The premise that they should is bizarre, especially since people report quasi-religious experiences on some psychedelics. If there were a link between these exp

The premise that they should is bizarre, especially since people report quasi-religious experiences on some psychedelics. If there were a link between these experiences and passivity, an external locus of control, and even nihilism, I think that would be more plausible. Even though the experiences can also create an individual sense of purpose and belief that would frustrate broader totalitarian aims as well. Psychedlics aren't on a team. I've become sympathetic to stories of how frantically the CIA seemed to pursue the psychedelic/mind-control link, as they were in a war for their civilization against an evil that by the mid-70's, had used mass psychological techniques to subvert and derail more nations and kill more people around the world than the third reich and fascism had managed combined, just by infecting the social fabrics of families, religions, and their nations. Psychedelics would have represented the possibility of a literal "Red" pill that had the effect of demoralizing people and causing them to interpret the world through the lens of secular materialism, victimhood, mass hysteria, and ultimately permanent struggle for its own sake. The risk of that being accelerated with chemistry would have been an emergency level threat. The radical life transformations people reported after using psychedelics at the time when they were rare and new would have been viewed as a way to mentally destablize target populations, unmoor them from the tangible and real experiences of their culture, and subvert and subordinate them to into the alien ideology. This cold-war era thinking and propaganda may be the source of the belief that psychedlics lead inevitably to political liberalism. Further, official anti-drug efforts were promptly co-opted by the soviets as perfect straw men of manufactured reactionaries (like trolls keeping targets engaged and in a cycle of outrage), to reinforce the popular narrative of a false consciousness, and further destabilize the western order. That psychedlics make one politically liberal is a stupid belief, but one whose origins have a plausible link to events in recent history.