Lest anyone forgot, amid the hubub of Initiative 300 and the mayor’s race, Denver voters will be deciding next month whether or not to legalize so-called “magic mushrooms.”

Technically, the initiative would not “legalize” psilocybin mushrooms outright, but rather decriminalize them in a sense; more specifically, their use, possession, and sale would remain illegal, but local police would be instructed to simply not enforce the law.

Before one even delves into the relative merits of decriminalizing the drug, that concept is troubling. If we are prepared to pass an ordinance telling law enforcement not to enforce the law, the question one is compelled to ask is – why have laws? The entire point of western liberalism is that we live under a system governed by law, not by the arbitrary capriciousness of man. If a law has a purpose, enforce it; if it no longer serves a useful purpose, repeal it.

Prioritization is an unavoidable necessity, but if the concern is over prioritization of police assets, why not leave that discretion to the police, who are in the best position to exercise such judgements? This, of course, already occurs; as with marijuana before legalization, actual citations for mushroom possession and use are exceedingly rare, arrests rarer still. On the occasions they do take place, it is generally as an aggravating circumstance – the perpetrators were doing or had done something else to attract police attention.

The offense to law aside, one returns to the merits of the argument, which in many ways reflects the debate over marijuana legalization. Much hinges on intent.

Decriminalization as a tool for enhancing public safety is not in itself a necessarily bad thing. Several years ago I came to the conclusion, reluctantly but decidedly, that limited decriminalization of drugs was probably the best policy for combatting the drug problem. It was increasingly evident that the “war on drugs” was creating greater challenges, in some aspects, than it was solving, and that a different strategy was in order. The idea was to decriminalize use among adults – something exceedingly difficult to control in anything resembling a free society in any event – while maintaining or even strengthening prohibitions against trafficking and use among children, and concurrently assigning the same social sanction against drug use as is attached to, say, cigarette smoking or STD’s. It’s perfectly legal, after all, to contract syphilis.

In other words, legalization was seen by many at the time as prompting an honest discussion over how to better to mount society’s attack on drug use – because a just society will always be waging a war against drug abuse.

The trouble began fairly recently when the narrative among legalization proponents morphed from one of reducing the social and economic cost of the War on Drugs and using legalization as way to solve the drug problem, to one of denying that marijuana use was a problem; eventually metastasizing to the point where we are at currently, where some are advocating for the widespread use of marijuana, touting almost magical benefits.

Now, it is possible, likely even, that there are some legitimate medicinal uses for marijuana, perhaps even for psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin. Some have made the argument, convincingly, that for terminal patients suffering pain untouchable by other means that even heroin ought to be available for such merciful use, the disastrous side effects rendered moot for a body close to death anyway. And there is also considerable merit to the point that the bureaucratic prorogation displayed by the Food and Drug Administration in approving new medications is cause for concern.

On the other hand, one is justified in questioning whether that is a sufficient catalyst for the mass medicalization of a substance absent any empirical data to back the fantastical claims. The heart breaks for parents of children stricken with various ailments who, in their desperation to find succor, have turned to marijuana with hopeful results, but the hard question remains of whether such emotional testimonies alone warrant a headlong rush into unknown territory with unknown consequences.

Which brings us back to mushrooms. If the argument is simply that current approaches are doing more harm than good and failing to adequately deal with the social and individual costs of drug use, then there may be some value in looking at legalization as an additional arrow in the quiver of tools available to combat the problem. But if the point is simply to legalize for the sake of legalization in the superstition that psychotropic drug use is benign, we are fooling ourselves.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and recovering journalist based in Denver. He is also an energy and environmental policy fellow at Centennial Institute.