You may’ve seen my posts on DMT and magic mushrooms before.
No?
If not, my stance is essentially that psychedelics are an amazing untapped medical resource.
And we’re ignoring that fact.
Lemme clarify:
Do I think people should be able to buy a pack of psilocybin like cigarettes, eat it all, and spend their Friday nights speeding down a freeway made of magma from laser eyed pterodactyls? No. Like weed and everything else that’s not crystal meth and bath salts, I feel like it should be legal – but regulated. Because right now, people desperate to start living their lives and too ignorant or unwilling (to understand that meditation can get them there) are booking flights to go through an intensive full-body-n-spirit makeover via an Amazonian vine. Some of them end up getting swindled. Others just have to travel to the jungle for their holiday and stay at a shaman’s Sheraton for a week.
(Eff a hotel with five stars.
You can see five billion of ’em from here.)
Then, there are others who will go across the border for an Iboga treatment instead. While a little bit different, it’s also a psychoactive drug that helps cure mental maladies and addictions by rewiring our brain’s connections. It’s also not legal (hence the outside-of-murica travel to use it).
And then, there are magic mushrooms which also still aren’t legal. I may or may not have tried these once, and I may or may not have had a horrifying experience because I watched a horror movie. Would I do it again? Probably not. Would I knock the consciousness altering fungus cuzza my bad trip? Absolutely not. In fact (because I’m in the minority with my self-induced negative side effect), I’m a great example of how good drugs go bad when you’re not under the care of a medical professional. And that’s what everything from DMT to LSD to iboga and whatever else I’ve skipped over needs: not avoidance, but regulation. Especially now that more experts are researching the benefits on patients who have issues with depression, alcoholism, addiction, and other mental disorders.
This British study, for instance, looked at the brains of 15 folks shot up with psilocybin:
“Psilocybin makes for an ideal test system: It is a sure-fire way of altering consciousness. In mathematical terms, normal brains have a well-ordered correlation state. There is not much cross-linking between networks. That changes after the psilocybin dose. Suddenly the networks are cross-linking like crazy, but not in random ways. New types of order emerge.”
Nice… New neural linking and order means new mental habits.
Those new links can override the old bad ones.
As a brilliant yes-and to this, there’s also been this recent Johns Hopkins study:
Johns Hopkins researchers found that using small amounts of psilocybin in a controlled setting could lead to life-changing positive experiences that increased long-term psychological well-being. The researchers said that they ultimately hope to see whether transcendent experiences, facilitated by taking psilocybin in therapeutic settings, could help treat conditions like addiction, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
So we could be cleaning up the hard drives of the kind of people who end up being a cancer on society because their mental states render them helpless. And we just… aren’t? Because of an archaic label?
Come on now.
Sounds like our laws need a good dose of altered consciousness before anyone else.