I should make clear that I certainly don't subscribe to this notion that if everyone just tripped hard enough, Kapital would somehow come crashing down and we'd all live in peace and harmony with flowers in our hair for ever more.
regardless of whether they went and crushed da system
I should in turn make clear that I'm not particularly against the use of psychedelics in a recreational context. not for it either, tho. if cats want to do them for whatever reason, then let them, as (hopefully) responsible individuals aware of the potential positive & negative consequences. I just don't want any confusion about their having any inherently liberating quality. (however: heroin, coke, speed, etc - f**k that ish. f**k it hard. destroys lives, full stop, and brings no material benefit to anyone except (while we're at it) c-a-p-i-t-a-l-i-s-t scum - i.e. the "bosses", not the street-level dealers)
Generally I'm in favor of decriminalization, even w/hard drugs, for a variety of reasons. As odious of as the idea of, say, packs of R.J. Reynolds spliffs being sold at Wal-Mart is, it's better than what we have now, i.e. prisons overflowing with non-violent drug offenders and the huge expenditure of resources on an essentially unwinnable war (the War on Drugs being, of course, an industry unto itself, with the attendant consituency and lobbyists). What the Netherlands & Portugal have done: making a clear demarcation between soft and hard drugs; and another between personal use and trafficking. Glenn Greenwald actually did a rather interesting study (commissioned by, of all people, the Cato Institute) on impact of Portugal's drug policy -
see here.
The position I'm holding is just that it sounds like it could be very helpful to some people, on a purely personal basis, to take drugs like these in a supervised setting as part of a course of clinical treatment.
I don't think anyone's arguing against this. As I said - do the double-blind, randomized trials, as well as the case studies, and let the research bear it out. If the results are favorable, great, add psychedelics to the arsenal as a tool for treating the appropriate disorders.
to your more general point - what's wrong w/reducing unhappiness - not to sound like a misanthrope, or to privilege suffering, but the obvious answer is that sometimes being unhappy (or angry, despondent, etc) is a perfectly natural reaction. not only to personal tragedies like untimely deaths of loved ones, but also to economic setbacks, and even to events that may not affect one personally. admittedly since there's no clear definition of a "natural" v. unnatural reaction, things can get murky, which is where the opinions of both patient & therapist come in. I dunno, but it seems fair to attribute at least some portion of mental illness in the modern world to the alienation of consumer society (in which everything, including relationships, becomes a commodity, etc), if perhaps not the largest portion.
