SAN FRANCISCO — A near disaster involving an off-duty pilot who admitted to experimenting with magic mushrooms may doom efforts to decriminalize psychedelics in California.

The alarming incident happened just weeks after Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have legalized possession of mushrooms and some other psychedelics — and has turned an already risky cause into an even riskier proposition for a governor with national ambitions.

The off-duty pilot for Alaska Airlines who tried to cut the engines of the San Francisco-bound flight said he had taken mushrooms and was struggling with depression. Using psychedelics for therapeutic purposes is an idea that has gained ground recently and was the chief argument for decriminalization in California.

But Newsom said the state isn’t ready and vetoed the bill, angering progressive allies who have been working on new legislation since the rejection. Those efforts now face much stronger headwinds following the averted catastrophe.

“This sets back the conversation about legalizing psychedelics in the state of California,” said Brian Marvel, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, an 80,000-member law enforcement organization that opposed the bill. “Do you really want people that are tripping on mushrooms driving cars?”

The fate of legalized psychedelics faces challenges similar to other progressive reaches such as limiting solitary confinement in prisons or halting minor traffic stops — each providing ample opportunities for critics to highlight potentially dangerous consequences. What happened on the Alaska Airlines flight shows how headline-grabbing incidents can complicate landmark legislation. It also reinforces Newsom’s keen political instincts to kill the bill.

“The governor was cautious,” said Tim Rosales, a Republican political consultant who campaigned against cannabis legalization. “Folks in the governor’s office are probably breathing a sigh of relief.”

Newsom’s office declined to comment on the pilot incident. The governor wrote in his veto message that he killed the mushroom measure, Senate Bill 58, because it didn’t set enough treatment guardrails around dosing and underlying psychoses.

“Unfortunately, this bill would decriminalize possession prior to these guidelines going into place, and I cannot sign it,” he said.

Newsom asked lawmakers to send him a bill next year with therapeutic guidelines — signaling the governor is more interested in medicinal use than decriminalization. He has conceded that research has shown psychedelics can be effective in treating PTSD, depression and other mental illnesses.

Supporters of the bill have vowed to revive the fight, either through new legislation next year or a longshot November 2024 ballot measure to legalize mushrooms.

State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco who wrote the bill, said that, despite the Alaska Airlines incident, he plans to introduce a new version of a measure he says would help provide effective treatment to combat veterans and first responders experiencing PTSD.

“Anyone can abuse a substance — legal or illegal — and do something horrific,” he said. “People overwhelmingly use them safely, without engaging in violence. This situation is an extreme outlier, and this guy should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

The pilot, Joseph David Emerson of Pleasant Hill, Calif., was off duty when he caught a partner airline’s flight from Washington state to San Francisco. He was sitting in a spare seat in the cockpit when authorities say he tried to shut off the engines before the two pilots subdued him.

The plane made an emergency landing in Portland, where he was arrested and charged with 83 counts of attempted murder — one for every passenger.

Some details of the incident remain unclear. Documents filed in state court in Oregon say he took the mushrooms about 48 hours before the flight, but an FBI arrest affidavit is vague about when he last ingested the substance.

Emerson said he was grieving the death of his best friend and had been depressed for about six months, according to the affidavit. He also told the agent that he was having a nervous breakdown at the time of the incident.

Mushrooms typically lose their hallucinogenic effects within six hours, so it’s unclear if he would have still been impaired if he had taken them 48 hours before the flight, as detailed in the state court documents.

Ryan Munevar, campaign director for the pro-mushroom Decriminalize California, said his group will continue collecting signatures to try to put legalization on the 2024 ballot.

Munevar said Emerson couldn’t have been experiencing the effects 48 hours after ingesting the mushrooms and pointed to the fact that there have been other episodes where suspects attempt to use psychedelics to justify violence.

“It wouldn’t have an impact on him the next day, let alone 48 hours later,” he said.

Marvel, the police association leader, said a major part of his group’s objections to the psychedelics bill was uncertainty about the therapeutic science, including a lack of dosing guidelines for people operating airplanes, vehicles and heavy machinery.

He said law enforcement would likely be open to legislation to allow psychedelics for narrow therapeutic uses, provided it’s well-regulated within the medical system. “You can do it in a slow manner in which there’s studies, there’s science behind it,” Marvel said.

Republican Assemblymember Tom Lackey, who voted against the bill, said the Alaska pilot incident underscores the need for more research on the substance.

“It’s an awakening moment,” said Lackey, who was a California Highway Patrol officer for nearly 30 years. “This substance has, sometimes, a delayed impact on people, and we know way too little to be using this as a routine treatment for people.”

Wiener’s bill that made it to Newsom’s desk this year was much broader and would have allowed the personal possession of mushrooms, known scientifically as psilocybin, and several other natural hallucinogenic substances.

California would have been the third state to decriminalize psychedelics. In 2020, voters in Oregon approved a measure to legalize the therapeutic use of psilocybin. Colorado voters followed suit last year, legalizing the substance starting in 2024.

BEIJING — Gov. Gavin Newsom’s trip to China this week was billed as a climate mission, but he also engaged in high level governmental discussions on forced labor in Xinjiang, the repression of democracy in Hong Kong and fentanyl exports.

The Democratic governor — who has little foreign policy experience — showed his ability to use an area where China and California are aligned around climate as a conversation starter for thornier diplomatic concerns typically handled by Washington.

“There was an animated part of the meeting that was around this issue” of fentanyl, Newsom told reporters after meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Wednesday. Newsom said he and Xi discussed the need to stem the flow of fentanyl ingredients out of China and into Mexico through the black market.

Earlier in the day Newsom met with Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Vice President Han Zheng. In those meetings, he brought up China’s human rights violations, pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and policies towards Tibet and Taiwan.

Before the trip, the governor’s office said Newsom considered these areas federal issues and would instead focus on climate policy and technology.

As it turns out, climate opened the door for Newsom to engage with China on a host of other topics — from trade to the Israel-Hamas war to a Californian imprisoned in the country for 17 years. The sitdown — the first between a U.S. governor and Xi in four years — also smooths the path for a potential meeting between the Chinese leader and President Joe Biden in San Francisco next month. The broad discussion was a major win for Newsom, a top surrogate for Biden’s reelection who could launch his own presidential bid in 2028, and for U.S.-China relations that have been at a low point.

In a press conference after his meetings Wednesday, Newsom called the havoc wrought by climate change “a forcing function for collaboration.” Throughout the week he’s brought up air pollution, floods and the wildfires that have torn through California towns over the past few years.

In discussions with local and national leaders in China this week, Newsom has focused on “low-carbon green growth.” It’s an area of climate action that’s less likely to be met with resistance than pushing China on coal and methane reductions, which have been points of contention in discussions with U.S. climate envoy John Kerry and at recent UN climate conferences.

Climate has often been a high point in relations between China and the U.S. — even when other issues were fraught.

It’s difficult to imagine nearly 200 countries would have inked the Paris climate agreement in 2015 without the U.S. and China announcing joint plans to cut planet-heating greenhouse gases. It marked the first time China, the world’s largest current climate polluter, agreed it should take steps to slow emissions.

But it’s been a long time since then-President Barack Obama and Xi took the stage together in 2014 in Beijing to announce a joint deal on climate change. Rather than converging on climate priorities, the U.S. and China have been drifting apart.

When Kerry became climate envoy he was clear the U.S. would not trade climate for other issues, such as anti-democracy crackdowns in Hong Kong or China’s military tactics to stake out territory in the South China Sea.

Yet geopolitics got in the way last year when Beijing suspended climate talks with Washington over then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. Concerns over Chinese intellectual property and technology theft and a desire to sever U.S. clean tech dependence on China have more recently slowed collaborations on clean energy and imperiled the climate fight.

“The U.S. is bent on compartmentalizing issues with China,” said Cory Combs, a policy research consultant with expertise on China. “So for example, it wants to talk fentanyl on one hand in a cooperative manner because it needs China. On tech, especially semiconductors, the U.S. has a very aggressive policy to make sure that China does not gain certain technological abilities for national security reasons.”

“Beijing has made extremely clear that it is tired of this compartmentalization,” Combs said. “They’ve put up a really consistent front that they will cooperate with the U.S. if the U.S. wants to be cooperative, and they will not if the U.S. does not.”

There’s been some climate rapprochement in recent months with visits by several Biden administration officials, including Kerry, but the results have been few. For example, China hasn’t yet finalized a plan to curb methane as part of a pact it reached with the U.S. at UN talks in 2021.

Much of the stalemate is tied to frostier relations. Experts say China doesn’t want to be seen bending to U.S. pressure to deliver on climate.

That Newsom was able to meet with Xi was “a big stake in the ground” on the side of engagement, said Alex Wang, co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change at UCLA. Even Kerry didn’t get the opportunity.

That may have much to do with Newsom’s distance from Beltway politics. While China hawks in Washington have emphasized the need to outcompete China in areas such as clean energy and critical minerals, Newsom has prioritized cooperation. There are still tensions that affect California, including Chinese dominance of electric vehicle production.

After his meetings with Xi and other Chinese officials, Newsom said Californians could hope to see more two-way trade, direct investment and economic development. “I’m mindful of the strategic red lines in our relationship,” he said. “But I’m also mindful that we’re more than capable of managing them.”

When asked if Californians could expect to see more Chinese cars on their roads in the future, he said, “I do see a future, but we have to shape that future in the context of free trade agreements.”

While federal relations are chilly, Newsom’s visit shows progress is possible with Chinese provinces and mayors away from the scrutiny of official diplomacy, said Joanna Lewis, a professor at Georgetown University who closely tracks U.S. and China climate engagement.

“Any dialogue that happens outside of Washington and Beijing by default just tends to be more open and frank,” she said.

California is unique in that its large consumer market and regulatory zeal gives it outsized heft for a non-federal government. For years, under both Democratic and Republican governors, the state has signed memorandums of understanding with Chinese provinces.

Many Chinese national party leaders have connections to California from their days striking agreements with the state when they were local leaders, like Vice President Han Zheng, who was mayor of Shanghai back when Newsom traveled there as mayor of San Francisco with Dianne Feinstein in 2005.

“The China-U.S. relationship is the most important bilateral relations in the world and the subnational cooperation is an indispensable part,” said Zheng in introductory remarks to his meeting with Newsom on Wednesday.

Whether Newsom’s visit will help advance the broader climate agenda between the U.S. and China isn’t yet clear.

But it will likely help pave the way for Xi to meet with Biden at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco next month. A meeting between Biden and Xi at the G20 in Indonesia last November was seen as helping smooth UN climate talks happening at the same time in Egypt.

“We cannot underestimate the political difficulties for the two sides at the federal level,” said Li Shuo, global policy adviser for Greenpeace East Asia. “They’re each very constrained by their domestic politics.”

The U.S. wants to see China go far further toward tackling its methane emissions and ending the build out of new coal-fired power. China is the world’s largest current emitter, with the U.S. in second place (and first if you account for historical emissions), but it’s also leading investments in renewable energy. California, for its part, is leading the U.S. on clean energy technology and policy.

Newsom’s visit is widening areas of cooperation in a way that could lead to progress. “I liked the approach that Newsom is taking, which is to find the places where we can work together productively and that hopefully that can lead to some movement on the other areas that right now are seen to be just at a loggerheads,” Wang said.

Democrats want to address climate change. Republicans want to tackle our national debt. Both sides are concerned about China.

There’s a way to deal with all three issues: putting a price on carbon.

Europe is already ahead of the game. This month, the E.U. expanded the reach of its longstanding domestic carbon pricing system by instituting a carbon price at their border, creating a first-ever global incentive for other countries to charge polluters for their carbon dioxide emissions. This comes as adoption of carbon prices is steadily increasing around the world — especially among U.S. allies and trading partners — with nearly 25 percent of global emissions now covered.

Despite all this, and the fact that policy leaders have long considered carbon pricing an essential solution in the fight against climate change, the U.S. has not yet moved to impose its own carbon price, largely due to a historically challenging political landscape. This has led some to write off the idea altogether. However, the potential for carbon pricing to address two other major U.S. challenges — our soaring national debt, and an increasingly aggressive China — in addition to the climate, could create a new and unique alignment of interests that make the politics finally click in Washington.

From a fiscal standpoint, carbon pricing would be an effective tool for alleviating our growing budgetary pressures. Implementing a carbon fee would generate substantial revenue, without hampering economic growth. Even if some of the revenues were used to provide rebates, and to fund provisions to protect vulnerable communities such as coal workers, significant dollars could be directed to cutting the deficit.

Especially as lawmakers grapple with how to address our increasingly dire fiscal outlook, carbon pricing could be the cornerstone of a bipartisan “grand bargain” deal, where conservatives can claim significant reductions in the deficit, and liberals can tout a major climate policy achievement.

Assuming the need to raise additional revenue — as most budget experts assert we must do along with spending cuts — a carbon fee is far and away the best solution, including for fiscal conservatives. Economists have long argued that taxes should target what we want less of, not what we want more of. A simple tax on carbon pollution would be far superior to the other likely revenue-raisers: substantial increases in income and corporate taxes that would burden workers and businesses.

From a geopolitical standpoint, carbon pricing could also play a vital role in countering China’s expanding economic and military influence. Recent research indicates that American manufacturers are much less carbon-pollutive than their Chinese counterparts — more than three times so. But current rules of global trade grant them and other foreign producers a free pass to undercut our industries by manufacturing cheap goods with far lower environmental standards.

Assessing a carbon price on the pollution of U.S. imports — with a border carbon price — would address this disparity, and deny Chinese companies an unfair leg up in global markets. Especially as recently made investments in decarbonization make the U.S. more carbon-efficient, the U.S. would be wise to implement a border-adjusted carbon price in order to monetize our clean manufacturing advantage and address the economics that fuel the CCP regime.

With the E.U. carbon border price now coming into effect, a growing, bipartisan group of senators is laying the groundwork for the U.S. to follow suit. By aligning a hawkish stance toward China with greater climate ambition, this trade-centered approach has already brought together a unique convergence of political interests, opening a window of opportunity to drive bipartisan collaboration.

Finally, when it comes to tackling climate change, economy-wide carbon pricing remains the most effective tool in our toolbox because it directly disincentives the pollution at the root of the climate challenge. As opposed to subsidies or tax credits, this approach would harness the power of market forces to swiftly and efficiently reduce emissions and accelerate technological innovation and deployment.

It is also an effective hedge against increasingly costly natural disasters and extreme weather events. These impacts are already placing significant strain on public budgets, costs that will balloon to the hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming years. This isn’t even to mention the loss of economic activity that typically follows such disasters.

These staggering costs will wreak financial havoc not only on states and localities, but the federal government, which typically foots a significant portion of the bill for recovery and rebuilding. As the prospect of this financial toll becomes clearer — especially against the backdrop of the broader U.S. fiscal outlook — it could compel lawmakers in both parties to adopt greater mitigation measures like carbon pricing, to stave off the worst of these impacts while they can still be avoided.

That’s why, after a summer of historic heat waves, wildfires and weather events, calls for the adoption of carbon pricing are increasing, even in light of the Inflation Reduction Act’s passage last year. This includes leaders in climate philanthropy — like Bill Gates and Andrew Steer — global finance, and even African governments, who recently issued a unanimous statement in its support.

Of course, achieving consensus around this policy will not happen overnight, nor without hurdles. Inflation and high fuel prices have made both parties cautious about placing a direct disincentive on the use of fossil fuels. Further, progressives’ resistance to market-based policies has grown, and some within my own party continue to resist any meaningful climate policy discussion, complicating an already challenging political landscape.

As one of the few Republicans in Congress who joined my Democratic colleagues in introducing carbon pricing legislation, I am keenly aware of the tall political obstacles around this solution. But, the salience of these three critical issues — climate change, the national debt and China’s ascent — will only continue to grow in the coming years, demanding action from lawmakers. A well-crafted carbon pricing policy could offer a rare opportunity to address them at the same time.

Leaders from both parties should seize on this opening, challenge preconceived notions about political feasibility and provide the pragmatic, common-sense leadership that America needs to tackle these critical challenges head-on.