California
Policy Landscape
California cities were among the first in America to loosen enforcement of laws banning psychedelics. Oakland was the first city to enact a significant policy shift on psychedelics, decriminalizing psilocybin and other psychoactive plants in 2019. The following year, Santa Cruz likewise deprioritized law enforcement of ‘entheogenic’ substances. Subsequent cities, including San Francisco and Berkeley, followed suit.
The legislature has proposed a few bills to decriminalize or regulate psychedelic substances at the state level, but none have been signed into law.
Public Health
California is one of the few places to release public health statistics related to drug use and has updated its official dataset of statewide hospitalizations to include 2023. This dataset contains drug-related incidents. There was a noticeable spike in hallucinogen-related hospital incidents between 2018 and 2020, then a much slower increase between 2020 and 2021, before finally falling to pre-2020 levels in 2022. In 2023, there were only two more incidences than in 2021.
Total Hallucinogen-Related Hospital Incidences in California
Source: California Department of Health Care Access and Information
In 2023, there were around 245,000 alcohol-related hospitalizations in California--making these incidents 56 times more prevalent than those related to hallucinogens.
Methodological note: Our dataset includes hospital admissions that the authors did not include. Notably, in addition to diagnosis codes that explicitly call out 'hallucinogens,' California also has diagnosis codes for "psychodysleptic," which some hospitals could use to categorize poisonings and unintentional use. When including this expanded definition, there were two more hallucinogen-related incidents in 2023 than in 2021, the year with the previous high (4,380 in 2023 vs. 4,378 in 2021). California is home to roughly 39 million people, so this trend represents no statistically significant change.
Crime
California releases public crime statistics but does not break down individual instances of crime by drug type, so we are unable to specify data for crime associated with psychedelics.