Legalize It!

 

https://c.org/qMDPhmyrBS 

Legalize Psylocibin in North Carolina

The Issue

To the North Carolina General Assembly, Destin Hall, Phil Berger, and Bill Rabon,

We call on North Carolina lawmakers to create a regulated, affordable therapeutic psilocybin program delivered in licensed, professionally supported settings. This is about safety, ethics, and responsible access for people and families who are sick and suffering.

We are Cody Blue Snider and Tanya Dahl Snider, North Carolina residents. Our work with plant medicine has never been about recreation. It has always been about healing, responsibility, and guided support. Through careful, ceremonial, and professionally supported experiences, we have seen how these medicines, when approached with preparation and care, can help people facing real mental and physical health challenges. Our families, and we ourselves, are among those people.

Recently, our family publicly shared a deeply personal milestone when Dee Snider participated in his first guided mushroom ceremony after a lifetime of sobriety, seeking relief from age-related health struggles. That moment strengthened our commitment to advocate for safe, legal, and accountable access here in North Carolina.

Our state is facing a serious mental health crisis, and many residents lack effective options. Without a lawful pathway, people are pushed into unregulated situations, forced to travel, or left without help. Regulation protects public safety by creating standards, oversight, and accountability.

We are asking lawmakers to establish a therapeutic psilocybin framework that includes licensed facilities, trained facilitators, screening, informed consent, safety protocols, and oversight. This is a call for a carefully regulated therapeutic model.

This framework should also allow culturally informed, ceremonial, and spiritually grounded facilitation approaches to be eligible within the licensed system, provided they meet established training, ethical, and safety standards. Healing traditions that emphasize ceremony, integration, and community support should not be excluded when they operate responsibly in accordance with regulations.

Affordability must be a core requirement so access is not limited to those with wealth, including veterans and individuals facing serious health challenges.

North Carolina has already begun exploring psychedelic policy. We ask lawmakers to take the next step toward a safe, regulated, and compassionate path to therapeutic access.

We respectfully ask lawmakers to:

• Pass legislation creating a regulated therapeutic psilocybin program
• Establish clear standards for safety, training, ethics, and oversight
• Ensure affordability and responsible access are built into the system

If you believe North Carolina should offer a safe, regulated, and affordable path to therapeutic psilocybin, please sign and share this petition.

Thank you for standing with us.
Sincerely,
Cody Blue Snider & Tanya Dahl Snider

The Terrible Old Woman's Thoughts 

This issue is very important to me. From my own personal experience, I have discovered that psilocybin helps with my anxiety and pain issues better and with far fewer side effects than benzodiazepines or opiates.

While I approve of modern treatments using ketamine to help with mental health conditions such as depression, psilocybin is safer and has fewer negative side effects than ketamine.

It is time to stop demonizing this helpful medication source. 

The Terrible Old Woman's New Moon Reading for April 2026

 

The faces I pull in my videos are all part of my dubious charm. The one in the thumbnail is reminiscent of my comedic hero Curly Howard.

 1903-1952

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curly_Howard

A Cowboy's Dilemma Teaser #rabtbooktours

Western Historical Fiction

Date Published: 08-19-2025

Publisher: Artemesia Publishing, LLC

As the Kelly Can Saga continues, Charlie and his wife, Susan, must deal with continued conflict as they attempt to grow their fledgling Kelly Oil Company. Like many other oilmen, Charlie and his partner, Hank Thomas, want to acquire oil and mineral rights to the Osage Nation’s land in northern Oklahoma. This leads them to confrontations with an adversary from their recent past. Susan’s life is imperiled by those evil characters. How will her cowboy come to her rescue and deal with dangerous direct threats on their lives? Charlie rapidly steps up to the challenge as any past Top Hand at the world-famous Miller’s 101 Ranch would.

 

Excerpt

After lunch the group decided to walk down the hill to the barns and corrals to show Getty some of their ranch and allow their meal to settle. 

As they stood at a corral, Charlie pointed and said, “Paul, see the big, beautiful Angus bull? He’s one of the reasons our beef is in such demand. Do ya see all the cattle out in the near pasture over there grazin’? We’re mighty proud of them, too.”

Paul nodded, “Very impressive, Charlie. I don’t know ranching or cattle, but I can hear the pride in your voice. You're every bit as excited to talk about this as you are about oil. Yep, very impressive.”

Charlie didn’t try to hide his smile. “I am, Paul. I’ll always be a cowboy, and ranching will be a big part of my life. I’m happy you’re impressed with this part of our lives.”

They walked around some more so Charlie and Susan could show off parts of the ranch. After a while, they returned to the house to continue their discussion.

As they settled in Hank asked, “Paul, do ya have any other land or rights to drill here in Oklahoma you might be interested in sellin’ before you head to California?”

Paul looked up at the ceiling, then back at Hank. “I hadn't thought about it, but I have several possibilities. Some might be interesting to you. They include land with minerals up at Cushing, over in Garvin County, nearby in Seminole County, and even over close to the Capitol in Oklahoma City.”

Hank smiled, “What would ya take for the whole batch?”

Paul slumped in his chair with his arms across his chest. “Let me think a minute.” After a long pause, he said, “I guess $75,000 would be alright.”

Hank looked at Charlie, who nodded his approval. Charlie said, “Paul, I can draft ya a check right now you can cash at the Exchange Bank tomorrow for $60,000 if we have a deal. You can have the deeds sent to Curt for processin’.”

“Your offer is less than I wanted.” He grinned and reached over to shake hands. “I’ll take it, and the deeds are in a safety de- posit box at the Exchange Bank.

I know you bought the bank. Harry Sinclair continues to run it, right?”

Charlie shook Paul’s hand. “He does, and I’m glad you are willin’ to sell.” He looked at Hank and winked. “We at Kelly Oil need to accumulate more properties; if you had them, I’m sure there must be value in them.”

Susan nodded. “Harry continues to have a leadership role for us, but we had one of our bankers from Kansas City move here to run the bank. Harry wanted and needed to create more time for Sinclair Oil.”

Charlie left the room to write the check. When he returned, he handed it to Paul.

Susan stood. “It's getting to be late. Paul needs to get back to Tulsa if he’s heading to California tomorrow.” She looked at Hank. “Didn't you say you were going to Shawnee for dinner with someone?”

Hank hesitated. “Uh... all I’m sayin’ is her name is Polly’. I'll be back in the mornin’ at about nine if that’s okay?”

Charlie grinned. “Who he has dinner with is none of our business, and nine’ll be great.”

Paul nodded. “Susan, you’re right. It's time I headed toward Tulsa. Today's trip was successful for me. I’m $80,000 richer than when I arrived. I hope we can do some business in California or at least be rooting for each other's success.”

About the Author

E. Joe Brown is an award-winning author of novels, short stories, and memoirs. His current projects include a series of historical fiction novels set in his native Oklahoma. Publication of the first book in the series is scheduled for August 2022. His memoir ‘Mickey and Me’ about meeting his hero, Mickey Mantle, is now featured in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Joe currently serves as President of New Mexico Westerners, an Advisor to the SWW Board of Directors, and is a member of Western Writers of America and Military Writers Society of America. 

He supports his love of music and performance through active membership in the International Western Music Association. He served on the organization’s board of directors for three years. In 2013, Governor Susanna Martinez appointed him a New Mexico Music Commissioner.

 Veterans Portrait Project, Military, USAF

Photo Courtesy of

Stacy Pearsall's

Veterans Portrait Project

Joe concluded his lifetime military and civil service careers upon retirement on June 30, 2010. An exciting multi-faceted career of firsts included leading the USAF Range Instrumentation Team to aid the original NASA Space Shuttle program. His team helped create the Shuttle Worldwide Network and supported the first six missions of Space Shuttle Columbia. As the Air Force Flight Test Center Project Manager, he guided the design, construction, and implementation of the Benefield Anechoic Facility on Edwards AFB. The facility tests state-of-the-art electronic warfare systems in a secure environment. His final assignment was in direct support of the two-star Major General at Edwards AFB where he advised on strategic planning to assure future readiness to test USAF and Department of Defense weapons systems. 

An alumnus of the Oklahoma State University College of Engineering, Joe continued his engineering education during both his military and civil service careers. He completed coursework at the University of Colorado, Georgia Institute of Technology, George Washington University, University of Tennessee, Chapman University, and the University of California at Los Angeles. He later completed a BS in Business Management at Phoenix University and the Executive MBA program with a Strategic Planning emphasis from Webster University.

Joe has been married to his wife Linda for over fifty years, and their sons have given them five beautiful grandchildren.

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Death and Life In the City of Dreams Release Blitz #rabtbooktours

 

Literary Fiction

Date Published: April 16th

Publisher: Acorn Publishing

Jaded city planner Townsend Meadows looks out across Evermore Valley with the ghost of his dead friend by his side. “Do you ever wonder,” Fen asks, “what this city will look like five hundred years from now?”

Their city is teetering on the brink of collapse, and the mayor’s answer is a gleaming new auto mall at the valley’s edge. For Townsend, it’s the death of everything a city should be. Struggling to regain his passion and forced to choose between compliance and conviction, he must risk his career to fight for a more hopeful and verdant future.

From an architect’s vision at the dawn of the twentieth century, to a rancher’s dynasty scarred by violence and greed, to a city founder’s hidden message of hope, this story about the rise, fall, and reawakening of an American city reaches far beyond the present. A timely, sweeping novel of memory, corruption, and resilience, Death and Life in the City of Dreams asks, “What legacy will we choose to leave for our children?”

 

About the Author

 

 Nicholas Deitch is a writer, architect, and advocate for social justice whose fiction explores the intersection of cities, history, and human resilience. His passion for storytelling began when a colleague recognized the emotional depth of his nonfiction work. Since then, he has honed his craft, publishing short stories in Litro Magazine, Club Plum, and Santa Barbara Literary Journal. His short story “Grace Eternal” won Best Fiction at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference (2019).

Death and Life in the City of Dreams, his debut novel, is deeply influenced by his experiences in nonprofit leadership and the design of inclusive communities and urban places.

Originally from Los Angeles, he now lives in Ventura, California, with his wife and creative partner Diana.

 

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I Love It When We Read Together Book Blitz #rabtbooktours

Children's Books / Early Learning Beginner Reader

Date Published: 08-12-2025

Publisher: Mission Point Press

I Love It When We Read Together invites reading partners to create their own special rituals with gentle prompts and endearing illustrations that encourage kids to read along, spot animals, and spark lively conversations. This book is perfect for building fluency and connection. Inspired by the literacy challenges of the pandemic, early childhood educator Karolyn Wallace crafts a cozy experience that helps families bring the joy of reading home.

 

About the Author

Karolyn Wallace is a seasoned educator with over twenty years of experience teaching in elementary classrooms across public and private schools in Maryland, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and New York. Before that, she was a broadcast journalist at local news affiliates in Los Angeles and Flint, Michigan. She is currently part of the team at The Children’s Learning Lab, where experienced educators connect with elementary students for online learning. She divides her time between Michigan and California, enjoying the company of her husband, children, and grandchildren.

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https://mybook.to/LoveWhenWeReadTogether 

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The Bric-a-Brac of Mickey Mack Teaser #rabtbooktours

Poetry /Comedy Satire Gift Rhyme Millennial Humor Silverstein Memory

Date Published: 04-15-2026

Publisher: The Tink and Tank Press

A wry poetry collection that captures the jarring sink-or-swim leap into adulthood. This book honors the limbo of exiting youth, a unique period where responsibility suddenly smashes the youthful optimist, crushing it under the crippling weight of adulthood. Twenty-somethings scatter across life's spectrum with some jobless and couch-surfing, while others marry, become parents, and buy a house. Everyone eventually finds themselves old enough to fight in foreign wars but too young to rent a car. It's the fast, brutal shift to an unguarded world, to bowling without bumpers. You've entered a chaotic soup of competing ambitions and subterfuge, where one hand offers help while the other conceals a knife. You're expected to be an adult without ever having been one, like seeing the ocean from afar and suddenly wrestling its waves. This book highlights the inevitable sense of crushing defeat and loss, but reveals the importance of laughing anyway. After all, life is a game of avoiding the consequences of your own actions. The Bric-a-Brac of Mickey Mack will hand you a mirror and dare you to laugh at its reflection.

Excerpt

I sat across from him, he had a twisted distant gaze while he wracked his mind and grappled with a foolish phrase which was written on a note and shuffled in a mess of junk atop a desk ensconced in filth, no doubt the man was drunk. His name was Mickey Mack, both laser focused and aloof, fenced in by Bric-a-Brac unpacked and stacked up to the roof. A product of his times, so wise, yet dumber than a door. A man of vast experience and yet he’s such a bore. He’d traveled ’round the world and been to many foreign lands to simply say he had, to sit and sulk, his only plans. For “that’s what people do,” he’d say, “they travel to enjoy the petty world and what it offers every girl and boy.” Despite the fact that Mr. Mack had traveled far and wide he would do what’s done at home and find a bar to sit inside. And there, while many past him by, bemoaning life itself, it tortured Mickey for he couldn’t help but see himself. He realized now that time is gone, and that’s the way it is, and he, while living other people’s lives, had wasted his. And as a way, as best he could, expel the toxic bile, he has compiled every groan and gripe within a file. And written down, at last, now put together in a book the crying whines of all he heard from all the trips he took. A vapid, superficial twit, he sobered up somehow, and Mickey Mack looked up at me behind a furrowed brow, and as he squinted, leaning closer straining hard to see, He was looking in a mirror, for the hopeless fool was me.

 

 

About the Author

Mickey Mack is a world-weary traveler and obsessive collector of life’s absurd talismans and trinkets. After years of eavesdropping on bar-stool confessions around the globe, he distills the Suffering Olympics of modern adulthood into witty, rhythmic heroic couplets.

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The Man In the Middle Book Blitz #rabtbooktours

A Tapestry of Tangled Lives

Family Saga / Fiction / Based on True Lived Experiences

Date Published: April 6, 2026

Publisher: Serapis Bey Publishing, Arizona, US www.parulagrawal.com

 

A story of human connection between twins, between lovers, between comrades in war, set against the shadow of the evangelical religion and its judgments."

 

Based on a childhood of shadowy secrets surrounding her parents’ marriage and the rigid judgment of the Evangelical religion, the author attempts to find her truth. A work of historical fiction and romance, it spans the era of WWII and beyond, weaving the story of her father, mother and aunt (her mother’s twin sister). The unexpected twists and turns mirror those of our own lives, and readers can empathize and identify with the characters’ humanity as they struggle with their flaws. The power of religious judgement is explored along with the strength and resilience of individuals challenged by the ethics of life. This is also a fascinating study of the complexities of being twins. With the strongest of bonds that overwhelms their very different personalities, their love for the same man creates a gulf between them that threatens their entire adult relationship. It is also a story of a man and how he navigates his own journey after love and loss. When his WWII experience takes him to countries he has never dreamed of seeing, and opens him to the excitement of new cultures, he finds new meaning. At the same time, his bonds to his comrades in arms and their shared experiences of battlefield traumas leaves him with emotional scars. A story of secrets and the power of love, the themes of self-doubt and second chances are embedded in the narrative, along with the acceptance of one’s actions following painful choices.

A story of human connection between twins, lovers, comrades during World War 11, families, and generational trauma, set across the United States and Europe and against the shadow of the Evangelical religion and its judgments. A family saga of secrets, shadows, and unspoken enduring love, and its impact across three generations, based on a true story of lived experience. A work of romantic, historical fiction, The Man in the Middle; A Tale of Tangled Lives is based on the true story of the author’s parents. It follows their youth in the early 1900s in US, through the years of WWII in Europe, and after, and their lives as friends, lovers, parents, and elderly individuals.

This is a story of love and its many forms. There are no heroes or demons, only people dealing with their humanity. Or maybe there are heroes: Luke, as he navigates his life honourably and responsibly, while harbouring feelings for more than one woman; Anna as she comes to terms with her selfish impulses and attempts to overcome them; Pierrette, who recognizes and accepts that she cannot give Luke the life he wants, and that their love is not enough. Karoline is perhaps the true heroine of the book. A victim of the religious beliefs she is trapped by, she finds it impossible to love herself. Instead, she spends her life feeling inferior to her sister and undeserving of Luke’s love. At Luke’s passing, she finally receives the confirmation of her worth and her place as the love of his life.

 

About the Author

"The author lives half-time in San Diego, CA, and half-time in a small village in Southern France. This is her exploration of the unexplained secrets that shadowed her childhood and the consequences that haunt all our choices."

“I wrote this book to come to terms with my past. I wanted to understand the people who raised me, through the fictional characters of Karoline and Luke, who represent my parents and my mother’s twin sister, Anna, who represents my aunt. My childhood was full of love, but as I watched the individuals around me, I sensed a drama that excluded me. I knew my father had been in WWII and experienced Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge and much more during the four years he spent in Europe. The way he talked about the world he had discovered there intrigued me and I knew there was more to tell, which he never spoke about. My mother adored my father, but there was a tension in the room when my aunt was present. A connection between my father and my aunt was obvious despite their effort to hide it. Through the years, there were inadvertent comments that hinted of a previous relationship between them, but it wasn’t until the end of my father’s life that conversations took place that enlightened me. I didn’t ask, but they each wanted to tell their story, their truth about what happened. This book is my truth, my experience in living with them and loving them. It is my attempt to honor them by exploring their humanness and accepting that we are each a complex entity.”

 

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Instagram: @julie.lee.williams

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https://mybook.to/TheManintheMiddle

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