Tobacco and alcohol industry are getting government subsidies, bailouts and huge profit margins. Not sure about the other "illegal" drug manufacturers.

It's more acceptable and state-sanctioned to sell drugs that kill people while keeping them subdued, than ones that keep them alive and open their minds.

I don't want to sound like a crazy 'conspiracy theorist' or a 'hippie', but I don't know to distill this sad and truthful statement more simply than that.

The problem with what you're saying isn't how it sounds, it's that there's no evidence for what you're saying.

My understanding, looking at the history of psychedelic regulation, is that it had nothing to do with preventing people from opening their minds: the people who did the regulating don't think the concept of "opening your mind" even exists. I'll let John Ehrlichman (Nixon aide) explain:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. [...] We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

You might say, "well that's the same thing as being against opening minds" but it's really not. Keep in mind, a lot of times cops simply planted drugs on people to arrest them: why would they wrongly accuse someone of trying to open their mind if their intent was to prevent people from opening their minds? The answer is, that wasn't their intent. They didn't plant drugs on people to prevent them from opening their minds, they planted drugs on them because they were black or antiwar.

> that wasn't their intent

The intent of the beat cop and the high-level official isn't always 1:1.

Agreed, but in a response to a comment whose claim is "It's more acceptable and state-sanctioned..." without differentiating who is doing the accepting or what elements of the state are doing the sanctioning, I think we've already accepted a level of oversimplification.

Reality is always more complicated than anyone says.

The reasons why tobacco and alcohol are legal are mostly historical and they are basically the only exceptions.

There are many drugs that kill people but keep them subdued that are illegal. It seems to me that is not the reason for which are legal and which ones are not.

I agree with tobacco. However, alcohol is legal in part because it’s easy to make. Even prisoners often start making alcohol let alone the general public.

While I agree that this plays a part, as it's what made it so popular to begin with, drugs 'directly' derived from plants are quite easy to make, too.

That’s an over simplistic and not realistic view. Marihuana had a similar history as tobacco, opiates go back thousands of years, caffeine is deemed fine, alcohol was actually illegal for years, etc.

Considering the counter culture and anti war (and thus anti military industrial) sentiment being highly correlated with hippies getting lit—I think it’s impossible not to come to the conclusion that the powers that be consider mind expanding drugs to be a threat to the order of things.

Yes I was simplifying quite a lot. But "historical" wasn't just meant as "was there already", even though it plays a huge part.

As far as I know, marijuana was mostly made illegal in the 30s and earlier in the US, mostly due to racist origins and with arguments mostly opposite those of hippies (e.g., creating bloodlust).

I forgot about Caffeine, that's true, as it is often not considered a drug by many (or at least not taught as one). But it's also not one of a dulling effect, as far as I can tell at least.

That they tried to make alcohol illegal and failed because of it's societal acceptance is another indicator that the original claim is not so obviously true:

> It's more acceptable and state-sanctioned to sell drugs that kill people while keeping them subdued, than ones that keep them alive and open their minds.

Overall it feels more that the general Zeitgeist of regulating narcotics failed on alcohol but succeeded with often racist propaganda for other popular drugs.

But that's just my understanding and I am not very well versed in any of those topics, so I'd be happy to listen to a better explanation. (I wouldn't be surprised that anti-establishment gatherings with strong drug usage correlation wouldn't exactly make legalisation popular in the establishment. But the history article I read on that just now claimed that sentences were reduced during the 70s because of the wake of hippies.)

You might sounds less like a 'hippie' if you avoid the phrase 'open your mind'. It implies that psychodelics provide users with some kind of enlightenment rather than just hallucinations and euphorea. Makes it seem like anti-drug politicians are trying to hide some sort of dark secret which can only be unlocked by taking LSD.

The common miscommunication here is that people perceive the statement as saying "psychedelics are the ONLY way of learning certain things", whereas what they should perceive is "psychedelics are ONE (very efficient) way of learning certain things".

The thing is that for people whose normal life does not include pursuing knowledge and understanding just for the sake of it (and I think this might be most people), it's unlikely that they'd end up with the right perspective shift through some other circumstance.

Is there any credible evidence that psychedelics reliably and "efficiently" help people learn things?

There is for example research showing that psychedelics have a lasting effect on the Big 5 personality trait "openness to experience": https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-els...

Which is quite remarkable given the stability these personality traits usually have.

Overall while it seems to be clear that people who take psychedelics don't become saints spreading love for the rest of their lives, there's some solid evidence accumulated by psychologists that psychedelics have some real effect.

I don't know what you'd consider "credible evidence". You can find tens of thousands of anecdotal accounts, but you're probably looking for something more formal.

It's likely a futile search: Research into these topics is difficult to get approval for, even when it's more "tangible" things like effects on depression or PTSD. In my opinion, we'll probably need another few decades to get there (though there has been some encouraging societal progress in some places recently).

We won't get anywhere in this conversation because we're on two different sides of a fence, and I certainly can't describe what being on this side is like and can only invite people to come over here. It'd be like asking you to describe what the colour green looks like to you.

Which path around, or over, the fence they choose is up to them ...

Depends how you define "learn", but there's lots of (actually quite exciting) research into psychadelics to treat mental illness.

Yes, there's a whole book about this in fact, "How to Change Your Mind"

I think it more accurate to say they make people question things

There's tons of evidence available online, but a big problem is a lack of agreement on what constitutes "credible evidence". There is a fairly significant amount of clinical evidence available (despite it being effectively banned from study for decades), but the vast majority of evidence available is anecdotal reports from users. It should be noted that while it's true that this class of evidence lacks a "proper" (standards double blind placebo-controlled, etc) approach, it does not logically follow that it is therefore incorrect.

As for where to point skeptical-minded people, I agree with others that Sam Harris is one of the better resources.

Here is an article on his recent 5g "heroic dose" mushroom trip:

https://thethirdwave.co/neuroscientist-sam-harris-reports-on...

> “There’s no denying that there were parts of the experience that felt like an encounter with something other than my own mind,” Harris says, something that guided him “across the landscape of mind.” Many trippers, Harris notes, interpret this something as god or a universal consciousness. Harris suspends judgment. “My day job is not to be fooled by spurious ideas passed down from our ignorant ancestors, so I’m very slow to make claims about what I think is going on here,” he says. “I’m just reporting the character of the experience.” In the end, Harris says, “I thought of this as the mushroom itself.”

> Thus Harris captures the magic and intrigue of psychedelics: the parsimonious explanation for the encounters you feel on a big mushroom trip is that you’re being guided by a fungus. Harris himself is astounded. “The fact that there are landscapes of mind this vast lurking on the other side of a mushroom is simply preposterous,” Harris goes on. “It’s as though we lived in a universe where, if you just reached into your right pocket with your left hand, rather than pull out your wallet, you’d pull out the Andromeda Galaxy.”

His full trip report (19 minutes long):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKGddvmU0fA

Other trip report resources, etc:

https://michaelpollan.com/resources/psychedelics-resources/

https://maps.org/research

https://erowid.org/experiences/exp_list.shtml (37,822 Reports Total)

https://erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Mushrooms.shtml (2,763 Total)

https://erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_LSD.shtml (2,195 Total)

https://www.shroomery.org/6255/Trip-Reports

https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Experience_index

https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Subjective_effects_index

What a fascinating trip report.

When I first heard of Harris about 15 years ago, back when psychedelic use was still a relatively underground phenomenon and the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance was just beginning, I never dreamed I'd ever see a militant atheist like him transform in to a psychedelic advocate taking "heroic" mushroom doses and having what could be described as powerful mystical experience, even if he's not comfortable using such terms for what he experienced.

I do wonder if his atheism would survive more such powerful experiences. Already, from this one experience, he speaks of understanding how such such an experience could be interpreted in religious terms by those who were already religious. Again, such empathy and understanding is not something I would have expected 15 years ago from such a militant atheist.

Even if he never trips again, I have to commend him for being open-minded enough and curious enough to try psychedelics multiple times, and once at a relatively high dose. Many more close-minded people, who feel completely confident in an extremely one-sided world view, would never chance having their perspective radically altered with psychedelics. Yet he did. Kudos to him for that. If more people were so inquisitive and open-minded the world might be a much better place.

That's not to say that I view psychedelics as a panacea, and I agree with Harris that they're not for everyone. Their use entails real risks, and they can easily be misused by taking them without an experienced guide, without preparation or respect, or in the wrong set and setting. But at the same time, when used constructively, they have a profound potential for encouraging empathy, open-mindedness, improved cross-cultural and cross-denominational communication and understanding. Harris' experiences and transformation are evidence of this.

I'm not such a big fan. To me, I am constantly baffled by how on one hand he has first hand knowledge of altered states and the deep, unusual perspectives that come with them, but then he goes right back to conceptualizing the world mostly at a simplistic object level. Perhaps he should trip on a more regular basis so some of the ideas stick better.

> about 15 years ago, back when psychedelic use was still a relatively underground phenomenon and the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance was just beginning,

15 years ago? Huh, I thought it had only started a couple years ago.

What exactly do they learn from it?

The central revelation, as I see it, isn't so much about facts or content (e.g. truth, purpose, ultimate meaning) but rather about how flexible the hardware/software package is that underlies our cognition and sense of the world - the experience of your mind behaving in novel ways.

I suppose there's nothing terribly transcendent for observers about seeing Doom run on an iPod, but it's definitely surprising to see how the flexible the hardware/software can be.

Subjectively, though, it can feel pretty transcendent when its your runtime being hacked in new and different ways.

If the iPod had a sense of self like we do then maybe it would be floored seeing itself run Doom (though hopefully it wouldn't confuse Doom for ultimate truth).

"The mind is vaster and more fluid than our ordinary, waking consciousness suggests. And it is simply impossible to communicate the profundity (or seeming profundity) of psychedelic states to those who have never experienced them. Indeed, it is even difficult to remind oneself of the power of these states once they have passed."

https://samharris.org/podcasts/drugs-and-the-meaning-of-life...

Open the mind is a figure of speech. If you think its hippie, you have your speech buried in the 1960s. Opening the mind is about accepting sensory data without mental heuristics (like concepts) titled over everything.

Opening the mind is used a lot in Buddhism and meditation to describe how consciousness is not inherently stuck in loops of negative thought, but that by opening the brain's perception of anything happening, we can see more clearly and without egocentric concern.

If anyone reading is thinking psychedelics and meditation are just hippie mumbo jumbo, check out Sam Harris or Dan Harris or Joseph Goldstein, who will show you how meditation is useful and not woo woo.

LSD literally makes you acutely aware of your perception. Things get put into perspective.

I like to take that to the extreme and say -- how many hospital beds would be empty and pill shelves full if these drugs weren't around? How many dentists would be out of the biz if they didn't shove glue-like candy in our childrens teeth? Then I see that I'm being silly and take another swig.

As zelly notes below the US has mandatory life sentence for certain amounts of drug production. Under 21 USC § 848(b), a life sentence is automatic for the principal administrator of a "continuing criminal enterprise" involving in excess of 300 times the quantities listed at 21 USC § 841(b)(1)(B), which for LSD would be (v):

> 1 gram or more of a mixture or substance containing a detectable amount of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)

By all accounts, Pickard had produced kilos of LSD.

Not defending the life sentence (let alone two concurrently), but it's a logical consequence of the US's fucked up laws & sentencing guidelines.

> Wonder what people were getting for drugs that actually kill people.

Depends, were they "black" of "leftist" drugs that "actually kill people"? I don't think anyone got jailed over leaded gas.

Kilos? Jesus, what would that even look like? I can't imagine that that much LSD would exist in the world at the same time. Amazing

Reminder that leaded gas is still in use.

In the US? Not really. Its sale is banned for use in cars. Wikipedia says there are a few exceptions for aircraft, farm equipment, and marine engines, but even in those fields I've never heard of it being used. It's also been pretty much phased out worldwide with a few tiny exceptions. What exactly are you referring to?

100LL is still a super common aviation fuel. It has a relatively low amount of tetra-ethyl lead, it it’s there.

I'm referring both to avgas (there's a measurable effect in populations near airfields) and leaded automobile fuel in a few countries in the world.

You're right, but only technically. Leaded gas is in use in GA aircraft only. The overall contribution this makes to atmospheric pollution is infinitesimal. Diesel garbage trucks are worse for society the amount of leaded gas we still burn.

where?

Three years probation and community service for the Purdue Pharma execs that were convicted for distributing oxycontin to pill mills.