With the end of election season in the United States less than a day away, psychedelics advocates in Massachusetts pulled out all the stops in the final full week of their campaign quest to ensure victory for Question 4 in the voting booth tomorrow.
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Psychedelics Advocates Rally at State House
On Tuesday, October 29th, nearly one hundred political activists, medical professionals, and media members gathered on the steps of the Massachusetts State House to urge their fellow Bay Staters to vote yes on a complex dual decriminalisation and legalised psychedelic therapy services bill known as An Act Relative to the Taxation and Regulation of Natural Psychedelic Substances.
Hollywood star turned psychedelic therapist Eliza Dushku was the highest profile Question 4 supporter to speak at the press conference. Dushku, who rose to fame in part due to her prominent role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has been an outspoken advocate for psychedelic research and policy reform efforts in recent years.
After struggling with substance abuse and severe PTSD for years following a tumultuous and abusive Hollywood career, Dushku was profoundly healed by way of psychedelic-assisted therapy. Following her transformative experiences as a patient, Dushku set out to become a provider herself, earning a master’s degree in Counseling and Clinical Mental Health from Lesley University along with formal psychedelic facilitator training from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Dushku currently serves as a clinical intern at Mass General Hospital (MGH) and, along with her husband Peter Palandjian, Harvard graduate and CEO of Intercontinental Real Estate, is an active philanthropic supporter of psychedelic causes.
Also on the press conference speaking list was Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score and Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University, Franklin King, Director of Education and Training at MGH’s Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics, and Hannah McLane, President of the SoundMind Institute and a Physician Research Fellow at Philadelphia’s VA Hospital.
Last-Minute Debate Highlights Discord
As for the discourse surrounding Q4 beyond the Yes on 4 campaign, the most confusing development of the final week of the campaign involved an allegedly misleading and hastily-organized “discussion” on the ins and outs of Q4, hosted by Mason Marks of Harvard’s Petrie-Flom Center and founder of the Psychedelic Week newsletter on Substack.
Marks has been an outspoken critic of Question 4 since the earliest days of the campaign, even writing a formal request to the Assistant Attorney General of Massachusetts last year opposing the certification of voter signatures gathered by the campaign to secure Q4’s spot on the ballot this election cycle. Furthermore, Dr. Marks is frequently cited by embattled psychedelic activist James Davis, founder of the Somerville, MA-based group Bay Staters for Natural Medicine (BSNM). As reported here at Psychedelic Alpha last week, Davis was caught misrepresenting the circumstances surrounding BSNM’s exclusion from a recent Q4 debate hosted by a student group at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. Even more recently, despite touting the group’s supposed public charity status prominently on its website, Bay Staters Incorporated is apparently no longer a registered nonprofit in Massachusetts.
Seemingly in response to the news of Davis’ exclusion from prior Question 4 debates, Marks chimed in online on Tuesday and offered to “host a debate or discussion between [Davis and New Approach PAC spokesman Jared Moffat] on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday.”
Not long thereafter, Marks was confronted online by various members of the psychedelic science community for the Bioethics expert’s support for Davis, who was exposed earlier this year for impersonating US Marine Veteran Mike Botelho for over nine months.
In response to criticism of his relationship with the Bay Staters founder, Marks described peoples’ pointing out of Davis’ history of misconduct as “ad hominem attacks”.
Nevertheless, following some back and forth online, Yes on 4 grassroots partners Jamie Morey and Graham Moore agreed to participate in a debate on Friday, November 1 at 8 PM ET. In turn, Marks agreed to invite representatives from the Entheogen Melanin Collective, Boston’s first-ever POC-led psychedelic advocacy group. Unfortunately, by Friday morning the Yes on 4 team backed out, which Moore claimed online was due to a “concerning lack of transparency” in planning the event.
“We were told this was a discussion about the ballot question between Bay Staters and the campaign,” Moore said, adding that prior to Psychedelic Week’s event announcement on Friday morning, the Q4 team “had no knowledge that people from other states were going to be included.”
Adding further to the controversy, on Friday morning Marks appeared to falsely claim on Twitter that EMC co-founder Imani Turnbull-Brown, a US Navy Veteran from Randolph, MA, never replied to his request to have her join the panel, to which Yes on 4 Community Engagement Coordinator Jamie Morey quickly chimed in to object to Marks’ characterization of EMC’s participation status. Morey even provided screenshots of Turnbull-Brown’s text exchange with Marks, showing that it was Marks who failed to respond to Turnbull-Brown’s request for a pre-panel meeting to discuss specifics and logistics. For her part, Turnbull-Brown confirmed that Marks reached out not long after Morey’s post to claim that he never received her message the day before, chalking it up to “an Apple-Android thing.”
On Friday evening, about an hour before the event was set to begin, Roger Williams University Professor of Law and discussion moderator Victoria Litman sent a Tweet urging the Yes on 4 team to attend after all. Litman’s re-invitation prompted Moore, a Somerville, MA resident and Yes on 4’s Educational Outreach Director, to log on just before 8 PM after all. But Marks insisted that Moore sign a video release form that required him to provide Marks with his full mailing address, which Moore described as “creepy” and refused to sign. In response, Marks chose to deny Moore entry to the event altogether.
At the start of the online event, I was informed that Moore was in the waiting room ready to participate, so I asked Marks via Zoom’s Q&A function to admit him. Rather than explain that Moore hadn’t signed a required video release form, Marks removed me from the event entirely. Later, when questioned in the Q&A about this apparent censorship, Marks denied the allegation and claimed that I had disrupted the event by repeatedly posting an already-answered question during my brief time in attendance.
As for the actual content of Friday night’s discussion, one attendee praised both out-of-state panellists, noting that they “offered helpful perspective on what is happening in other states that passed voter-initiated ballot measures, the pitfalls of the rule-making process… and managing outside players influencing the process.”
They also lamented that, rather than engage in substantive discourse, Bay Staters founder James Davis spent the bulk of his speaking time, “taking up way too much air, mostly centering himself, and not really addressing some of the questions asked.” While the audience member did praise Littman for her “real-time fact checking of falsehoods being presented by [Davis],” they concluded that overall, the discussion “wasn’t productive” and that Davis’ remarks ultimately came across “like grandstanding [and] ego-rubbing.”
The Final Countdown
In any case, the event will almost certainly bear no weight on the outcome of Tuesday’s election, although the polling numbers are still extremely close with under twenty-four hours until election day. A near-even split has been indicated in recent UMass and Boston Globe polls.
However, the most recent polling data seems to indicate a shift in favor of Q4 advocates. Last week, an Emerson College poll found that 50% of voters were in favor, 44% were opposed, and roughly 6% were still undecided on Q. Similarly, the University of New Hampshire released a poll on Sunday, November 3 indicating 46% of voters were in favor, 36% remained opposed, and a hefty 16% of voters were seemingly still undecided.