This sentiment is so romantic that I almost chose not to reply about how inaccurate it is.
Prohibition makes a lot of sense from the point of view of an army that might need to draft a lot of men and make good soldiers out of them quickly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/16/opinion/16davis.html
Maybe I should post this to "new", it's a pretty interesting article; slightly off topic here.
It would therefore be strange for governments not to try to control substances that had the potential to upset this. No conspiracy is required, just pragmatism.
I have no experience, so I can't say who's right or wrong. I just think it's sad that these type of arguments have given some drugs so much of a stigma that it set back medical research in this area for 40+ years.
What I am not in support of is the fallacious "X illegal drug has effect Y, therefore it is illegal because the government doesn't want you to experience Y" argument.
I have a bit of tripping experience. I'll try to explain something.
The things you see and think and feel on acid are often highly personal, possibly embarrassing (vouch), and difficult to express. There is an aphorism, which, like so many aphorisms, is uselessly true: "enjoy the little things". It's hard to take this advice if you've forgotten what the "little things" are, never mind appreciating them; if you try to take this advice, you might just emulate some clichés you saw in a movie or a show and bore yourself.
This is what it's like to roll a joint on mushrooms:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/qnf5g/from_now_on_ill...
One of my friends, who has tripped many times, when I was describing a novel psychedelic to him, asked:
"Does it do that thing, where you're like ..."
snaps fingers slowly several times
And... yeah. That thing. You forget yourself, you notice yourself. It is totally exquisite.
Psychedelic introspection draws on this. It is an utterly human phenomenon that one thinks of their beliefs and ideas as part of them, when they are nothing of the sort (cf. Five Aggregates). It becomes much easier to realize you have a drinking problem when you have first realize that you lose nothing by realizing that you have a drinking problem.
Perhaps you have done something wrong: it does you no harm to accept this. Perhaps you have aligned yourself with bad company: seeing them for who they are makes them no worse than they were before. Perhaps you have been wasting time: you waste no more time if you start working.
Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing in it to steal.
Ryokan returned and caught him. "You may have come a long way to visit me," he told the prowler, "and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift."
The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.
Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. "Poor fellow, " he mused, "I wish I could give him this beautiful moon."
It is a common lament of the e-lucy-diated: so many of the world's problems would be resolved if those people could see this beautiful moon. But who should take acid? What would it do? And how could the world possibly benefit?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/why-do-inno...
Consider the case of the police interrogator who tortures a false confession out of an innocent sixteen-year-old and destroys a life. How does one survive an encounter with a mirror after such an abhorrent act? A person will recoil in abject horror at even the possibility of admitting to have done such a thing. The belief that you have done it becomes a demon, and it is as though it attacks your mind, and so your mind runs and hides.
In a state of constant renewal -- which is the only true state of the mind -- a memory can be seen for what it is, and one can react honestly, appropriately, and ethically, with true humility. But when people are denying reality, they are helpless to change it. And perhaps the moon can remind a person that theft is not a very good life-track to follow.
I do not mean to present LSD as the solution to the world's problems. I mean to present LSD as LSD. From my perspective, I feel as though I have barely scratched the surface, and already I am caught up in dramatic overexpression and gratuitous use of italics. I had hoped to write a good post. That did not happen.
Oh well. It's four in the morning.
I know it's annoying that I ask this a lot in this thread, but there are so many good leads here :)
To me this came from having access to a historical perspective. But the resulting shift was so subjective, so much like seeing the same things from a different perspective that I can no longer say with conviction that drugs like LSD could never do the same thing. The fact that a dose of a drug gives you no new information may not be so important, as long as it helps you rearrange the knowledge you already have.
I wouldn't trust anything my brain said about intergroup conflicts.
Sounds cool. What books were those?
If you have, then I assume that you failed to do any meaningful self observation which would have been more than identifying personal flaws.
The original claim which I was responding to is so baseless that I do not feel that the burden of proof is on my side.
[1] http://csp.org/psilocybin/Hopkins-CSP-Psilocybin2008.pdf
Wouldn't you agree that one of the primary functions of government is to ensure social stability?
It would therefore be strange for governments not to try to control substances that had the potential to upset this. No conspiracy is required, just pragmatism.
Given that LSD advocates in the 60's and 70's loudly proclaimed its power to transform society, whether accurate or not, it would have been irresponsible for governments to ignore this.
I grew up in the UK, and witnessed the rave and drug scene from 1988 onwards. Millions of doses of LSD were consumed, and continue to be consumed. I don't see millions of people awakened to the system.