Why We Should Say Yes to Drugs

It's not really bizarre at all.

Portugal have made the decision that although drugs are bad (in their opinion), the users of drugs are not bad people, but rather the victims of bad people (the dealers).

I grew up in a really conservative, deeply religious (Protestant Christian) family. My parents loved me and did their best to raise me according to their beliefs, but their beliefs were both absurdly strict and also ridiculously unsupportable by the scientific evidence that, as a book- and science-obsessed teenager, I was absorbing at a rapid pace.

Given that I was quickly disbelieving everything I had been raised to believe, and given that I was also doing teenager things like partying with friends and experimenting with various substances, there was an incredible amount of tension and arguing taking place in my home. My relationship with my parents was appalling. We fought constantly. I hated their beliefs. I hated my upbringing. They had no idea how to deal with a son who had always really been a good kid - a fun companion for my dad and a really loving child with my mom (who is still one of the most adorable, kind, caring and wonderful people I've ever known).

One night, when I was perhaps 16 years old, I came home quite late. I was high on LSD - probably the latter part of the trip. I was walking around the side of my house to get to the back door, and I paused. I started thinking about my parents. And suddenly it all became clear to me - the reasons for why they were they way they were, and the centrality of love to it all. The fact that their strictness was rooted in their deeply felt fear that I could end up doomed to spend eternity in hell. That, and a dozen other insights about them and our relationship washed over me.

This moment completely transformed our relationship. It was like a fever had broken. I still utterly disbelieved in their Christian faith - but I no longer raged against it, or felt the need to argue with them about it. I accepted them. I realized they had grown up in an environment similar to mine, but had never been able to break free of it. Instead of anger at them for this, I felt compassion for them.

I recognized that I loved them, and they loved me.

I know I could have gotten there without the acid trip, but I firmly believe that it would have taken several more years at least. That moment of insight when I was 15 or 16 years old was the kind that sometimes doesn't dawn on people until they're 30. Sometimes it never does.

Incidentally, this is just one of many moments of change that are rooted in some of the experiences I've had with psychedelics. I also, for example, shed my existentialist fear of death. But that's a different story. ;)

> HPPD is almost certainly a real disorder.

I just looked that up and have assumed it was normal for most of my life. Sometime around when I was 3-5 years old, I was laying in bed, looking up up at the wall and noticed this visual noise. I wondered about it and resolved that "that's just how it is." I would also close my eyes and let that fuzz "set in" and see beautiful fire works and replay music in my head. Maybe just developmental hallucination or whatever.

In rooms with no lights, that visual noise actually forms into spacial "estimators", I think somewhat formed by memory of what the room actually looks like in full light. I've always noticed it, it's always been present, and I thought it was a normal function of human vision. I'm in a dark room right now and almost everything has that visual noise on it. The less light the object reflects, the more visual noise it has.

> There's a rather worrying trend of psychedelics being "sold" as a safe panacea.

I guess I missed that trend. Every time I've ever talked about psychedelics with people, it's always been "psychedelics, with disclaimer" - the disclaimer being that things can go very wrong and to be careful; read erowid for facts and contraindications; read recent "safe drug" reports; always have at least one sober person to steer things in the right direction; and have a safe place to go.

> If you believe the cheerleaders, psychedelics are powerful enough to rapidly cure mental illness and facilitate profoundly positive personality changes, but have only trivial side-effects.

I don't think I've heard it posited this way - I hear people say in some form that the effective administration of a safe dose of certain psychedelic drugs can be medically efficacious. I feel like I'm way more likely to hear drug side effects trivialized in a drug commercial.

>any honest conversation has to give serious consideration to potential risks

Agreed. It should be the hallmark of any "let's try some drugs" discussion.

> Why do I when I take for example mdma, a drug that just makes me feel happy and loved, become a criminal and can go to prison?

Not arguing pro war on drugs here, but there's more to mdma:

> Results show that oxytocin creates intergroup bias because oxytocin motivates in-group favoritism and, to a lesser extent, out-group derogation. These findings call into question the view of oxytocin as an indiscriminate “love drug” or “cuddle chemical” and suggest that oxytocin has a role in the emergence of intergroup conflict and violence.

Source:

Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/06/1015316108

I've taken my fair share of drugs of all sorts, and maybe I'm just a grumpy bastard, but I've never felt like the author describes. I've never seen God or the afterlife. I've always been fully aware than even deep into a trip or a roll or in the depths of a k hole, it's just the drugs that are making me weird.

I'm all for taking recreational drugs to have fun and I'm all for "recreational drugs" used in a clinical setting, like ketamine for treating depression and addiction, LSD for addiction and end of life care, or MDMA for PTSD. But I don't think we'd see social benefits and an improved society from dosing everyone up on LSD and MDMA. I don't think that psychedelic experiences are profoundly religious or spiritual. I don't go around recommending that everyone takes a bunch of drugs. People will if they want to, but I'd never pressure someone into doing them.

I'm not necessarily saying that the author falls into this camp, but I think that a lot of the time people try and make up medical or spiritual reasons for why they should legalise drugs, when they just want to take them recreationally. Just admit you want to take a bunch of drugs and get weird, there's nothing wrong with that!

And one last thing: I'm not sure about shrooms, but pissing on LSD is a terrible experience. Every little detail of the toilet is magnified and in perfect clarity, and the toilet either feels like it's 6 inches away or 6 feet away.