Oregon's drug policy is incoherent. They make psilocybin available to the rich and healthy, while locking up the poor and chemically dependent who could profit from it most. This half-baked attempt at a free market in psilocybin won't work until drug prohibition stops wildly distorting costs, thereby making psilocybin unavailable for those who need it most. (Psilocybin, after all, is available for free in mushroom form -- for free.2) For the latter demographic, it makes no difference if the price is reasonable in the long run: if they cannot afford it now when they need it, they are screwed.
Another problem is that Drug War fearmongering has taught us to treat psilocybin (and all other illegal drugs) like they were plutonium, causing liability costs to skyrocket, along with red tape. When I signed up for psilocybin therapy in Oregon, I complained about the endless paperwork. The facilitator apologized, noting that he himself had to fill out less paperwork when he purchased his first house. This implicit terror of drugs is so out of touch with common sense that it qualifies as a modern superstition.
That said, your point is well taken: the high prices are not a result of greed on the part of providers, but — like so many other problems in America today — are a result of an insane and counterproductive drug policy.
You can get a master's degree in healthcare today and not learn a thing about the power of hundreds of outlawed drugs to inspire and elate.
In response to a tweet that "some drugs cannot be used wisely for recreational purposes": The problem is, most people draw such conclusions based on general impressions inspired by a media that demonizes drugs. In reality, it's hard to imagine a drug that cannot theoretically be used wisely for recreation at some dose, in some context.
It is actually illegal to be a Ben Franklin in 21st century America. To put this another way: we outlaw far more than drugs when we outlaw mind and mood medicine.
Trump's lies about America's voting process are typical NAZI and DRUG WAR strategy: raise mendacious doubts about whatever you want to destroy and keep repeating them. It's what Joseph Goebbels called "The Big Lie."
"Dope Sick"? "Prohibition Sick" is more like it. The very term "dope" connotes imperialism, racism and xenophobia, given that all tribal cultures have used "drugs" for various purposes. "Dope? Junk?" It's hard to imagine a more intolerant, dismissive and judgmental terminology.
If religious liberty existed, we would be able to use the inspiring phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the same way and for the same reasons as the Vedic people of India used soma.
The Drug War is the most important evil to protest, precisely because almost everybody is afraid to do so. That's a clear sign that it is a cancer on the body politic.
The U.S. government created violence out of whole cloth in America's inner cities with drug prohibition -- and now it is using that violence as an excuse to kick the people that they themselves have knocked down.
Until we legalize ALL psychoactive drugs, there will be no such thing as an addiction expert. In the meantime, it's insulting to be told by neuroscience that I'm an addictive type. It's pathologizing my just indignation at psychiatry's niggardly pharmacopoeia.
No drug causes addiction after one use. From this fact alone, it follows that even drugs like meth and crack and Fentanyl can be used wisely -- on an intermittent basis.
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