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Would demonizing and banning psychedelics not count as advancing one religious or spiritual tradition over another? This is getting way off topic, but does it
by mikelyons 7y ago
Would demonizing and banning psychedelics not count as advancing one religious or spiritual tradition over another?
This is getting way off topic, but does it stand to reason that new emerging spirituality that uses substances that are not tax-advantaged/legal counts as favoring the traditional over the new? (setting aside the history of psychedelics that's older than Judaism or Christianity)
- SllX 7y agoI think demonizing and banning psychedelics was part of a larger scheme to find reasons to lock more black people up. Because that’s ultimately what the drug war was and is about. Best thing we could do is wash our hands of the whole thing, and try to revert our criminal justice system back to the state it was in prior to prosecuting the Drug War. Based of today’s political atmosphere, I don’t have a whole lot of hope for it, but at least as far as weed and psychedelics go, we’re starting to see something of a correction that will remove them from the scope of the drug war in time. I think you could make a good case, I don’t know if it would be a winning case today, but I think you could make a good case along those lines in the courts. That said, I am incredibly unfamiliar with psychedelics and either their history or culture so I don’t want to say more than that. I will say that if a substance were banned for blatantly religious reasons, I don’t think SCOTUS in any age would have upheld the ban as Constitutional. There would have to be a non-religious reason for the substance controls. I for one would like to get the government out of the Drug War business though. It’s done, it’s a drain on the Treasury, it’s explicitly racist, and it actively distorts our civil and political institutions.