.Higher Office: The Psychedelic Candidacy of Jonathan Pinkston

As he sat, waiting his turn among job-seekers and single-issue activists at a sparsely attended Sebastopol city council meeting, Jonathan Pinkston appeared calm. I could only guess at his inner emotion. It was—undoubtedly—a big moment for Pinkston. And, just maybe, it was a point of inflection around which the whole region might turn its course.

Pinkston had come to read his intention to run for a seat at the table into the public record and, in a sense, lay a challenge before the sitting city council. His objective, Sebastopol’s mayoralty, and any further town and county seats that might secure his ambitious campaign platform.

In what will be a hotly debated campaign, the 37 year old might wish to be known as “the youth candidate” in white-haired Sebastopol, “the Hub candidate” or “the change candidate,” here to save Sebastopol’s soul. 

But it is a matter of predetermination, if not pre-destiny, that Jonathan Pinkston will be known as “the psychedelic candidate” of Sebastopol, for the seventh plank in his hugely ambitious reform platform is the decriminalization of select schedule 1 psychedelic drugs in Sebastopol city limits, promising a first-of-its-kind “guided use,” permit and tax program.

Moment of Danger & Decision

Pinkston is rushing to present Sebastopol with a choice in time. It is a moment of danger and decision for Sebastopol. In a cycle familiar to local politics, a large budget deficit has opened the town to short-sighted development schemes promising rich fees.

In this cycle, the monied developer is the Chicago-based owner of The Barlow, which is now attempting to build a large luxury hotel in place of the empty Guayaki Yerba Mate building. According to published plans, their all-inclusive, $500-a-night resort would have 83 rooms and a rooftop infinity pool. The Barlow effort is the third attempt by three different developers to build a mini-lux hotel in Sebastopol—a familiar pattern of monied wine tourism interests.

Pinkston regards these luxury hotels as gentrification, and worse—a decisive turn into the path of the “Sonoma-fication” and “Healdsburg-ization” of “Peacetown” by outside money.

Materially and culturally, Sebastopol was built up by an illicit cannabis industry that collapsed with legalization. Pinkston believes a new semi-licit psychedelic sector, informed by the neo-shamanistic principles of “intentionality,” would turn Sebastopol back to a path in line with its outspoken values—herbalism, healing, spirituality, art and psychedelia. But he and his allies must act fast to head off the most recent hotel.

The Pinkston platform (printed here) presents a striking alternative vision of Sebastopol’s future. It is easy to get swept up in it, and speaks to our unmet desire for young leaders with new ideas and bold actions. 

But the ex-idealist in me asks whether, in venturing into this vision, he will fall into the well-marked pitfalls that can trap ambitious thinkers and dreamers. Those of big but impractical ideas, under-estimating political difficulties and causing unintended consequences.

The Man in Question

Jonathan Pinkston is young and idealistic but not untried in life. He has a solid, brick-and-mortar success to show on Main Street as the most visible of the seven owners of Soft Medicine Sanctuary—a tea house, music venue and school with a new, “regenerative” business incubator nextdoor.

Soft Medicine began as a tea stall in the Occidental farmers’ market. It has grown to host more than 100 monthly classes and events, ranging from yoga to numerology to 5 Rhythms dance to DJ stars of the Burning Man circuit. It has become a hub, and Pinkston has become a big wheel in counter-cultural West County. Soft Medicine is his main support base, strong but perhaps narrow.

He has been working to extend his political base with “The Hub,” a small but growing coalition of Sebastopol businesses and organizations that agree to the spirit of his platform, though not necessarily the specifics. Its board consists of West County notables Debra Giusti of The Harmony Festival and Global Peace Tribe, Jaqui Bonner of Bearheart, Alex Sheman of Kai Harris and Jonathan Greenberg (journalist of “Biden Can’t Win” fame—presumably he thinks Pinkston can).

I know Jonathan Pinkston professionally from two formal interviews (one linked here) and numerous informal encounters. I can give you my own impression of him. Pinkston is a tan and lean 37 year old who dresses in the influences of tech and hippie. He seems quietly affluent. He is a talker and very persuasive. His humor is satiric and biting, sometimes sharply contrasting with his high-mindedness and acts of open-handed generosity. 

For all his industry and activity, he has a physical stillness. He is well-read and well-researched, and his work style is deadline-oriented, more improvised than planned and sometimes a bit heedless. He can get ahead of himself. His defining quality is an unmovable and quiet assurance. All things seem possible to him. It’s exciting.

If some of that seems contradictory, perhaps it is, or maybe he is just hard to pin down—sui generis, a new type of character for a new kind of story. We certainly need a new narrative. And with his platform, he presents one.

The Hub Platform 

This is Jonathan Pinkston’s Hub-backed campaign platform, bullet-pointed. Because this amounts to publishing campaign promises on his behalf, I confirmed this particular section of the article with its subject.

∙ ‘Town Hall Style, Grassroots Engagement in Local Politics.’

∙ ‘Promotion of Additional Youth Leaders (Under 40)  in Town and County Government.’ 

Says Pinkston, “These people are inheriting the town; we need their voices in shaping what is to come.”

∙ ‘Additional Parks, Community Commons, and Greenspace.’

In the campaign that will lead off his campaign, Pinkston and Hub are organizing a fundraising drive to purchase the empty lot opposite Sebastopol’s town square as a part of a town square annex three times the size. Symbolically, the lot had been the site of a stalled effort to build a different luxury hotel. The developer, Piazza, is based in Healdsburg.

∙ ‘Opposition to Rushed Development of High-Density Transient Housing.’

Hub uses oblique policy language, but this can be taken as their opposition to rushing big, bougie hotels.

∙ ‘Additional At-Cost Housing.’

Hub is promoting locally sourced efforts to build more Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), tiny houses and urban co-housing developments for locals at below-market rates.

∙ ‘Commercial Rent Control by Penalty or Community Land Trust Ownership of Downtown Buildings.’

Hub is inspired by the Burlington, Vermont model of fighting “the retail apocalypse.”

∙ ‘Qualified Decriminalization of Psychedelic Plants and Fungi.’

These big ideas cost big money, and Sebastopol is in deficit. While unpopular sales tax and fee increases have reduced that deficit, there are indications that major infrastructure repair costs are looming. Jonathan Pinkston does have one big idea for feeding the general fund—and it’s the elephant in his platform’s room. 

The psychedelic candidate calls for political collaboration on a program to issue a limited number of permits for the cultivation and distribution of “unrefined and unprocessed” entheogenic plants and fungi. While he has not finalized a list, this would presumably include ayahuasca and magic mushrooms but exclude magic toads and LSD—as well as processed gummy and pill extracts. 

This permit program would not create dispensaries in Sebastopol but rather “clinics” and retreat centers where psychedelics would be consumed under direct supervision, guided by spiritual tenets of Indigenous custom or the Stanford medical protocols for psychotherapeutic use.

Remembering how many illegal growers were priced out of legal cannabis, Pinkston says that the permits would be affordable at $50K a piece but that a total of 30 would address Sebastopol’s structural $1.5 million deficit each year. Still, those 30 permits and centers would transform Sebastopol with a new industry and economic base. One could imagine Sebastopol becoming a regional center for a different kind of “healing” tourism, producing a general economic boom and unforeseen consequences. 

A Psychedelic Moment?

Besides the synchronic correspondence between the deficit, the looming luxury hotel development and his Main Street success, Pinkston believes the timing is right for decriminalization in the North Bay.

Intentional use and drug-like abuse of psychedelic drugs do appear to be mainstreaming despite federal law. Relaxed research controls have produced blockbuster studies that confirm long-held beliefs about psychedelics, that “intentional” use can mediate the acceptance of terminal disease, death, loss, childhood trauma, sexual abuse, and combat PTSD. (See Michael Pollen’s 2018 New York Times best-seller, How to Change Your Mind, for a digest of ongoing research.) 

And studies say that psychedelics are beneficial in the treatment of anxiety and depression and have the potential to mediate recovery from substance abuse and spiritual awakenings into anti-consumerist, connective belonging. 

In short, mainstream scientists and authority figures now stand with hippies in saying that psychedelics could help save a world in danger.

Since Denver decriminalized psychedelia in 2019, 30 municipalities and two states have followed suit. In California, these include San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz, Eureka and Arcata. It would be easy to see Sebastopol next on that list.

Whether Pinkston and Hub are the catalysts or not, this undeniable momentum makes decriminalization in the North Bay seem inevitable.

Vision or Hallucination?

Taken at a gallop, Jonathan Pinkston’s Hub campaign platform is breathtaking in its scope and vision. It is especially striking in the context of an election culture in which candidates will make many yard signs but few specific policy promises. Pinkston’s intention is to run as an Independent, and he expresses little interest in the familiar game of lining up the endorsements of prominent unions and elected officials. The question is, can he win the game playing by his own rules? Again, I think of the political pitfalls of visionaries and intellectuals.

To map his difficulties and calculate his chances, I sought comments from some of Sebastopol’s leading figures with a draft platform. Not incidentally, these leaders will become some of Hub’s allies and opponents in its campaigns.

I began with Sebastopol’s top cop, Chief Ron Nelson. My 20 questions concerned the public safety consequences of decriminalization. Does he think there would be less crime or more crime? And what classes of crime—grow permit violations or robberies? Would he worry about the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) if Sebastopol became a national model and leader in the movement?

Nelson claimed it was necessary to remain apolitical about a candidate’s chances and issued a blanket “no comment” statement. It’s always a politically savvy choice. Still, these fundamental questions could become flashpoints in the debates and loci of conservative opposition. Also, the Sebastopol police will need to fully support these laws’ non-enforcement.

Next, I approached the mayor of Sebastopol, the honorable Stephen Zollman, whose dais seat Pinkston admires. The mayor was sweetly embarrassed to admit that he had not heard of Pinkston or Hub before the recent council meeting. In a true collegiate spirit, he offered this advice based on his own successful campaign:

First, successful platforms are typically formed by bringing together multiple single-issue leaders and parties into a coalition behind a candidate. The implication is that Pinkston may be putting the cart before the horse in presenting an entire platform first.

Surprisingly, in the course of our conversation, Zollman came out in favor of “guided-use” decriminalization, bravely sharing his guided ketamine-assisted breakthrough in unwinding some of his trauma as a queer youth and army veteran. However, Zollman believes Hub should conduct an extensive local educational campaign before decriminalization. Perhaps the time is not yet ripe.

Thirdly, Zollman suggests that it’s often difficult to find time for a candidate’s platform pieces once in office, given the crowded agenda of urgent city businesses. Pinkston may be too overwhelmed by sewer problems or union contracts to carry out his platform.

Unanswered Questions

As a journalist, my job is to ask questions and to get the whole story, but there are some important questions I can’t get answers for. Will Pinkston heed political advice and make his campaign less ambitious, less exciting and more conventional? Will The Barlow, Piazza Hospitality or any of the other proponents of  “Wine Country Sebastopol” bankroll opposition to his candidacy with a “pro-development” candidate and conventional yard-sign campaign? 

There are many other questions, but perhaps the paramount one is whether famously hippy and famously change-adverse Sebastopol is still interested in building Utopia. And that question can only be answered by the coming vote.

Whatever one’s impression of his platform, Jonathan Pinkston grasps the essential paradox of our times: that even saving the status quo will require radical action at this point in our historical drift.

Learn more. linktr.ee/PinkstonLINKS.