They now have a “bad trip” hotline for psychedelics

Pretty sure I would have trouble working the phone in that situation tbh.

Great!

Of all the things we are seeing during this partial liberalization related to drugs, the concepts of education and harm reduction are the two I feel best about.

People will do what they do. And they have reasons. It is rarely just rando actions.

Obviously, we want everyone safe, happy, healthy.

To that end we have employed strong legal and personal judgement. Stiff consequences, the thinking goes, means effective prevention, and those who get snagged in all that are deserving somehow.

In one sense, that is all simple, clean policy. Easy.

However, the costs are high and learning can be life changing, lives ruined over what is arguably a not so uncommon act. And discrimination runs rampant. Brown people of little means see a very different outcome than say less brown ones of means.

Worse, take one substance and see one outcome, take another and see a very different, profound to a degree of genuine shock and wonder, outcome. A few laughs maybe a stern talking to vs. decades in a cage.

It really is a mess! Some parts of the world are extreme too. Both ways, permissive or scary authoritarian, obviously both making very little sense.

Where I live, decriminalization is seen as either a trend toward better, or the beginning of the end game despotism...

I cannot shake the fact we are losing in this struggle, off.

Meth, in particular is decimating peoples, and enforcement cost a lot of lives. Not mother natures kitchen too. Some schrooms seem like a rounding error, yet most of the world does not differentiate well. The same sorts of draconian policy get used and the conversation is as unproductive as many have come to expect.

And now here is the bad trip hotline!

I am just rambling, but maybe to a point after all:

My childhood was during a time when mistakes, bad calls of all kinds were seen as learning ops. Lives were not generally torched, records one cannot shake off did not get created, dooming people early on.

The idea of people hearing the bell ring at the school of hard knocks was a thing. As adults, we did not seem to benefit and it all got escalated into something far less forgiving.

War on drugs policy did so much harm.

Still does.

And we are generally are still losing. Badly.

The idea of ruining people to help them is broken.

And the times are damn tough for too many of us.

Maybe there are good answers. Maybe we can find them and maybe, just maybe...

Why even bother having conversations like this?

Me? Tired of seeing us lose! ...so damn badly.

And by "US", I mean humans.

It all seems to be a lot harder than it needs to be.