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Comment by XaoDaoCaoCao | Hacker News Reader

It's a cultural crime that psychedelics have been criminalized for half a century or so.

The expansion of certain mental faculties (3-D Visualization, free thought association, meta-thought) could have been harvested for societal benefit...

Oh well, wishes to the dust and all that.

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1970-2030+ or so will be seen as a drug dark age. A time where criminalization made everything more dangerous, and harm reduction worse. Part of a 60+ year gap in innovation using all substances for many health related cures and issues as well as recreational fun and exploration.

We learned nothing from alcohol (a drug) prohibition.

All prohibition and criminalization does is make everything more harmful, from use, to production, to creating cartels/mafias that become as powerful as nation states.

>creating cartels/mafias that become as powerful as nation states.

The state is balls deep in those cartels. Go read about Freeway Rick Ross and Afghanistan poppy fields for prime examples. It's all part of the military industrial complex, Peter Dale Scott has great books on the matter.

The books of the mentioned author on that topic:

https://rowman.com/isbn/9780742525221/drugs-oil-and-war-the-...

https://rowman.com/isbn/9780742555952/american-war-machine-d...

Author's page:

https://www.peterdalescott.net/q/

Drugs have been largely a tool by the government to justify aggressive searches of poor people. I don't think the justice system we have can work only with only the search justifications of terrorism, child pornography, and intellectual property theft. Maybe I'll be surprised, though.

Maybe hate speech/bullying will be the new frontier. We have to know what everybody is reading and writing to make sure they aren't hating: "my dog alerted to the smell of a flash drive."

It's the start of a journey. There are huge benefits to psychedelics that are still undiscovered. It will take at least 50 more years but we will eventually get there

Why do you think there is an expansion of any sort? For any effect a simple explanation is that some function gets reduced, and result simply looks wild.

> some function gets reduced

What does this mean?

Like your driving skills and logic obviously dwindle.

If you try to imagine an orange on the table, you normally won't see that orange as if it really was on the table in front of you. It's a lower fidelity imagination.

There are of course good reasons for this, you wouldn't survive long in the wild if things you thought about suddenly seemed to appear in front of you.

On psychedelics, this doesn't necessarily happen either, but you can learn to visualize things in 3D as if they were real objects in front of you. Using this for anything useful takes some skill and practice, but it can be done. Some people can do this without psychedelics, but they tend to have mental health issues.

Is there any kind of research? How can I know a person under psychedelics actually sees a 3D object correctly in detail, not just thinks she does?

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