Some great points from both of you there, I think.
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. I've come across this notion before and find it rather sophomoric, to say nothing of naive. It's even directly contradicted by historical evidence; the best counterexample being the Aztec empire, which was a tyrannical and warlike theocracy that specialised in mass human sacrifices, yet they took psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, morning glory seeds, all kinds of crazy shit. Or at least, the nobility and priesthood - which is to say, the people who presided over and conducted the sacrifices - did. The Aztecs were about as hippy as the Third Reich.
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. And my own experience backs this up, in fact; I remember after one particularly heavy mushroom trip feeling like my brain had been "reformatted" the next morning, and I felt saner and happier than I had for some time - not that I'd felt myself to be especially stressed or depressed before hand, but all the same, in retrospect it makes me think that such an experience could be very valuable to someone with real emotional or psychiatric problems. I think ecstasy (as opposed to 'proper' psychedelics per se) was very popular among therapists before it was scheduled in the '80s, especially for treating patients with PTSD. The quote that sticks in my head is the one from a therapist or psychiatrist who said he'd seen patients "make more progress in one session with MDMA than in six months of conventional therapy".
But as I said, this is all about trying to help people overcome their own difficulties rather than attempting to bring about some society-wide upheaval than will topple The System. I'd agree with padraig that if you're a serious revolutionary, you're probably better off going about it with a straight head.
In answer to grizzleb's point about the egotism of subjective experiences (devil's avocado, sure), I think you could counter it possibly by saying that a really heavy psychedelic experience can be a great leveller, imparting a fundamentally similar level of experience to people regardless of their personal background and native culture? Though I admit this is a sort of devil's-defence-brief (or should that be "angel's"?) response to your devil's-advocate argument. Having said that, I've certainly read 'trip reports' by people I've never met and found they mention startlingly similar subjective states to things I've experienced, to the extent that this kind of experience can be described in words. Then there's the whole club/party/field-full-of-people-on-E thing which is very collective as opposed to individualised, and while it may have been tarnished by association with those appalling candy-raver knob-ends, it's worth remembering that it can be a very profound collective experience and you don't have to dress up like a futuristic day-glo twat to be a part of it.
) but speaking more generally the entire point of science is inquiry and, by extension, uncertainty. there is no implied desire for an "orderly" world, simply to describe the world as it is (that is, anything but orderly, laws of thermodynamics etc aside). the line about scientific "orthodoxy" echoing religious dogmatism - in addition to being very, very tired - encompasses a quite superficial reading of both.