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I completely disagree that an enthusiasm or experience with psychedelics must lead to a definition-against, to some inherent tension with society. Are there ba

I completely disagree that an enthusiasm or experience with psychedelics must lead to a definition-against, to some inherent tension with society. Are there bad laws in place currently? Yes. Laws that contribute to the state of modern-day slavery (our "justice" system) and limit our essential freedoms to our bodies are unjust, but it is those laws that are against our society. I do not think of myself as against society; rather, I think of myself as a progressive, working to remove the ill-conceived laws that should never have been instituted in a freedom-loving, rational society. The difference in this framing is that I understand bad laws happen. Bad laws do not make societies bad, though they can. I am not against my society, as an American citizen, because I recognize that America has processes and procedures for the remediation of bad laws. I believe it is the responsibility of citizens seeking change to take advantage of these processes, where possible, to dismantle the systems of power that have been constructed around these bad laws. Once the systems of power have been dismantled, and the populace sufficiently convinced of their wrongheadedness, the laws will evaporate and the healing can begin. But to accomplish this is a massive undertaking that requires disparate effort from unrelated parties, and most importantly a belief that it can happen.

atoav 3y ago
I think it has to do with normalization. And this takes time. My parents would both probably connect people taking psychedelics with the Hippies, partly because they don't know better, partly because this is the picture they got in their rural alpine village describing psychedelics. Weed is slowly getting more normal, so that jokes they used to make died out a while ago. When we watched my brothers run the Amsterdam marathon they would even push us to try some with them. Meanwhile 20 years ago my father would have unironically put weed on the same level as heroin. He did not know better. Things like LSD are probably just further down the road for them, so it is a mixture of general acceptance within society, education about the substance and the commercialization of it.

atoav 3y ago

I think it has to do with normalization. And this takes time. My parents would both probably connect people taking psychedelics with the Hippies, partly because they don't know better, partly because this is the picture they got in their rural alpine village describing psychedelics. Weed is slowly getting more normal, so that jokes they used to make died out a while ago. When we watched my brothers run the Amsterdam marathon they would even push us to try some with them. Meanwhile 20 years ago my father would have unironically put weed on the same level as heroin. He did not know better. Things like LSD are probably just further down the road for them, so it is a mixture of general acceptance within society, education about the substance and the commercialization of it.