- Joined
- Feb 8, 2006
- Messages
- 65,043
I think the only thing good that would come about (which would be significant) is that a whole set of people who would otherwise never have tripped due to lack of access, or culturally being against it, or culturally not exposed to it, would be the types of people who could really benefit from it. That could realistically result in a higher percentage of the population having had a positive, beneficial outcome from it. I know that I benefitted from the psychedelic experience, it helped to make me a more aware, understanding and loving individual. However, more sociopaths would do them too, which could be dangerous. But the reason we should not ever do this is because there are a lot of people who should not do psychedelics. Some people just can't handle them or don't want to handle them, or are very fragile or traumatized already. For these people, psychedelics can be a damaging influence, sometimes very much so. It already happens to some people who decide to trip on their own - read Erowid or the PD forum to see that quite a few people experience lasting negative effects. I think that a lot of such people have had the opportunity to try psychedelics and they have always not wanted to go there. Sometimes that decision is wise. If you then force those people to trip, it's out of their hands, and the resulting experience would probably be even more traumatic because it was enforced by others. I think we would end up with a lot of "acid casualties", so to speak.
This practice would be horribly unethical. It's a nice, romantic idea, what if everyone had the ideal, life-changing psychedelic experience like I did? Everything would fix itself. But unfortunately it's not that simple.
I think in this vein of discussion, the best thing we can do is legalize, and provide accurate information to people. Foster a culture where people seeking experiences would want to find out about it first, and it would be easy for them to do so. Then those who naturally seek the psychedelic experience, who are most likely to benefit, can do so safely and without an unhealthy frame of reference surrounding drug use.
This practice would be horribly unethical. It's a nice, romantic idea, what if everyone had the ideal, life-changing psychedelic experience like I did? Everything would fix itself. But unfortunately it's not that simple.
I think in this vein of discussion, the best thing we can do is legalize, and provide accurate information to people. Foster a culture where people seeking experiences would want to find out about it first, and it would be easy for them to do so. Then those who naturally seek the psychedelic experience, who are most likely to benefit, can do so safely and without an unhealthy frame of reference surrounding drug use.
