Alaska activists have officially launched a signature drive to place an initiative on the 2026 ballot to legalize certain psychedelics such as psilocybin and DMT.
About a month after the lieutenant governor’s office certified the measure for circulation, a combination of volunteer and paid petitioners for the Alaska Natural Medicine campaign got to work last week after receiving initiative booklets from the state.
With a requirement to collect 35,000 signatures, advocates are “working hard to make that happen as we get into the fall season here,” David Karabelnikoff, Alaska policy advisor and member of the steering committee for the campaign, told Marijuana Moment on Monday.
Having personally collected signatures over the past week, Karabelnikoff said he’s “found support from, surprisingly, a wide variety of people.” That even included a “long-time member” of Narcotics Anonymous, which counsels people on a general principle of abstinence from drugs.
There’s a “whole variety of cross-sections of people that are willing to give the voters a chance to make the decision on this at the election ballot box,” Karabelnikoff said. “And I think that plant medicine and natural medicines are kind of a cross-cutting topic.”
“We found support from from both conservative people as well as progressives or liberals,” he said. “Alaska has a unique balance—also with this really strong libertarian spirit up here, where, if you’re staying in your own lane and not hurting anyone, then we kind of feel like the government should stay out of our business.”
A policy outline from the campaign explains the proposal as “building off of” Colorado’s voter-approved 2022 Natural Medicine Health Act, under which facilitators recently administered the state’s first legal dose of psilocybin.
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