That's why some folks say they take psychedelics; they want to justify their drug use for 'fun' as something more beneficial. I wish people were more honest with themselves and others.
The article just scanned people's brains while they were on drugs and saw that the electrical activity was more erratic and scattered than normal, not more active and connected, and concluded that people were using psychedelics based on a myth.
In fact a lot of people who have taken (and really cherish) psychedelics would not describe them as fun, and sometimes they're very actively un-fun/terrifying/unenjoyable, and yet can still be beneficial.
What exactly is going on at the level of "brain connectivity" is pretty much unrelated to all of that^
Yes the trip can be lots of fun, but really, "fun" is widely available once you cross the line and take drugs. MDMA is fun. Amphetamines can be fun. There is no scarcity of "fun" here and I have no issue admitting I've taken those to the possible detriment of my health and for fun.
The difference is that if I had to skip the "trip" part of psychedelics and retain the rest, I'd still do it.
I did a lot of psychedelics, I don't know if fun was ever the word I'd use to describe most of it, but I don't regret any of it. It opened up a lot of the back of my brain in a way I never could conceive and really allowed me to think and analyze things in ways that I wouldn't have access to without. That in itself is well worth the experience, in my subjective reckoning. When I no longer felt that psychedelics were able to provide me with what it once did, I stopped. That was that. That surely is enough, right?
Lying about efficacy will do nothing but only bolster what was never a legitimate rationale to begin with. This is a country that failed to learn lessons from prohibition, that managed to kept the Mann Act on the books even though the legislative intent - that of the fear over 'miscegenation' was hardly a secret, a country where congress never bothered to even get rid of the chapter in the US Code that contained the Chinese Exclusion Act and therefore leaving the ugly legacy plain to see for all. Why lie about your cause when the truth that undergirds the reality is far uglier and far more disconcerting to begin with? And of course, for once, Oscar Wilde was wrong and the truth may not be pure but certainly simple: prohibitionist policies began in racism and are sustained by moral panics while protected by the state agencies that now benefit financially from its existence. All this has a paper trail, both online and in print, in the federal register, in the US Code, in congressional records and archives. If that's not enough to justify resistance, your real reasoning will still be more persuasive than having to make up something to justify a position against a line of thinking that has goalposts with wheels built in from the start.
Marijuana legalization used the same strategy: medical first, then complete. The technique works. The other technique of "Oh yeah, I want it for fun so you should let me do it" has been tried for eons and got nowhere. You can come up with all the theory, but one technique worked and the other didn't, so I'm not interested in the theory.
Fake science it's going to be. The people who hate it don't have the ability to tell that it's fake.
The amount of half-braindead pot smokers earnestly talking about their medical need to get stoned is so irritating. Legalization happened despite them, not because of them.
And come on, healthcare requires you to lie. The head of the NIAID famously lied about mask efficacy in order to get what he wanted and people backed him for it. I don't see myself as any different.
When a drug is stigmatized in the United States, it is essentially impossible to get it legalized without showing there is a medical use for it. That's just how it is. If your goal is to get a drug legalized, it does not matter whether that's how it should be, or whether this is all rooted in systemic discrimination, or whether pharmaceutical companies push stuff that's just as bad under their veil of legitimacy. Citizens who are anti-drug are under the impression right now that ~100% of illicit drugs are extremely dangerous and a major threat to their community, and they are not going to sit around and listen to a history lesson philosophizing about how all their fears are a propagandized illusion.
Even if you got them to listen, they would just say "Why risk it?" The only way to start changing minds is to point out there are upsides to drug legalization beyond just "freedom is good." That's why all of the arguments for legalization focus on health/therapeautic benefits, either directly from the drugs themselves or in the ability to treat those who need help with addiction.