Josh Kappel - Revolution. Reform. Referendums.

By Brian Turk

When Vicente LLP attorney Josh Kappel was still in law school, choosing where he was going to clerk for the summer was an important decision. Well, at the time it seemed important. But seventeen years later, no one could call it anything but monumental.

Kappel had choices on where to clerk. He could go down the road well-traveled, or he could take the leap and go to work with Brian Vicente at the nonprofit Sensible Colorado. At the time, this was a big risk. If Kappel jumped in with both feet to demolish cannabis prohibition in Colorado, he was surely limiting his choices of where to work in the future if things didn’t pan out. He was standing on the ledge looking out onto the horizon—toward both his professional future and the future of all Colorado residents.

Kappel chose to join Executive Director and sole staff member Brian Vicente at Sensible Colorado. Vicente was working with Mason Tvert of SAFER to try and bring legal cannabis to the state.

Since this was back in 2008, much of their work initially focused on protecting medical cannabis patients.

“At the time there was a push by the Colorado Department of Health and Environment to put limits on Colorado’s medical marijuana program,” stated Kappel. “Specifically, that caregivers could only have five patients.” There was a lawsuit and then a hearing. The results of this first victory set the retail model for the medical cannabis dispensary—where the number of patients a caregiver had determined the number of plants the caregiver could grow.

Later, President Obama made the statement that if a medical cannabis business was in clear and unambiguous compliance with state law, then it wouldn’t be subject to federal prosecution. This was a public and powerful policy of tolerance. It encouraged Sensible Colorado to make a strong push for a state-licensed medical cannabis system.

“During my final semester in law school, House Bill 10-1284 passed,” recalled Kappel. “This created the first medical cannabis licensing regime in the world. It passed in May, and I graduated law school in May. We started Vicente LLP (then called Vicente Sederberg) a few weeks later—with me, Brian Vicente, and Christian Sederberg. Not long after, we hired Shawn Hauser. Our goal from the beginning was to leverage capitalism to end cannabis prohibition.”

The team helped with the formation of the Marijuana Enforcement Division in Colorado and assisted medical cannabis businesses in getting licensed under this new structure.

“Brian Vicente was pushing for Amendment 64,” said Kappel. “He was building the coalition and the team—hosting meetings with Mason Tvert, Steve Fox, and others to create a system for cannabis for all adults. This was all taking place right at the beginning of the law firm. Our goal was to represent businesses in these new emerging markets, while also focusing our pro bono time on helping move this whole industry forward.”

The team was able to advance Amendment 64 in Colorado and went on to work on medical and adult-use cannabis in other states.

“After Amendment 64 passed,” stated Kappel, “we just decided to keep doing this. Washington passed shortly after, but we still had 48 states to work on.”

And man, did this crew get to work. What started with a handful of dedicated folks is now an army of attorneys and advocates. Today, Vicente LLP has offices in nine different states besides Colorado, and at one time they had more than 100 employees, with Kappel practicing in both Colorado and California.

“In 2018, a lobbyist came to my office,” Kappel recollects, “and told me there was a group of folks who wanted to decriminalize psilocybin in Denver—and they might need some legal help. I almost spit out my coffee. I asked if they were organized and passionate, and he said they were. So I told him to send them my way.”

In May of the following year, Kappel helped Denver’s psilocybin decriminalization measure get on the ballot.

“I didn’t think it was gonna pass,” admitted Kappel. “If it got 40% of the vote, I was gonna consider it a win in my book, since nothing like this had been done before. But it wound up passing by a couple percentage points. It was a historic moment in psychedelic policy because it was the first time a psychedelic reform measure was enacted anywhere. From there, Oregon passed their measure, and Oakland passed theirs. But Denver was the start of the modern psychedelic reform movement.”

And Kappel was once again helping lead the charge—firmly planted at the forefront of a revolution behind plant medicine.

This initial decriminalization measure led to the swelling of a movement to legalize psychedelics on a state level.

“Initial polling showed that Colorado voters overwhelmingly supported access to psychedelic medicine for therapeutic purposes,” shared Kappel. “So we got to work developing access points for psychedelic medicine and incorporating other medicines besides psilocybin.”

This led to Colorado’s Proposition 122, which passed in November 2022.

“Prop 122 has three prongs to it,” Kappel explained. “The first is that it creates a regulated access model for natural psychedelics. It’s a supervised care model where you have a licensed facilitator in an approved location with licensed and tested products—where adults over the age of 21 can work with a facilitator to use psilocybin under their care, for any reason or no reason. Maybe because they want to work on childhood trauma or explore their consciousness.”

There are two types of facilitators. Some work with people in the psycho-spiritual realm and don’t have a secondary license beyond what’s required by the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA), which oversees a 15-member Natural Medicine Advisory Board.

Then there are clinical facilitators who hold a secondary license—such as professional counselors, psychologists, or psychiatrists. These clinical facilitators bring psilocybin into their licensed practice, incorporating psychedelics into the traditional mental health model and industry.

“The second prong is a personal and community healing model,” stated Kappel. “This allows adults to use, possess, cultivate, and share a few different natural medicines—psilocybin, ibogaine, DMT, and mescaline (but not mescaline from peyote). Those are the substances that can be used in the personal and community healing model. In that space, adults are allowed to engage in community healing—like an ayahuasca circle, for example. But it also allows people the agency to work with psychedelics on their own as well. So you’re seeing people microdosing, or taking a little before they go out, or go for a hike, or to the museum. They’re using these plant medicines instead of alcohol. They’re also using them to get off SSRIs, to break certain habits, or to show up more fully for their families. There are a lot of benefits coming out of this at-home personal use model.”

The third prong of Proposition 122 involves the civil protections it provides. The professional licenses held by clinical facilitators are protected, as long as the facilitator follows the requirements set forth by Proposition 122. Somebody can’t have their kids taken away because they’re involved in natural medicine healing. Those on probation or parole are also protected. There are other civil protections as well—but employers can interpret these as they see fit and can still choose to penalize those who bring natural psychedelics into their health and healing regimen. So, beware of that fact.

“One of the benefits of these psychedelic substances is allowing people the ability to take a step back, be more conscious, and examine how they’re currently living their lives,” shared Kappel. “Psychedelic healing allows people to change how they relate to the world. For some, that’s understanding and re-relating to trauma in their past. For others, it’s breaking their reliance on alcohol or nicotine. A lot of people say their experiences with psychedelic healing are the most profound and meaningful events in their lives. The awe of the experience allows people to relieve a lot of tension in their lives.”

At the moment, there is no way to legally buy the psychedelics protected under Proposition 122. But you are allowed to cultivate, possess, and share them—except for ibogaine, which is strictly a clinically supervised plant medicine because of potential cardiac side effects.

Now, there is a way for people to receive remuneration for providing harm-reduction support services. There are many viewpoints as to what that means, but this is how microdose clubs and similar groups can operate.

Josh Kappel is only 40 years old, and his entire legal career has focused on revolutionary reforms, laws, and policies furthering the use of plant medicines in Colorado—and many other places. Kappel steadfastly walks toward the horizon he chose to face when he was still in law school. And he does it with humility and gratitude.

“I took a risk and a left turn when I chose where to clerk in law school,” shares Kappel. “But that decision allowed me to work on some pretty monumental change that rippled across the country. I am very privileged to be able to work on such impactful projects.”

And Colorado is privileged to have Kappel and his crew. They’ve proven that we blaze trails here in the Centennial State—and that we can blaze whatever we like, without fear.