Personally, I am not interested in most drugs. My focus is on enjoying the natural, simple, everyday world as this world is abundant, cheap, and readily available.
But drugs and drug policy affect me in numerous ways so they are worth having a position on.
My thoughts thus far:
- not an inherent problem, we are always modifying our state of mind with various things, always have done, and always will
- the war on drugs was misconceived and has caused negative side effects
- reasonable suggestions that psilocybin can offer a means to reconnect to our true nature—our authentic self—and thereby help find meaning in our lives or at least that 58% and 67%, respectively, of volunteers rated the psilocybin-occasioned experience as being among the five most personally meaningful and among the five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives; 64% indicated that the experience increased well-being or life satisfaction; 58% met criteria for having had a ‘complete’ mystical experience.
- dangerous drugs - impurities, not intended for consumption, or badly made
- they're not for everyone, psychological problems abound
- some drug use may damage health directly
- drug use without a supportive environment - would increase chance of having negative impacts
- doing things whilst on drugs that are damaging because you forgot they were damaging
- drugs used as an escape from regular life - fix life first
- supply chain often linked with crime
The pursuit of a militarised and enforcement-led global ‘war on drugs’ strategy has produced enormous negative outcomes and collateral damage. These include mass incarceration in the US, highly repressive policies in Asia, vast corruption and political destabilisation in Afghanistan and West Africa, immense violence in Latin America, an HIV epidemic in Russia, an acute global shortage of pain medication and the propagation of systematic human rights abuses around the world. The strategy has failed based on its own terms. Evidence shows that drug prices have been declining while purity has been increasing. This has been despite drastic increases in global enforcement spending. Continuing to spend vast resources on punitive enforcement-led policies, generally at the expense of proven public health policies, can no longer be justified.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/IDEAS/Projects/IDPP/The-Expert-Group-on-the-Economics-of-Drug-Policy.aspx (or direct pdf link)
58% and 67%, respectively, of volunteers rated the psilocybin-occasioned experience as being among the five most personally meaningful and among the five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives; 64% indicated that the experience increased well-being or life satisfaction; 58% met criteria for having had a ‘complete’ mystical experience.
http://csp.org/psilocybin/Hopkins-CSP-Psilocybin2008.pdf
psilocybin can offer a means to reconnect to our true nature—our authentic self—and thereby help find meaning in our lives. The experiences recounted to me by study participants, as well as my concurrent personal journey, together with our study results, represent a large body of data from which I derive my conclusions
When I talk to addicted people, whether they are addicted to alcohol, drugs, gambling, Internet use, sex, or anything else, I encounter human beings who really do not have a viable social or cultural life. They use their addictions as a way of coping with their dislocation: as an escape, a pain killer, or a kind of substitute for a full life. More and more psychologists and psychiatrists are reporting similar observations. Maybe our fragmented, mobile, ever-changing modern society has produced social and cultural isolation in very large numbers of people, even though their cages are invisible!
The view of addiction from Rat Park is that today’s flood of addiction is occurring because our hyperindividualistic, hypercompetitive, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes most people feel social and culturally isolated. Chronic isolation causes people to look for relief. They find temporary relief in addiction to drugs or any of a thousand other habits and pursuits because addiction allows them to escape from their feelings, to deaden their senses, and to experience an addictive lifestyle as a substitute for a full life. it is too early to say conclusively if the Rat Park view of addiction is right or not, but it is not too early to be sure that the old theory that addiction is a problem caused by addictive drugs is far too simple
http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/rat-park/148-addiction-the-view-from-rat-park