Occasionally, we receive negative feedback from people in the psychedelic industry, who feel this newsletter has an ‘agenda’. The implication, I think, is that our ‘agenda’ is ‘anti-psychedelic’ or even pro-prohibitionist, and we view the entire field through these binoculars, and are therefore biased and not a reliable source of information. If you hand out criticism you should be prepared to take it, and I take such criticisms seriously.
It's true that at Ecstatic Integration we have concentrated on issues of psychedelic harm and ethical abuses, and this is only one part of the picture when it comes to psychedelics. My thinking is that while there has been a steady stream of stories on the miraculous benefits of psychedelics for the last 15 years (partly because most psychedelic media is paid for by psychedelic corporates), the risks are still under-reported and under-researched. Nonetheless, we do try to at least mention the potential benefits of psychedelics in every article on the risks or harms – if we demand better balance from others, we should also show it myself.
I personally am not prohibitionist, though I may have a different attitude to the those who see themselves as heroic warriors in the ‘war on drugs’ – liberating humans from the oppression of police-states. I differ from this mainstream view in two ways. First, I don’t think mind-altering drugs are necessarily ‘good’. Almost every drug has side effects, and they can enslave as much if not more than they can liberate. I incline to the liberal view that people are adults and should be free to make their own decisions about how to change their consciousness, but I don’t trust the market to give them accurate information about risks, nor do I trust the market to regulate itself wisely. Any market requires rules and sanctions for those who break the rules, whatever it is they’re selling.
Secondly, I don’t think the police are bad. If you want a legal drugs market, you need rules, and those rules need to be enforced. You can’t have a legal alcohol market if everyone can sell moonshine from their backyard to whoever wants it. Occasionally, pro-drug warriors come across as anarchist utopians cocooned in Twitter bubbles until reality smacks them in the face, as it has in Oregon (which decriminalized all drugs and was surprised when overdoses rocketed). If you decriminalize or legalize a drug without enforceable rules, you get what happened in New York’s cannabis market, where there was one legal store and 1400 illegal ones.
What is the future of psychedelics in western societies? I honestly don’t know and I don’t even have a fixed view – the field is changing so fast I think we’re all learning as we go. But I can tell you my five biggest reservations, and five possible responses. The reservations are:
1) Psychedelic therapy will struggle to get FDA approval (so the therapy bit will get ditched)
2) Psychedelics have unpredictable effects
3) Psychedelics lead to ego-inflation in the providers and suggestibility in the clients
4) Psychedelic medicine is a religion
5) Psychedelics might make us vulnerable to the spirit world in ways we don’t understand
After the paywall, why I think these are serious reservations, and what possible solutions exist.
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