9 ms·
The Law Isn't Ready for Psychedelic Medicine
- not_a_cop75 7y agoHonestly, what IS the law ready for? Lawyers making money? Check. Benefiting the public at large? Big Nope.
- loxs 7y agoYeah, for millions of years, we always waited for the law to be ready, before we made some breakthrough.
- XaoDaoCaoCao 7y agoIt's a cultural crime that psychedelics have been criminalized for half a century or so. The expansion of certain mental faculties (3-D Visualization, free thought association, meta-thought) could have been harvested for societal benefit... Oh well, wishes to the dust and all that.
- rainyMammoth 7y agoIt's the start of a journey. There are huge benefits to psychedelics that are still undiscovered. It will take at least 50 more years but we will eventually get there
- drawkbox 7y ago1970-2030+ or so will be seen as a drug dark age. A time where criminalization made everything more dangerous, and harm reduction worse. Part of a 60+ year gap in innovation using all substances for many health related cures and issues as well as recreational fun and exploration. We learned nothing from alcohol (a drug) prohibition. All prohibition and criminalization does is make everything more harmful, from use, to production, to creating cartels/mafias that become as powerful as nation states.
- chepaslaaa 7y ago>creating cartels/mafias that become as powerful as nation states. The state is balls deep in those cartels. Go read about Freeway Rick Ross and Afghanistan poppy fields for prime examples. It's all part of the military industrial complex, Peter Dale Scott has great books on the matter.
- acqq 7y agoThe books of the mentioned author on that topic: https://rowman.com/isbn/9780742525221/drugs-oil-and-war-the-united-states-in-afghanistan-colombia-and-indochina https://rowman.com/isbn/9780742525221/drugs-oil-and-war-the-... https://rowman.com/isbn/9780742555952/american-war-machine-deep-politics-the-cia-global-drug-connection-and-the-road-to-afghanistan https://rowman.com/isbn/9780742555952/american-war-machine-d... Author's page: https://www.peterdalescott.net/q/ https://www.peterdalescott.net/q/
- pessimizer 7y agoDrugs have been largely a tool by the government to justify aggressive searches of poor people. I don't think the justice system we have can work only with only the search justifications of terrorism, child pornography, and intellectual property theft. Maybe I'll be surprised, though. Maybe hate speech/bullying will be the new frontier. We have to know what everybody is reading and writing to make sure they aren't hating: "my dog alerted to the smell of a flash drive."
- lostmsu 7y agoWhy do you think there is an expansion of any sort? For any effect a simple explanation is that some function gets reduced, and result simply looks wild.
- selestify 7y ago> some function gets reduced What does this mean?
- lostmsu 7y agoLike your driving skills and logic obviously dwindle.
- macrolime 7y agoIf you try to imagine an orange on the table, you normally won't see that orange as if it really was on the table in front of you. It's a lower fidelity imagination. There are of course good reasons for this, you wouldn't survive long in the wild if things you thought about suddenly seemed to appear in front of you. On psychedelics, this doesn't necessarily happen either, but you can learn to visualize things in 3D as if they were real objects in front of you. Using this for anything useful takes some skill and practice, but it can be done. Some people can do this without psychedelics, but they tend to have mental health issues.
- lostmsu 7y agoIs there any kind of research? How can I know a person under psychedelics actually sees a 3D object correctly in detail, not just thinks she does?
- techntoke 7y agoPsychedelics are legal if you're wealthy.
- WalterSear 7y agoThere are plenty that are cheap to obtain or grow.
- techntoke 7y agoBut the cops only care about them if you're poor.
- WalterSear 7y agoThe cops are only involved if you are purchasing the expensive ones from dealers. Essentially nobody is being arrested for purchasing spore syringes, cactus seeds or salvia divinorum. The police aren't interested.
- techntoke 7y agoIf you are growing shrooms then you'll likely being charged with possessing them with intent to distribute, which is 5 years in prison.
- antisemiotic 7y agoSure, but about anything is legal if you're wealthy. (sometimes a travel to a poorer country might be needed). Or more precisely: the law bothers you only if you're poor or piss off someone richer than you.
- lovvtide 7y agoThe implication that this has anything to do with the law is amusing.
- xrd 7y agoMany states (Oregon and Colorado) are starting to decriminalize psilocybin. The interesting thing is always how the federal government views this and what actions it takes. I'm optimistic.
- Elof 7y agoJust happed in June in the Bay Area, CA. Alameda County, which includes Berkeley and Oakland. The law is for naturally derived psychedelics so it includes things like DMT and Ibogaine as well
- dfischer 7y agoWe should eliminate a majority of law. Too much law is like an over engineered program with edge cases for everything that prevents anything from changing in the future. Law cements stagnancy in our society. And at the worst, it creates moats for the powers that can use law to protect their interests over others.
- yoube 7y agoWhy is tech infested with know-it-all libertarians? Honestly, do you think we'd all be better off in a lawless anarchy?
- dymk 7y agoSame reason "Let's just throw it away and rewrite it the right way this time!" is such a common failure mode of engineering projects. While it nearly assures the death of the project, it's so enticing due to its simplicity.
- dfischer 7y agoThe point isn’t to throw it away - law has meaning. It has less meaning when it defines everything.
- jMyles 7y agoI can't speak for the rest of "tech", but this know-it-all libertarian prefers lawful anarchy to the lawless variety. :-) (Not sure I'm really a libertarian either, but almost certainly a know-it-all)
- _tb 7y agoyes.
- WalterSear 7y agoCognitive artifacts exacerbate the fundamental attribution error in proportion to their social effect.
- 7y ago
- pmoriarty 7y agoIf psychedelic use becomes more widespread it could lead to a radical change in society the like of which we haven't seen since the 1960's. This is the one slight sliver of hope I'm holding out for the future.
- WalterSear 7y agoIME and opinion, their potential to elicit empathy and mental growth is overrated, and not imediately related to their antidepressant and trauma integrative effects.
- rosser 7y agoTheir effects are largely a result of what you're trying to get out of them, and how earnestly you pursue those ends. People who want those things, and mean it, tend more often to find them, in my own experience.
- WalterSear 7y agoThat hasn't been my experience - either my directly, or in regards to what I've seen in others.
- rosser 7y agoI don't think dueling anecdotes are very useful without some context management. I won't ask after the particulars of your background with this stuff, because that might be asking you to admit to a crime. Please consider reading my reply to a sibling comment of yours for some context on where I'm coming from, if you'd like.
- throwaway8879 7y agoStrictly anecdotal obviously, but having spent a majority of my 20s in and about the Ayahuasca "peace and love let's dance with flowers in our hair" crowd, I can tell you that a lot of the empathy and mental growth is very superficial. At least seemed that way to me.
- bjourne 7y agoI frequent other message boards in which people share their stories about using drugs. One story I read a while ago was from a "newbie" (novice?) sharing his experience taking LSD. First he got some nice hallucinations but then he took a knife from his kitchen and started carving up his arm. Which, of course, meant he lost lots of blood and had to go to the hospital. Anyways, the point, for me, wasn't the story itself but how the more experienced drug users reacted. They didn't write "You're lying! LSD is a mellow drug and won't cause you to harm yourself." Nope, nothing of the sort, instead their opinion was that the novice made a "classic rookie mistake" by leaving dangerous items around. One user wrote that before he tripped he always hid all dangerous items as a precaution. What I also read on that message board was that you shouldn't experiment with psychedelia unless you have a stable psyche. Would a pill with the label "Not to be taken by people with an unstable psyche" or "Possible side effects: Knife carving of muscle tissue by user" pass any regulatory body? I think if such substance came from big pharma most people would be very skeptical.
- JamesBarney 7y agoIf this did become used in a medical setting it would only be allowed to be prescribed by a small number of licensed physicians, and only in a specific type of healthcare session. These types of risks are far less if you imagine taking them in a hospital room with a babysitter, similar to how ecstacy is currently prescribed.
- mschuster91 7y agoPeople pull incredibly dumb stuff on alcohol all the time. No one cares, no warning labels "don't do alcohol when you're prone to being an aggressive douchebag" on alcohol, nothing. Basic drug education in schools would prevent many of these issues. Stuff like "what are the effects/risks of various popular drugs", "always have someone sober as a tripsitter", "call an ambulance when someone overdoses, there are Good Samaritan laws"... but no, schools worldwide rather teach/preach abstinence and kids end up fucked, because from where should they know if their parents are not 60s hippie kids?
- rosser 7y ago