Your average American that "can't handle cheese responsibly" will try it once, have a terrible 12h and swear off drugs for life. With no long term health effects from one dose.
I don’t thin legalisation would hugely increase use.
This might be anecdotal, but even though they can be fun, but they're also very exhausting and make you introspective and also kinda encourage you to think about improving different aspec of your life. Sure, there's some bad trips that make people psychotic, but I think that legalisation and regulations would help protect those peope, rather than harm them, because there's usually an underlying condition that triggers such an episode. On the flip side, I've had bad trips a few times and they usually taught me a lot about myself, the people around me, and how I lived life at the, which in turn pushed me to change for the better, and improve some aspects of my life.
these arguments never seem to have a separate addictive from non-addictive drugs component.
You severely underestimate how much most people want to escape their lives, even if the experience is negative. It's silly to act like people don't self-harm.
I'm not denying that people will self-harm. But the argument that people will self-harm with LSD needs to ignore that there's plenty of better drugs legalised already
Go to a couple of AA meetings and say that again.
Hey, lets optimize society for human happiness and enjoyment without escapism then...
Moloch: "Now just hold the fuck up, I have some corporations to run"
LSD bonds with something in the brain, such that it causes persistent flashbacks more than any other hallucinogen, sometimes years later. Taking it just once to try it might not have any effect, or might cause flashbacks for the rest of your life. Depends on your personal neurochemistry, the dosage, form of dosing, and your mental state. A friend who had taken LSD described it to me once something like this: LSD sometimes takes any cracks (neurosis or psychosis) in your mind and expands them wide open, forcing you to look into them. If you're aware of them already and they're minor, it can be helpful, sometimes expanding your mind to new capabilities. If you've been unaware or worse, in denial, or they're major, then you get a bad trip that may come back to haunt you over and over again over the years.
Flashbacks that continue to occur after the original drug effects have worn off are a medically recognized phenomenon, which is documented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as hallucinogen persisting perception disorder.
Flashbacks typically happen in the days or weeks following ingestion of the drug but can happen months or even years after the drug use has been discontinued.
However the risk from one dose is minimal. If your risk threshold is so close to 0 then we should be banning way more things today.
Not one of us has ever had a single flashback, let alone "persistent" flashbacks. If they were ever really an issue, it was long ago with different/absurdly strong formulations.
A more convincing theory for flashbacks is that they are similar to PTSD. LSD can give really intense and memorable experiences, and in the case of a bad trip, they can be considered traumatic. Symptoms show similarities too. Essentially, flashbacks are just memories, good or bad, and in the worst cases, so bad as to haunt you for years.
Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD) is not like flashbacks. As the name suggests, it affects perception, i.e. senses, commonly in the form of visual noise, distinct from what is experienced during a trip. Think something like tinnitus. We know it exists, but the details are unclear.
LSD is not so dangerous per se if you are in good hands. It does leave you discombobulated for 12 hours or so and put somebody into a strange and sketchy city like Amsterdam and some of them will get into trouble. Mushrooms are a little better because the duration is shorter but they still didn't find the problems acceptable. They tried the stimulating and hallucinatory 2C-T2 which is somehow entirely non-cosmic but I think even that failed market testing.
After all these years a pastor I know is providing psilocybin therapy for the terminally ill which they are doing in a tightly controlled
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect
environment and of course accompanying people for the whole tip.
The problem is we have such a high bar for pyschedelics that isn't applied to other recreational drugs.
Funny you say that because I couldn't have wished for a better trip than roaming Amsterdam with my friends when I tried mushrooms all those years ago. The canals, the architecture.. it was a fairy tale and I remember it dearly.
Yes, and a variety of other psychedelics in my early 20s. I remember spending time on erowid and then seeking out substances. Mescaline, peyote, ketamine, psylicobin, acid, GHB, DXM, others I'm forgetting.
I wish I had never done any of it.
One problem is that you can't get honest information about what is responsable, besides the "all drugs are evil" propaganda. Like you can defenitley smoke weed more often and call it responsable, but for MDMA 5 times is already quite at the edge imo. And people don't realize that easily.
Indeed, but I was speaking of 5 times like 1 LSD 1 mushroom, 1 coke and 1 mdma a year or something, with extremely cautious dosing..
> you can't get honest information about what is responsable
This is really debatable or even not true. There are several website (erowid, r/drugs) with literally thousands of not tens of thousands of reports and experiences of various people, including thoughts on multi-year / multi-decade drug experiences. If you sincerely look for the information there's everything you need
Individual responsibility should apply here. I don't want my rights restricted because other people are fools.
If it's considered acceptable to tell people what they can and cannot put into their bodies because "average" people can't handle it, there's no limiting principle in place to stop our bodies from being controlled by others.
If you say so. I believe prohibition exerts substantial control over our bodies, and also corrodes other aspects of personal freedom (such as the Fourth Amendment in the US).
Not only is possession of any drug for personal use without an intent to distribute not a criminal offence in Spain, neither is consuming said drugs in the privacy of your own home. There is also no legal restriction on growing cannabis or psychedelic mushrooms on private property outside of public view, as long as the amounts are small enough that there is no reason to suspect an intent to distribute it.
I'd like to do that^^.
1. Imagine what would happen to the mafia etc... No more war in mexico for example.
2. Normal people wouldn't just start taking heroine for example
3. Imagine what happens to jails
4. You could use some of the new tax money (which goes to the mafia currently) to hire some medical professionals. That way you could help the really addicted.
5. 100% pure heroin would not destroy the body (it was developed as painkiller). Those junkies are that f*ed up because of the other stuff they pump in their veins. How is that a win for society?
I also believe they were all in error when slavery was legal everywhere.
This is a combination of appeal to authority and appeal to majority.
I don't care if my views are fringe and others choose to not take them seriously as a result. That's outside my control.
People accepting beliefs uncritically is the problem, and that applies equally to nutjob conspiracy theorists as well as people who accept the whatever the current groupthink believes.
A cursory examination of history is all that's needed to know that, at any given point in time, there are many beliefs across society which are just flat out wrong. To think that in 2023 somehow we've finally got it figured out is arrogance.
No, ideas that need to be applied broadly should be judged on a combination of their merits and demerits, and popularity, as there are enforcement and political costs associated with any proposal (as long as the government needs to do make any changes whatsoever).
It would be different if it was a private proposal that will only affect you and immediate family.
To be entirely honest, it seems like you need to rethink this more thoroughly instead of just repeating memorable slogans.
On the other hand, what to do if some people don't act responsibly and get addicted; and then for instance ruin their health or neglect their children. Who should be responsible for helping them go to rehab, fixing their health problems or helping their children? If it means the society has to take care of this, then isn't it also fair that society tries to prevent people from getting addicted in the first place? And prohibiting drugs is one way of trying to do that.
The war on drugs had tried and failed for decades. All it's done is enrich the cartels, fill prisons with minorities, create an oxycodone epidemic, flood the streets with cheap and deadly fentanyl, and countless other problems.
While the same government "protecting" citizens from harm is corrupt the point of the CIA becomeing drug traffickers on the side [1], making the problem even worse like throwing petrol on a fire.
[1] https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/big-whit...
Prohibition has nothing to do with prevention.
Has it succeeded? No.
Criminalizing it often makes it even more difficult to deal with the societal damage of addiction. Dealing with an addict is difficult, but dealing with an addict who is now a criminal is that much harder.
Society has all sorts of tools to help people who are struggling. Our criminal justice system is one of the least effective.
An addict is harming their family whether drugs are legal or not, and it's obvious from our current situation that their legal status doesn't prevent people from using drugs.
An addict who is now a criminal can be forced into treatment at least. An addict who can freely buy their drugs (because we aren't prosecuting dealers either) and do them on the street anywhere will just die faster (especially with fentanyl).
I also don't see why it has to be all one way or the other. I agree that people with dependent children have no business taking risks with drugs. like you say, this creates a mess other people are compelled to clean up.
but what if a person doesn't have children (or successfully raised them to be independent adults)? as long as they pay whatever taxes they owe, why care what they do with their time?
Lets imagine a hypothetical drug so we don't have to argue about the effects of real ones. This drug removes the idea of responsibility from your mind when your on it. This drug creates a paradox in your framework. You dictate that individuals have ultimate responsibility. This drug removes any internal idea of responsibility as a concept leading to bizzare and potential dangerous actions from the user.
Would you agree this drug should be banned then?
But with ethanol we tried that once, didn't work out well as you tend to create a police state to prevent it as it's easy to make.
However they must also bear the cost of any harm done in that state. The problem isn't that someone took a drug, it's that they did X thing to hurt others. Punish X thing, not the drug use.
I acknowledge that this has serious problems because not everyone acts responsibly. But the alternative is to implement a system which removes the basic freedom to control what goes into your own body... and still have people acting irresponsibly anyway.
The alternative is worse.
I agree it's unfortunate.
Look at the size of the average American. They can't handle cheese responsibly. But we're supposed to think that now they'll manage acid?