I don't know how American ethnobotanists do their jobs today. Any time that they find a psychoactive substance overseas that works in any obvious way -- say, by dramatically improving the mood of a formerly depressed person or by giving extraordinary and informative visions to a laconic homebody -- they must be thinking to themselves, "By rights, I should report this drug to the DEA, since it is yet another of the endless ethnobotanical substances that could be misused by our white American young people, whom we have to protect from the psychoactive facts of life 'by any means necessary'. Sure, these locals seem to be using the drug wisely, but wait until our poor, helpless young people get ahold of it, especially given the fact that we refuse to teach them about safe use or to regulate product as to quality and quantity." Indeed, one can imagine a whole new profession of ethnobotanical police officers, who travel overseas with a book of laws in their suitcase rather than a book of plants, not to find new substances that would be of benefit to a suffering humanity but in order to confiscate such substances for the sake of our young people prior to eliminating the plant and all of its determined users from the face of the earth. In fact, I fear I may be naive in supposing that such an ethnobotanical police force does not already exist.
All drugs have positive uses at some dose, for some reason, at some time -- but prohibitionists have the absurd idea that drugs can be voted up or down. This anti-scientific notion deprives the modern world of countless godsends.
There are definitely good scientists out there. Unfortunately, they are either limited by their materialist orthodoxy into showing only specific microscopic evidence or they abandon materialism for the nonce and talk the common psychological sense that we all understand.
I don't have a problem with CBD. But I find that many people like it for the wrong reasons: they assume there is something slightly "dirty" about getting high and that all "cures" should be effected via direct materialist causes, not holistically a la time-honored tribal use.
My consciousness, my choice.
To say that psilocybin has not been proven to work is like saying that a hammer has not yet been proven to smash glass. Why not? Because the process has not yet been studied under a microscope.
Imagine a world in which we were told about both the potential benefits AND the potential harms of drugs like cocaine and opium.
And where did politicians get the idea that irresponsible white American young people are the only stakeholders when it comes to the question of re-legalizing drugs??? There are hundreds of millions of other stakeholders: philosophers, pain patients, the depressed.
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.
After watching my mother suffer because of the drug war, I hate to hear people tell me that the problem is drugs. WRONG! That's a western colonialist viewpoint. God loved his creation (see Genesis). He did not make trash. We need to use entheogenic medicines wisely.
Addiction was not a big thing until the drug war. It's now the boogie-man with which drug warriors scare us into giving up our freedoms. But getting obsessed on one single drug is natural in the age of choice-limiting prohibition.
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