsuit against the city of Aurora, the second largest of its kind, just behind the one awarded to George Floyd’s family.

McClain’s death magnified the American reckoning with racism and police brutality but it has also sparked a national debate about the use of ketamine – a medical anesthetic, popular club drug, and psychotherapy tool – in law enforcement situations, leading to its ban in the state of Colorado, and possibly across the nation.

“What we’re talking about is the weaponization of medicine,” says Mari Newman, the lawyer representing McClain’s family. “It might as well be a taser or a gun.”

Newman says that McClain was exhibiting none of the signs of “excited delirium syndrome” – a controversial diagnosis that legally warrants a ketamine injection – and that police officers erroneously employed “code words like ‘he had superhuman strength’” that she says were an attempt to influence paramedics to give the injection (and justify their own use of excessive force).

Police are not legally allowed to administer ketamine. Paramedics can, but only if a patient is exhibiting symptoms of “excited delirium”. The controversy surrounding this diagnosis – characterized by aggressive behavior, superhuman strength and hyperthermia – comes in part from its emergence during the war on drugs in the 1980s, and is applied disproportionately in the post-mortem of Black men killed by police. The condition is not recognized by the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders, or the American Medical Association.

A report by public radio station KUNC revealed that in the past 2.5 years, Colorado medics injected 902 people for excited delirium, leading to serious complications in 17% of cases. The American Society of Anesthesiologists recently stated it “firmly opposes the use of ketamine or any other sedative/hypnotic agent to chemically incapacitate someone for a law enforcement purpose and not for a legitimate medical reason”.

A Minnesota medic filed a whistleblower lawsuit last year claiming police had pressured him to inject someone with ketamine during an arrest, adding that such acts are not uncommon (in Minneapolis, ketamine use grew from an average of four law enforcement incidents a year, to 62, from 2015 to 2017).

After the death of McClain – and a similar incident involving Aurora police – the state of Colorado passed legislation last June banning the use of ketamine for excited delirium, and clarifying that police should never influence medics to use it. “EMS is responsible for patient care, not law enforcement,” Governor Jared Polis said in a signing statement. “Ketamine should not be used for law enforcement purposes.”

A similar federal bill was introduced shortly after, and is being considered by Congress.

Emergency Medical Services Association of Colorado president, Scott Sholes, says that, when used according to protocol, ketamine is the safest alternative to violence or other sedatives available to paramedics, and removing it from their toolbox puts them at a serious loss.

“I can tell you horror stories about physically restraining people for hours, back in the day,” says Sholes. “For the first ten years of my career it was strapping people to back-boards, sometimes flipping the board over and sitting on it in order to control people, and eventually we got some medications we could use.”

Starting in the early 1990s, Shole says, medics could use antipsychotics like Haldol, and later benzodiazepines like Valium or opioids like fentanyl, to subdue those who pose a threat to themselves or others. But these drugs could often take 30 minutes to take effect, and sometimes delivered the opposite effect intended.

“In comparison, ketamine takes three to four minutes, is easy to dose, has the safest profile, and has remarkable success with sedation,” Sholes says. “With everything we’ve seen in the media on ketamine, no one is looking at the data.”

Sholes points to a study released last summer revealing that, of the 11,291 instances of patients being injected with ketamine by paramedics, “patient mortality was rare. Ketamine could not be ruled out as a contributing factor in 8 deaths, representing 0.07% of those who received ketamine.”

Sholes stresses a kind of church-and-state separation between medics and law enforcement, and that paramedics should never be collaborating with police in the execution of their duties. However, he admits, there have been instances where this line has been blurred, violating EMS protocol.

And in the case of Elijah McClain, he says that Aurora paramedics failed to follow basic practices in the administration of ketamine.

“I’ve been a paramedic for 40 years, and that video [of McClain’s death], if you think it’s bad from a layman perspective, it’s astonishing to me,” says Sholes. “That’s not how ketamine is commonly used … In that video, I see paramedics who did not assess the patient. By the time they injected him, he wasn’t moving, certainly wasn’t fighting. He was given way more [ketamine] than protocol called for. ”

First approved by the FDA for use as an anesthetic in 1970, ketamine has been a popular medical tool for pain relief and sedation in humans and animals for decades.

In the 80s and 90s, illicit use of ketamine (or “special K”) was popularized by the rave scene of New York City’s club kids, who took it for its euphoric, hallucinogenic properties. In recent years, it has shown remarkably promising results in the treatment of mental health disorders, spawning an industry of “ketamine clinics” around the US.

“Ketamine’s effects operate on a spectrum,” says Desmond Wallington, a psychologist and Colorado mental health director for Klarisana, a ketamine clinic. “On the low-dose end it’s a psycholitic; so time, space and reality briefly dissolve around you. And then there’s a psychedelic experience, where those effects will last for an hour or so, and on the far end there’s an anesthetic [unconscious] experience. We operate in the first two realms.”

Wallington says he “cringes” at the idea of ketamine being used in a law enforcement context, particularly because of its growing association with police brutality against young Black men.

“You don’t want to give ketamine to someone with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder – you could send them into a delusional headspace and leave them worse than you found them,” he says. “If they’re already on a stimulant, you’re putting them at risk for a stroke.”

McClain’s family attorney, Mari Newman, says that she believes ketamine injections are being used by law enforcement simply to silence an unruly suspect.

“If someone’s disagreeing with an officer, what better way to shut them up than to knock them right out?” she says.

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The Wonderland psychedelic business conference, held recently in Miami, Florida, drew large crowds and big-name keynote speakers – such as former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson – with the promise of a booming new sector. It is being suggested that the next big development in mental healthcare will come in the form of psychedelic drugs: substances such as psilocybin (magic mushrooms), ayahuasca (a plant-based mixture from South America), and DMT (a naturally occurring hallucinogenic).

While these substances have been illegal and primarily associated with countercultures such as the hippies of the 1960s and ravers of the 1990s, changes in laws and scientific breakthroughs in psychedelic treatments for depression and anxiety have created a new industry projected to be worth £8bn by 2027.

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This is likely the case with mixing coffee and cannabis, an increasingly popular trend for marijuana companies in legalized states.

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At first glance, the traditional demographic of marijuana voters – white, young, male, Democratic – would presumably increase votes for Clinton. But with the Libertarian candidate (and known pot enthusiast), Gary Johnson, having the best chance since Nader to siphon votes away from a mainstream candidate, and the unpredictable loyalty of party-line voters this year, it’s not guaranteed that Clinton will be able to cash in on the momentum of marijuana.

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At the end of their rope, Bernie’s parents decided to put him on a pet supplement derived from cannabis. Gradually, his seizures became less severe and less frequent, before disappearing altogether.

Despite a large amount of promising anecdotal evidence like Bernie’s story, and a growing industry of cannabis-based pet products, many people have a hard time taking medical marijuana for pets seriously.

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