"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."
It's a category error to say that scientists can tell us if psychoactive drugs "really work." It's like asking Dr. Spock of Star Trek if hugging "really works." ("Hugging is highly illogical, Captain.")
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
No substance is bad in and of itself. Fentanyl has positive uses, at specific doses, for specific people, in specific situations. But the drug war votes substance up or down. That is hugely anti-scientific and it blocks human progress.
The drug war is the defeatist doctrine that we will never be able to use psychoactive drugs wisely. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the government does everything it can to make drug use dangerous.
It is a truism to say that we cannot change the world and that therefore we have to change ourselves -- but the drug war outlaws even this latter option.
If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.
Psst! Drug use has benefits too. Pass it on!
There's more than set and setting: there's fundamental beliefs about the meaning of life and about why mother nature herself is full of psychoactive substances. Tribal peoples associate some drugs with actual sentient entities -- that is far beyond "set and setting."
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
The DEA should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for withholding godsend medicine from the depressed. Here is just one typical drug-user report that appeared in "Pihkal": "A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like..."
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