Should We Loosen the Restrictions on Psychedelics?

Most psychedelic drugs are very niche. Telling someone you’ve smoked pot or telling someone you’ve taken 2 hits of LSD generate very different reactions. The stigma around it will have trouble wearing off because psychedelics are such an unknown. Most people don’t do them but have heard about people having bad experiences. I hope the overall idea of moving past the War on Drugs can make things like LSD less foreign and delinquent

This doesn't meet with my general experiences.

I've never understood how something like LSD can be "abused" in the way that alcohol can be abused... my experience (and the hundreds of folks I know who've used it) is that at some point, you have bad experiences with it and you stop. That's not a cyclical abuse pattern like with alcohol, where you become addicted and continue on despite the terrible toll on your health.

Similarly, of the people who have been heavily involved with psychedelics and the general outcomes aren't any worse than for the hundreds of functioning alcoholics I know.

While it is true that these kinds of drugs can put you in some really scary places and while it is true that they can possibly have longer-lasting negative effects, the article doesn't make a very compelling case to me to keep these chemicals scheduled so that only researchers have legal access to them.

Pieces like these are interesting... I can see a strand of "messianic utopianism" in some discussion of these drugs, but most of the folks I know who want these things legalized don't have an agenda beyond "I like it and have found it helpful in my life". It's a strange way to characterize the discourse... it'd be like characterizing pieces like these as having an agenda to keep these drugs out of peoples' had out some misguided sense that only clinicians know what kinds of things healthy people should do. That is clearly not what motivates most researchers I have met.