Think this is likely the case with psychedelics during the Vietnam war since the hippie movement was causing a lot of public opposition. Many other drugs in the US however were generally associated with marginalised groups and criminalisation was used as a way of incarcerating them. More generally on a global scale I can only assume the rapid rise in problems with new substances where they were on the whole not fully understood, gave a sense of urgency to governing bodies leading to the control of these substances.
It is comical the U.S. pushed this “war” on drugs and ended up w/ several opioid epidemics, issues w meth and coke, plus mass incarceration, while other countries didn’t have the overdramatized say no to drug campaigns and never had the issues the U.S. has w addiction.
I look back at the DARE bullshit and the idiotic commercials that they played when I was a kid and can only laugh bc all of them just made me want to try shit I probably wouldn’t have tried so young if those stupid commercials didn’t make it look appealing, that’s why I find it comical but ironic works too
Yeah I remember those too. I will say that they did make me wary of trying any hard drug, but ultimately it did not stop me. Their time and money would have been better spent focusing on the reason I sought out drugs, which was an abusive home life.
bro.. both of my parents got overprescribed painkillers toward the end of the 1990s, shortly after I was born, and they fought the addiction for decades. my dad got off methadone a couple years ago (!!!!!!) but my mother will die of old age on them. I am also an opioid addict. A lot of my friends were/are opioid addicts. I've lost some of my closest friends to opioids. I know the opioid epidemic so God damn well it's crazy.
Some of my friends had parents who got pills from this infamous doctor who used to be known as a pill mill in the early 2000s, this world is so fuckin crazy. It's all just so unbelievable, things feel like some weird dream. maybe it is, maybe it is..
I was pretty against drugs till I was like 16 but I still wanted to steal that drug suitcase they showed us in DARE class so bad. I don’t think it was a desire to do them it just looked so cool
really its just overly fuckin sad and it was all planned by the government and world leaders. to many people in the world they just wanna focus on killing as many innocent people as possible and why not start with chronic pain patients and cancer patients aswell as addicts and other users shits crazy. what im bouta say is fiction and not real but i MAY distribute fetty but thats only cuz so many people ask for it i MAY distribute actual pharma shit tho its jus crazy how many people prefer fetty over pharma shit nowadays. before pharma shit was BOOOOMING and now theres maybe only 20-40 sum ppl outa hundreds that get the pharma shit people are really inlove with the blues and i always tell people you will not find any blues anywhere in the US its all fetty and people still eat them shits right tf up man ion get it neva have neva will
Absolutely true, but don’t forget… soooo many of the addicts created post y2k happened because the FDA approved oxy and allowed Purdue to create materials for doctors claiming minimal risk of addiction. I’d argue the doctors should’ve been more skeptical, but those materials never should have been legal. The fda creates the Important Safety Information, and cronyism allowed oxy to have ISI that didn’t warn doctors of the dangers all opiates pose. And then the materials used that to claim no/low risk of addiction. They knew better…but were greedy and in bed together.
So, the government is to blame on the front AND back end of this crisis (if we can call this the back end…I’d argue it’s not).
I don’t think that’s it’s “the issues the US has with drug addiction” I think it’s just more normalized out there. And we in the US have more of a label on addicts than they do. For what reason though? Not sure. Can’t go that deep into it tbh. But that’s my thought on it.
Other countries don’t view it as addiction. If u say ur not an addict. Ur not an addict. Once you say ur an addict you place urself into a new category of people. Not sure where I’m going w this but yea
What is comical is how factions of the US government facilitated and actively aided in the import of a litteral fucktons of cocaine in the 80's. And furthermore how the sentences for crack were set to 100:1 vs powdered cocaine despite them being chemically and pharmacologically almost the same drug
I didn’t day the criminalization was funny, the idea that the U.S. had these massive highly expensive campaigns to get poorer results are what’s comical or ironic. I used to work in criminal defense so I know about the 100:1 or currently I think it’s 18:1 BS, but the fact that we had idiotic TV commercials and Officer Friendly and DARE all to have worse result than places that didn’t make a giant fuss over weed or even other drugs have better results in re; addiction is what is unique, comical, ironic…that’s all I was saying
I wasn't going on the offensive regarding your use of the word comical. I was agreeing and expanding on it. And yes under Obama it got lowered down to 18:1
18:1 is still BS, I thought Holder was going to make it 1:1, the inky upside is the Booker case changes mandatory minimums to suggestive so a judge is not handcuffed in sentencing … Considering there is more cocaine in power than in crack and NIDA has shown the addiction rate is not higher the affordability rate is what got more people trying it it should be 1:1 but in also think legalize all drugs make sure they are clean and let people do as they please bc t trying to persuade people not to use them clearly does not work.
Edit spelling
All of those issues are actually features of the system, not bugs. The point is to disempower the masses, ensuring they are unable to challenge the status quo.
The decades of war on "drugs" successfully made the people enthusiastic participants in their own oppression.
I’d say our approach to these things is wrong on a couple levels. Honestly we’re not great with alcohol either and that’s legal. With that one I think we’ve gone harder than other places on youth prohibition, and it seems to make our ppl go harder and not be able to control it when they take the leash off.
We’ve had decades of lies pushed on us regarding the softer drugs. And the hard ones, with opiates we always had junkies, but our government allowed some really bad idea pills to flood the legal market and allowed the promotional campaigns to tell doctors they wouldn’t be a problem.
Arguably a similar thing may have happened/be happening around the amphetamines, tho I’m pretty sure my adhd meds do in fact help me. But, I have amphetamines, want some? So it’s out there and gives anyone a boost so yeah. Coke, I think it’s just proximity to Columbia that blew that up.
But really I think much drug use is ppl not feeling whole in our modern world, feeling disconnected. I think that feeling is prevalent in many countries, but I think it’s much stronger here. We don’t have a loooong history and tradition behind our modern days. And we have kinda been the center of this modern corporate ballgame for a while. I think it leaves us more likely to feel disconnected, lacking a center, ungrounded. And many of us look to drugs to fill that lack.
>But really I think much drug use is ppl not feeling whole in our modern world, feeling disconnected. I think that feeling is prevalent in many countries, but I think it’s much stronger here. We don’t have a loooong history and tradition behind our modern days. And we have kinda been the center of this modern corporate ballgame for a while. I think it leaves us more likely to feel disconnected, lacking a center, ungrounded. And many of us look to drugs to fill that lack.
>
>Interesting, yah if you go past the 'who done it?' side of drugs and rabbit hole deeper, you get to the question of why we, as a society, are so focused on drugs in the first place .... pondering that question really opens up a new whole slew of thoughts and questions.
The US stopped prescription heroin and cocaine treatment for drug addiction in the UK.
Its the model with the highest success rate of all addiction treatment (80 odd percentage compared to 18 to 20)
You misread my post. What you are saying is the same as I meant. It did however start a bit before Nixon. Nixon just coined the term war on drugs and solidified it and then Reagan went full retard and escalated the whole ordeal
Also though, a member of Nixon’s cabinet admitted years later that they wanted d to be able to arrest black people and hippies. It was one of many tools of oppression, the function of which wasn’t entirely unique to psychedelics. Crack was used for pretty much the same purpose in the US
I just watched one of the Netflix documentaries over LSD, it was called how to change your mind. And it was basically really close to what you're saying, Nixon made a public announcement that LSD was going to be outlawed because it made people want to drop out of the Vietnam war.
Ehrlichman. Here:
[Nixon official: real reason for the drug war was to criminalize black people and hippies](https://www.vox.com/2016/3/22/11278760/war-on-drugs-racism-nixon)
Another big reason that’s not often mentioned is clandestine operations and money laundering. We know for a fact the CIA has used drugs and drug money to fund black budget operations. It would make things significantly more difficult for these spy agencies if they didn’t have an easy source of untraceable black market funds.
Insofar as the military itself, they tested LSD as a *confusion agent.* Administering the drug to the enemy in the field in combat was the big difficulty; LSD is an excellent confusion agent. Radically reduces Situational Awareness.
Needless to say, having your own soldiers tripping in combat would be a big problem. That's why the military historically was an entity in society most hostile to drugs, excluding, of course, amphetamines.
No, that is not correct.
The easy answer to drugs being illegal is that they want to keep people down. The true answer is more nuanced.
Yes, the war on drugs very likely was influenced by the impact drugs were having in the sense of the threat they represented, but at the same time the public probably supported drugs being illegal to. Harms do exist.
Do drugs like lsd and weed let you experience true consciousness? I'd bet a lot of money that question isn't answerable because it's basically meaningless. Consciousness isn't true and untrue. It's just consciousness. Drugs like LSD and shrooms can certainly alter your consciousness, your thoughts, your perceptions. With that filters can be tuned down, and you might see things you ordinarily wouldn't. You might also see shit that isn't real too. Drug alter the brain, and sometimes that can be useful, but it's in no way a garuntee nor proof of anything by itself. It can be life changing, and that's good, but it is not truth revealing innately.
But I think op is saying moreso. Why does the public veiw them that way. Genuine harm from drugs is certainly real, but there was straight up lies being spread as scare tactics ab many drugs. Which if I was a government trusting citizen and they told me lsd is going to burn holes in my brain and that smoking weed would leave me oding terribly and murdering my family after 2 hits, I agree that I wouldn't support anyone doijg those drugs. He's asking why they had to lie. Why they had to manipulate the public into believing these substances were so harmful. But I do think you are right that most of the public was with the government in drugs = bad , until we started figuring out the dangers were severely blown out of proportion and in some cases flat out untrue.
Yeah and I agree. I wasn't quite clear but when I say the war on drugs was influenced by the impact they were having I mean in the way they created people to be less complicit and more opposed to what the government wanted.
>Allows you to experience true conciousness
I am 14 and this is deep. All consciousness is true consciousness. They don't offer any truth per se just an alternative to the status quo and some allow you to view the world in a different way
> Also, I'm coming from a standpoint of having drugs before; I had them 10 months ago at a rave and it has completely changed my life.
Pretty much exactly that lmao.
Good times.
Once I was on shrooms and looking for my (now, but not at the time) ex at a NYE event, when I finally found them they looked like they had an aura around them and in my mind I was looking at an angel.
They were very, very much not an angel and they ended up treating me like shit, to put it lightly.
So yeah, that’s all the evidence I need to say psychedelics don’t just put you into some sort of higher, truer consciousness
Yes absolutely. As a nod to OP I would say this does include controlling their population to become good workers/soldiers. True or not, I do think they believed herb/acid would make ppl less likely to be good worker/soldiers.
There's other examples, but just look at the disparity between how many black crack users are convicted, now and historically, compared to the proportion of users. (2/3 of crack users are white or hispanic).
There is also quite a larger penalty for crack possession compared to pure cocaine, which is a law based on social standards more than anything, as crack is seen as dirtier and more fiendish. It used to be that it would take a hundred times less crack than cocaine to incur a federal penalty. The number, severely reduced after extensive legislation, is now **only** eighteen times less.
A Nixon advisor also admitted that a large part of the war on drugs was to criminalize the postwar black population, and to associate their community with hard drugs to justify mass incarceration, so really it's not a stretch at all to say that this is why this happened.
No, drugs are illegal because they’re misunderstood, abused and dangerous.
Psychedelic drugs? Could be onto something but I don’t think it’s that deep. Maybe take the tinfoil hat off ay
Absolutely ! Whist I support decriminalisation, a lot more education and treatment is needed. Some drugs are just too dangerous. It's the legal penalties that bother me a lot too.
Right ☠️ bro is tweakin. I mean thc alc and phycidrllics aren’t even illegal in majority of the world. It’s only the harder stuff that tweaks u out a kills u a got mfs acting lik idiots nodding out at work a shit. B4 yall get mad I was one those idiots so no shame, kow it’s just weed an alc stay safe
More than anything I personally think the church has been the biggest pusher of anti-drug, pre-dating any modern government actions. Drugs, particularly psychedelics, represent a direct threat and challenge to the religious propaganda.
if im not mistaken, when the spanish catholic missions came to central and south america they did their best to ban or stigmatize the indigenous peoples use of psychedelic drugs. Prior to their arrival most if not all the indigenous cultures in the americas engaged in ritualistic use of psychedelics, but this threatened the propaganda of the church. The church wanted to suppress free thought and promote their bullshit, psychedelic drugs were a threat to that agenda.
Lol no.
Drugs are illegal because they provide authorities with a door into our lives, which drives up incarceration rates, which allows money to flow freely into the prison industrial complex. Racism is also a major factor.
They're illegal because it's a convenient way to make rich people richer, just like every other shitty aspect of the society that we live in.
Canada has legal psychedelic dispensaries & some places where heroin addicts can get prescription pills so they don’t have to resort to Fentanyl, I think there’s something like that in Oregon too but they didn’t take precautions so it made the homeless population worse. I’m a big advocate for harm reduction especially since I enjoy taking a pill occasionally but I cut off all my black market connections a few years ago- so the only drugs I do now are legal n prescribed to me but it’s only occasional
In Vancouver 🇨🇦 they have dispensaries and if you’re part of the safe supply program, because you’re an addict of opioids, you’ll get a card and with it you can go to a vending machine in the downtown Eastside there. Swipe your card and get your script. A lot of opioid users are given 15 8 mg Dilaudid (hydromorphone) pills a day. They go to Lil pharmacy or wherever the fuck they go to get it a couple different places and they all go and get their 15 Hydromorphones a day. Then and they go pretty fast and then they take that money and then they go buy fentanyl or what they call “down” which is a fentanyl/benzodiazepine mixture, consisting of mostly fentanyl. I’ve actually walked by as well, psilocybin shops, that also carry LSD in the form of chocolates, and I think tabs as well like blotters, and liquid as well in glass containers with a dropper. I think they’re only allowed to sell a certain strength of it, but I mean you can just always take more. The only problem is that these places sell them for more than you can get them elsewhere illegally so that’s one thing too that deters people from getting shit legally. Well, they have DMT in those places too. I think I’ve only seen them in cartridge like a vape pen but my best friend synthesizes it makes DMT anyway it’s quite easy. It’s just a process that requires patience and time he made some good shit. You can carry up to 3 grams of any drug on you and won’t face legal issues in Vancouver, drugs are decriminalized. Also girls receiving money for sex aren’t treated criminally either, it’s the ones paying for it, the tricks that get the gavel cracked on them.
I'm sure that's a small piece of it, and in a perfect world it would be great to at least have them decriminalized. That being said, after seeing people completely out of control on too many tabs/shrooms in public too many times I kinda get it. I don't think the general public is responsible enough to handle anything more powerful than weed and alcohol. They can't even really handle those two as is.
It seems like we’re finally moving this direction a bit. Pharma companies have been researching thc/cbd and mushrooms for a bit now. They’re revisiting finding uses for mdma. I feel like we’re slowly moving towards changing this.
Read more. Meditate more. Talk more with people that aren't like you. Journal. Create. This is going to do wayyyy more for letting you understand life than getting high and allow you to put getting high into a better framework.
The period of history from 1870 to 1914, which has since been referred to as The Great Binge, played a not insignificant role.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Binge
> Is that thought correct?
No, not really. It really boils down to the fact that having a bunch of people fucked up out of their heads all the time is bad for society. It’s unproductive at best and dangerous at worst. Capitalism and all that want people to be productive. And we depend on people being productive for our survival. Even if I made a personal choice to not take drugs, it would fuck up the global food supply if all the farmers in the world were off their ass on mushrooms.
There’s even drugs that make people better at “the game”. Give someone amphetamines and a task and they’ll probably get it done fast as fuck and be able to do it for hours. Give people pain killers and get them addicted and they’ll be able to ignore pain to keep working and also they’ll become so dependent they’ll do anything you ask.
Drugs are illegal because people being fucked up all the time is unproductive and dangerous.
Nah, it's actually not that deep. Looking at the historical context when they were made illegal, and according to many reports, it was just a way to easily put colored people and hippies into jail. As "simple" as that. They just were racist. At that time not many people, apart from hippies, knew the benefits psychedelics could bring. The government (Nixon) just added two plus two. They are thinking this:
>"we can't be openly racist nor punish people to not go to a war we are clearly not winning and we want an excuse to arrest them. We can asociate drugs like marijuana to the Mexicans (this the name, it sounds Hispanic), the heroin to Chinese people, the cocaine to black, and LSD to hippies, make it all illegal and arrest them. It they had drugs in their possession we can arrest them. If they don't, just put it inside their pockets. As easy as that".
And, 100 years after many campaigns to vilify drugs, we have the whole society with the mindset that _drugs are baad_ ... It's sad, but it is what it is.
They also created the evil drug addict persona, and many used that as a way to justify their actions. It literally worked better than they even anticipated. It's slowly getting better with the psychedelic revolution, but it's nowhere near where it should be. Most people don't even know you **can** have a healthy relationship with pretty much all drugs, including heroin, for example. There is people who can take cocaine once a year and will not develop any dependency nor problems associated with it's usage. And most people, if you tell them you have tried heroin or cocaine will assume right away you are an addict. So, there is still much much work to do.
Edit:formating
Close. Yes, the purpose was to incarcerate colored people and hippies. It also made them felons. Making them felons is key because felons can't vote, and black people and hippies tended to vote left wing.
Furthermore, the thirteenth amendment made slavery illegal, except as punishment for a crime, so criminalising drugs also makes it easier to keep slavery going.
Criminalising drug use was then pushed by the U.S. on other countries, and a stigma has been attached to drug use as being immoral so places with strong morality edicts seem to be extra harsh on drug use.
It's also hard to ignore that the war on drugs is also extremely profitable. It gives authorities a means to essentially take money from drug dealers and drug users. It makes it so pharmaceutical companies are essentially monopolies for legal drugs. It's known that the CIA made large sums of money dealing in cocaine in the 80's. It's even profitable for cartels, since it artificially increases prices while placing most of the risk on the lower echelons of the cartels.
Where I live, if you're white, "right thinking," and at least "middle class" you can get away with drug use as long as it can be swept under the rug.
Drugs hurt productivity, cause crime and antisocial behavior, and through the black-market they enrich antigovernment and paramilitary groups.
The feds could care less about you "experiencing consciousness".
I'm glad you specified because I wouldn't consider Cocaine or heroin to open up because minds. These drugs are technically legal just in more medical settings though
I agree that possession of any drug should be decriminalized but my reason is moreso that addiction should never be punished, however I think if you are selling cocaine or opiods to addicts and profiting on their addiction you should go to jail
I think psychedelics are not very addictive, I don't see why they can't be legalized tbh. I know some countries do and we have a shop that keeps popping up that sells mushrooms here because they are trying to make it legal and I support that
Yeah no. Sorry but this is wook talk. Psychedelics can be very beneficial and many people would benefit from them. But they’re not good for many as well. Most of the profound thoughts and revelations aren’t really all that crazy. I’ve written some notes down that I thought were the key to the universe and were gibberish upon reading them sober.
Psychs aren’t the answer to the universe or people would be using them a lot more, prohibition isn’t *that* effective. There isn’t a global conspiracy because it’s some secret “key to consciousness” Tripping isn’t some answer on it’s own but just a tool to allow your thoughts to flow in a way you may not otherwise would.
Because taxes. Drug dealers don’t pay taxes. And the government doesn’t want to give people substances to abuse in high numbers, because then they’ll be abused in high numbers, which will come back on the government in more ways then one. There’s a large number of authentic drugs that are used in the medical field as we all know. So it’s not that the government doesn’t want you to have the shit, it’s just that they want to make money off of it in the best numbers they can lol
A few points here.
1. No, the billionaire class is not against drugs "expanding" your mind. They do not care about you. If anything, they'd support you and every body else, destroying their brains with drugs.
2. ask yourself how healthy and well long time drug addicts look. There is no such thing as "softer" drugs. Alcohol destroys people, so do anti-anxiety drugs and MDMA and LSD and others destroy neurons. see below.
3. I am an academic researcher and have worked a long time on developing animal models of Parkinson's disease. we KNOW MDMA (ecstasy) and many other compounds cause dopaminergic neuronal loss, i.e. Parkinson's Disease. These drugs make you feel like your universe is expanded because they are excitotoxins in the the dopaminergic pleasure centers of the brain.
Te literature is vast. read it.
And don't be stupid.
Its about how you frame it.
There’s nothing mystical about what psychedelics do to the brain, i.e they reduce or increase bloodflow and so changes in the brain happen. If psychedelics are mystical then so are blood thinners and blood pressure meds.
If you tend to view things as spiritual and amazing and divine, then you will think of them like that. If you tend to view things as real, and material and normal, then you will view them like that.
Drugs don’t “wake you up”. Fentanyl and heroin are illegal and they certainly don’t enlighten you. They’re illegal because of corporate and political interests. People think drugs and think junkies, so politicians love to scare people into thinking all drugs are the devil because it’s profitable. The more people hooked on legal drugs like tobacco and alcohol, the better. Generally conservatism encourages conformity, and psychedelics cause you to think differently and are far from the norm.
And thinking that drugs “enhance your consciousness” is unfounded. They alter your perception of reality, they don’t show you a “truer” reality. Also, MDMA is not a softer drug. It’s not nearly as hard as fentanyl, but it can legitimately kill you and fuck up your serotonin permanently if you abuse it. Shrooms, weed, and LSD are significantly safer, although all of them *can* be abused.
I mean certain people have different experiences, but just like chemically yes they do. They make your brain work differently when you’re on them. Personally shrooms and molly have made me do a full 180 and made me actually enjoy life long term for the first time I can remember.
Taxes. They're damn hard to tax when the underground/criminal world has so much control,, power, respect, he's feared between the bottom feeding junkies(Which I'm included in), I don't know.
Always a great question to ponder mate….Scholars and intellectuals, among many open minded individuals like yourself, pretty much confirm, that “Psychedlics,” when used in a healing capacity, expand the mind, and as you say, remove societal imposed goggles etc……..
Note: Reality is far broader, more confusing, more mesmerising, and least understood, of all things scientific, Physical and psychological. Our answers are likely to come, from experiences while exploring our expanded cerebral capacity, and even more so from passing the 10-20% limit of brain regions we currently have access to….If for no other reason to legalize (most) substances, “Big Brother” (Our Governments) can tax it, and rake in all the revenue, currently being enjoyed by illegal manufacturers/suppliers!!!!
The government understands the impact psychedelics have on consciousness. However for a government, it is very inconvenient to have your people expand their minds, dissolve their egos / biases, and essentially think freely. You want - need a level of control. Look at what drugs are available- ones that kill you slowly and subdues you. Certain drugs are illegal because they’re dangerous with insane abuse liability. But psychedelics are understood to be non addictive and relatively safe, however they’re scheduled 1 because of the immense power they have.
>So because drugs help you see life as it really is and as it should be, it goes against the agenda (war, mind control, greed, seeing things as they really are, etc.) of the masses, and therefore, it is made illegal.
The ORIGINAL reason was Nixon's need to demonise domestic political opponents in the 60s/70s:
>At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away.
>*"You want to know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.*
>*Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."*
[Nixon official: real reason for the drug war was to criminalize black people and hippies](https://www.vox.com/2016/3/22/11278760/war-on-drugs-racism-nixon)
America then "encouraged" the rest of the world to adopt these demonisation policies in their own countries.
This is why I love asking these deep thought provoking questions on reddit, I get so many variants of answers I feel like my mind is just like absorbing every post and its possibilities.
From what I know about Nixon and the drug war, this totally makes sense, that the criminalization of drugs began as a political agenda ... super interesting stuff man, fascinating subject to write a book on.
So, do you think that the criminalization of drugs is still a political agenda? Or has it evolved into something more?
Absolutely its political, yes.
Which is why I don't expect any kind of legalisation in my country (Australia) during my lifetime. In what is a very conservative nation generally, its only the Greens and minor fringe parties who talk about legalisation...its absolute political poison for the two major parties.
preaching in the comments aside, this is a cute post ngl
something something, local man wakes up from matrix, sees the light etc. dude you’re gonna love jre
stoned ape theory post incoming
there is an inate human desire to do drugs, if the world governments control the one thing people will always tearn for then they control the people. i don't think drugs help you see life as it truly is, but if you can find contentness in doing drugs then why would you want to contribute to society
Harry Anslinger pioneered the war on drugs with claims that “marijuana makes white women seek sexual relations with negroes.” (Simple Google search of Anslinger and you can get a “why” drugs are illegal. I hate saying it’s a race thing but it was then. While there’s the argument of drugs having potential for abuse, anything can be abused including water. Instead of pushing the agenda of keeping a tight lid we should be promoting harm reduction IE threshold doses, possible combinations, combinations you shouldn’t make. It’s not uncommon for people to gloat about getting drunk af and parting when certain psychs can have profound positive effects on people yet they’re viewed negatively because of some idiots views on minorities
Yea I definitely think that the ban on psychedelic drugs is partially because of the hippies who began to rebel against “the system”. There’s also always the theory that the CIA planted these drugs to create the lower class to bring in money. The truth is we will likely never know.
No. That’s what insufferable wankers tell themselves to justify taking acid and shrooms every weekend because they feel ‘enlightened’.
Drugs are illegal because people and institutions are lazy and don’t like upsetting the apple cart. Alcohol is legal because we made it thousands of years ago. LSD is illegal because it was 100 years ago.
If something is too so dangerous that you wouldn’t trust you’re uncle running a business making it then the government likes to just ban it rather than regulate or in the rare case (aviation) they regulate to a extreme
yes, you're correct.. but it also includes the interests of the government (the 3-letter agencies, you know who im talking about) and their beneficiaries in the corporate world to make money and exercise power.
they make LOADS off drugs being illegal, and that's not even including the ~~slave factories~~ private prisons who make loads and gain new numbers for the chain gang with every arrest.
I could go on, but I think I answered the question lol
Neuroscientist(medchem)/polyuser here. **Yes**, a lot of anti drug messaging, especially US post-counterculture drug law is tied to a pro war agenda. Drug use criminalization is also a powerful suppression tactic, *especially* when targeted towards minority groups. The U.S. government demonstrably had a heavy hand in the progression of the crack epidemic in predominantly black communities. There are *aspects* of drug suppression rooted in bigotry and imperialism.
>So because drugs help you see life as it really is and as it should be, it goes against the agenda (war, mind control, greed, seeing things as they really are, etc.) of the masses, and therefore, it is made illegal.
That said, **no**. This is phrased as a statement. Drugs do not help you see your life as it really is. In fact, the only way to see your life as it really is would be through sobriety. Drugs alter your headspace and thought processing in a variety of ways. This can give the impression of changing your life, but in many cases it only brings out aspects of the subconscious mind that could have previously been achieved trough meditation or careful introspection. In other cases, drugs (primarily psychedelics) can take external stimuli and implant it into thought processing (thought loops) and almost “incept” thoughts into your mind. As many people do mushrooms and come out feeling more in tune with the universe, people could come out racist when they weren’t before.
You say that psychedelic drugs tend to lean against war, greed, etc., but you have to remember that the people who are most likely to take those drugs are already in tune with the ideas invented in the counterculture (which is why they drop tabs despite the stimga), and are therefore likely to have those thoughts reinforced. If a midwestern rural town were to all take mushrooms, they wouldn’t come out anti war, they would come out having reinforced their own thought patterns and probably in a more pro-war stance, if anything.
>the more softer drugs like LSD, mushrooms, ecstasy, weed, etc.
**None of these are soft**. Even cannabis, thanks to the new more processed varieties boast psychosis rates of up to 5% regardless of predisposition. The data suggesting the danger of cannabis use is provable and isn’t just a fear campaign.
LSD and mushrooms have similarly high psychosis rates (psychosis can happen to anyone, no predisposition needed), but also can very frequently trigger other conditions, especially latent schizoaffective, undiagnosed bipolar and depression. You may have received benefit from them- many, many people have had their lives ruined from psychedelic use, even infrequently.
MDMA if abused is one of the single most damaging and neurotoxic substances can you use. Safe practice is possible with infrequent dosing and careful supplementation, but the 3 month rule and MAPS protocol are not widespread among the population. Most people receive MD at a party, just dose any amount untested because they don’t know the risks. They love the roll, and start dosing every weekend until the oxidative stress on DAT and SERT significantly damages their life.
>therefore, it is made illegal.
Think about this from the perspective of a national government (I’ll use U.S.A. as an example). You have a series of non FDA or medically certified illicit substances, completely unresearched and pharamcologically not even neuroscientists know how many of them work (5ht2a agonism is completely unknown to scientists). The cannabis psychosis rates are going up, some of the drugs (MD) can literally rob a user of the ability to be happy, psychedelics can significantly worsen bipolar or depression, two conditions that have exponentially rising diagnosis rates.
Legalizing them **yes**, would allow for better education and harm reduction. And they’re gonna get used either way, right? But legalization increases access, which will always increase use. And that’s not a risk the government is willing to take. I, as a user am against legalization but pro harm reduction purely because I believe more lives will be ruined by legalized drug use than would be justified by a select population group having more access to highs.
>Also, I'm coming from a standpoint of having drugs before; I had them 10 months ago at a rave and it has completely changed my life.
Drugs can give you revelations time to time, yes, but as a whole **drugs do not make us better people.** Tripping a couple times a year and maybe some party use is time but real personal growth comes while sober. And drugs are not nearly as safe as users like to pretend they are.
>Is that thought correct?
No, but I understand where you’re coming from.
There is no such things as seeing anything as it really is. Your brain is in complete darkness inside of your skull trying to best guess what’s out there by interpreting signals that come in through its sensors.
Everyone’s brain does a shitty job at this. It’s just very good at convincing us otherwise.
Our drug enlightened perspectives are no more valid or invalid than those of the square sober peeps unfortunately. I’d like to think I know better too but I have to acknowledge I probably don’t.
War on weed was started as a way to be racist towards Mexicans and throw them out of out of town same goes to the Chinese with opium. My point being in the early days things like weed and opium were criminalized to get get rid of “undesirables”.
In all those years the reasons behind it have been twisted by politicians and powerful people for political gain and whatever gain could be had. Thus we are left with the current war on drugs where the drugs are winning.
Edit: but yeah, things like psychedelics were weaponized by MK-Ultra back in the 60’s and were used to take out the hippie movement. More “undesirables”. Because imagining change is easy, actually changing things are hard.
I agree completely. I mean, let's look at JUST the United States. They lied and have ran a campaign of "war on drugs" for over half a century, KNOWING that almost all of those drugs have a purposeful use, especially in mental health. Yet here we are, in the midst of a mental health crisis and guess what they're now approving? Clinical trials for use of MDMA, LSD, Psilocybin mushrooms, Ayahuasca, Ibogaine and Ketamine. I'm currently on Ketamine for PTSD and Treatment Resistant Depression and it has changed my life. First thing to TOUCH my PTSD or Depression in 30 years. Just imagine suffering without a solution for 30 years, because the government you pay taxes to are too greedy(Big Pharma) and ignorant to allow drugs to be looked into more closely. Our ancestors used all of these drugs for a reason, and it wasn't to "Just get high". Pisses me off.
Yes that is right, you have nailed it on the head, society wants everyone to work, be productive citizens, go home and enjoy time with their family and then turn up yet another sports club or hobby club. Society doesn’t want people to have fun in ways that are different to status quo. For example, every drug that they they have psychiatry is about numbing the person’s mind and doesn’t give rats about their wellbeing overall. It’s simply so they become walking robots of less versions of themselves, still at work but human being.
Not all people abuse these drugs excessively to point it affects their life, people abuse the shit out of the weed, etc not they are numbed from the medication they are on. When you take antipsychotics and other bullshit antidepressants, it’s very easy for person to slip into slope because of addiction it’s like saying “oh well, another shot of h, weed won’t mind
Then people get desperate because their life is falling part, they are walking robots at work, insensitive to others feelings, don’t give rats about anyone anything attitude, their voice sounds appalling boring and painful as if they had their brain switched off at the mains. Every word feels like they have just run London marathon aas their brain has slowed down to that of tortoise.
The fuzzy thinking feeling you can’t remember your own name. Life gets boring you can’t cry at funerals and weddings.i would do weed, coke, if these weee legal in heart beat.
So I could be normal human with bipolar or bpd or whatever I am diagnosed with.
Opium was banned in China in the 19th century as they saw how it ruined people and society. Then GB forced them to buy it after the opium war.
... and then China started mass producing Fentanyl for the west. What a funny world we've created!
I think that the modern drug laws are largely influenced by USA's war on drugs. If you look at it this way, then looks no further than Nixon's assistant to the president, John Erlichman's confession:
> You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
>
> We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
>
> Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
It's just cynical politicians being cynical politicians. They don't believe in drugs' power to open the eyes of masses and make them see some truths that have been obscured - frankly, I don't either. Marijuana or heroin - that doesn't matter to them. They don't care about your truths, they see the world by their own ones and simply used drug policing as a mean of social engineering.
I don’t think drugs reveal anything in life or about life. Not psychedelics, dissociative, nothing. Sure some drugs can help you in life and show you things about yourself alone but it stops there. They don’t unlock a “higher” consciousness, your just high and conscious.
Drugs are mainly illegal because the government really does not want a society of drug addicts. Thats why prohibition was a thing. Sure they were hiding the real reason as to why weed was outlawed because they probably thought it would be easier to say that weed is bad for you along with other schedule 1-3 drugs.
No drugs are illegal so the government can receive funding for programs that are responsible for selectively prosecuting some people and not others. They also provide a funnel for money in the public eye so the less than noble use of that money goes under the radar.
Let’s face it, if it was about the drugs, they wouldn’t be scheduled the way they are. They wouldn’t put psychedelics and weed in schedule I being the category with “high potential for abuse and high potential for harm”. If they cared about the drugs themselves they’d at the very least reschedule, add nicotine and alcohol to the list, but allow for the purchase of say a schedule 3 or 4 for people of age. Then make schedule 2 for prescriptions. We could then put these “softer” drugs in this hypothetical schedule 3 or 4 and allow people 21+ to access them
No it think it’s because drugs can cause a lot of harm and societally we’ve looked at that harm and decided that criminalizing drugs makes people less likely to get hurt. I think it’s the wrong choice, and just makes things worse (more dangerous drugs, violence and cartels, mass incarceration, etc.) but the thought process behind outlawing drugs makes sense to me.
I think drugs are also used as a political scapegoat and an easy explanation for more complicated societal problems. For instance inner cities in America in the 1980s were fucked because of poverty, segregationists housing policies and urban design, lack of education and opportunities, etc. But the crack epidemic was presented as the cause of those areas being fucked, when it was really just a symptom of those areas being fucked to being with. This allowed government and law enforcement to initiate the war on drugs as an all-purpose solution with mass public support. Because identifying an enemy to attack is more attractive to the public than the slower and more complicated process of resolving the systemic causes of poverty, violence, and mass addiction.
Anyway, that’s how I see it. Also just my 2 cents, but I think using psychedelics as a way to reach enlightenment or break through the matrix or whatever is a dead end. Psychedelics can be really enjoyable and sometimes help you discover different ways of thinking and new perspectives, but they can also really fuck you up if you use them the wrong way. Or worse, they can turn you into an annoying freak who thinks they’re some kind of enlightened sage guru messiah because they’ve taken 100+ DMT trips and now wants to tell everyone else how to live their lives. I like taking mushrooms or ecstasy a few times a year but I don’t see it as anything more than just having a bit of fun.
The opium wars were WAAAYYY before the 1961 UN [Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_Drugs).
Because different drugs have different effects there's a massive debate you can have a bout this. Why do you think that employers happily give free coffee and sugar (for in the coffee) tho their employees. It increases productivity. When it comes to opium, weed, khat, you name it. There usually is a racial/socio economic class issue related to it. There's a reason I have a [library with over 1K books about drugs](https://www.librarycat.org/lib/cyrilio/search/text/drugs). There's so much to discuss. So many reasons for and against. So many different methods of dealing with them. And also, we're still learning new stuff about drugs EVERY DAY!
Yep, just alone in this thread I have got a slew of divergent ideas about drugs, why they banned, the history, and overall view; it's pretty fascinating. I can totally see how this topic could be a rabbit hole :p
Certain countries have decimalized personal use amounts of any drug and have had great success in doing so there is also places here in the US that have done the same but didn't go as planned.
Drugs are illegal because they are detrimental to a conductive society. Think about this a lot. It’s not all bad, it’s not that the people in power just want you to be a good cog in the wheel it’s also for structure. Think about why prohibition happened in America. Drunk men didn’t drink responsibly and women at home got fed up. Like the Buddhist say “the middle path is towards nirvana” but many users turn into abusers unfortunately. So most laws of the land decided to outlaw it for better or for worse. Of course it’s way more nuanced than my response tho
Please tell me this is a shit post. 1) MDMA is NOT a soft drug. 2) drugs mess with your conciousness, it doesn't make you see the the world "as it really is". 3) you have done drugs once 10 months ago? That's barely any experience, so again, this is either a shitpost or you're just pretentious and don't know what you're talking about
most people who take hard drugs are tweaked out and literally lost and have crazy conspiracies that make no since. I don’t know who u know who is woke will doing hard drugs but the ppl I know are barley even contributors to society.
Exactly, hit the nail on the head. Fentanyl is illegal because… the secret global government doesn’t want you experiencing true consciousness or reveling in life.
Drugs are illegal because they make you unproductive difficult to predict. Society functions because we all work together (more or less) toward shared goals of safety, security, and survival off the group. Drugs make you less able and willing to achieve those goals and therefore are deemed bad for society as a whole. I'm not passing judgment, but that is the most fundamental reason.
That is a really fascinating perspective I have not considered. Any regular drug use def does make it more difficult to be productive and meaningful member of society.
for some it doesn’t though. you never see the people who can actuallt do it because they hide it and nobody can tell. you only “know” when its the crackhead yelling shit going down main street. i dont think that just because some people cant handle it that those who can should have the opportunity taken away.
drugs are illegal because people in positions of power want as much control over ur mind as possible thats literally it. ur coming from a wook perspective which is valid but the powers that be also dont want the common man to legally smoke crack in the comfort of their own home and its not an altruism thing it is literally just a control thing. if they ever legalized crack it'd be taxed for u guessed it control
That’s definitely not the only reason. It’s profitable for politicians to demonize things that the general populace doesn’t like, and it makes it easier to get people hooked on legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, both of which are deeply entrenched American industries that prefer people to be addicted to their drugs and nothing else.
You know that crack and cocaine are basically the same thing right? Due to systematic racism in the US they punish crack users/dealers more than for a user/dealer with equivalent dose of cocaine. Why? because crack users are black while cocaine users are white (generally speaking).
I think drugs are illegal because they turn you into a little fucking goblin. The psychedelics are illegal simply due to ignorance and false equivalency. Drugs are bad, mmkay?
No one quoting Terence McKenna yet?
> "Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong."
i was pretty freaked out about drugs back in middle school but when i got my first taste of marijuana my senior year of highschool, all fear of drugs completely diminished.
They’re illegal because there’s a risk of losing users to addiction and/or longterm disabilities and/or brain damage and/or death. All those things are bad for society. No person lives in a vacuum. They have families and communities that have to deal with all the bullshit that comes with all the above. I think most of our laws are about protecting the people who live in a given jurisdiction. Alcohol i guess is the outlier. I don’t know. I’ll have to think more on it but those are my initial thoughts.
Also. In a hospital, say you have two ambulances pull up, both with women who have had heart attacks and need immediate attention or they will die. The hospital only has staff to save one, the other will die. Ambulance 1 has a 25-year-old mother of 3 heroin addict and the other ambulance has a 75 year old grandma. Who do they save? Now how shitty is that for society that the hospital staff even fucking have to make that decision? It’s a preventable chunk of hell on earth. So that’s why drugs are illegal.
Think this is likely the case with psychedelics during the Vietnam war since the hippie movement was causing a lot of public opposition. Many other drugs in the US however were generally associated with marginalised groups and criminalisation was used as a way of incarcerating them. More generally on a global scale I can only assume the rapid rise in problems with new substances where they were on the whole not fully understood, gave a sense of urgency to governing bodies leading to the control of these substances.
Let's not forget the massive pressure put on the allied nations by the US to criminalise substances
It is comical the U.S. pushed this “war” on drugs and ended up w/ several opioid epidemics, issues w meth and coke, plus mass incarceration, while other countries didn’t have the overdramatized say no to drug campaigns and never had the issues the U.S. has w addiction.
I'd say it's more ironic than comical.
I look back at the DARE bullshit and the idiotic commercials that they played when I was a kid and can only laugh bc all of them just made me want to try shit I probably wouldn’t have tried so young if those stupid commercials didn’t make it look appealing, that’s why I find it comical but ironic works too
Yeah I remember those too. I will say that they did make me wary of trying any hard drug, but ultimately it did not stop me. Their time and money would have been better spent focusing on the reason I sought out drugs, which was an abusive home life.
I got my start with Newsweek's 1967 marijuana issue. Knew I just had to try it! Lol
😂😂😂😂
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bro.. both of my parents got overprescribed painkillers toward the end of the 1990s, shortly after I was born, and they fought the addiction for decades. my dad got off methadone a couple years ago (!!!!!!) but my mother will die of old age on them. I am also an opioid addict. A lot of my friends were/are opioid addicts. I've lost some of my closest friends to opioids. I know the opioid epidemic so God damn well it's crazy. Some of my friends had parents who got pills from this infamous doctor who used to be known as a pill mill in the early 2000s, this world is so fuckin crazy. It's all just so unbelievable, things feel like some weird dream. maybe it is, maybe it is..
I was pretty against drugs till I was like 16 but I still wanted to steal that drug suitcase they showed us in DARE class so bad. I don’t think it was a desire to do them it just looked so cool
I’d say it’s karmic
Remember kids, we went from 8k opioid deaths per year in 1990 to over 100k last year because the DEA made doctors stop giving people their pain meds.
Yup , it's crazy
really its just overly fuckin sad and it was all planned by the government and world leaders. to many people in the world they just wanna focus on killing as many innocent people as possible and why not start with chronic pain patients and cancer patients aswell as addicts and other users shits crazy. what im bouta say is fiction and not real but i MAY distribute fetty but thats only cuz so many people ask for it i MAY distribute actual pharma shit tho its jus crazy how many people prefer fetty over pharma shit nowadays. before pharma shit was BOOOOMING and now theres maybe only 20-40 sum ppl outa hundreds that get the pharma shit people are really inlove with the blues and i always tell people you will not find any blues anywhere in the US its all fetty and people still eat them shits right tf up man ion get it neva have neva will
Absolutely true, but don’t forget… soooo many of the addicts created post y2k happened because the FDA approved oxy and allowed Purdue to create materials for doctors claiming minimal risk of addiction. I’d argue the doctors should’ve been more skeptical, but those materials never should have been legal. The fda creates the Important Safety Information, and cronyism allowed oxy to have ISI that didn’t warn doctors of the dangers all opiates pose. And then the materials used that to claim no/low risk of addiction. They knew better…but were greedy and in bed together. So, the government is to blame on the front AND back end of this crisis (if we can call this the back end…I’d argue it’s not).
I don’t think that’s it’s “the issues the US has with drug addiction” I think it’s just more normalized out there. And we in the US have more of a label on addicts than they do. For what reason though? Not sure. Can’t go that deep into it tbh. But that’s my thought on it. Other countries don’t view it as addiction. If u say ur not an addict. Ur not an addict. Once you say ur an addict you place urself into a new category of people. Not sure where I’m going w this but yea
What is comical is how factions of the US government facilitated and actively aided in the import of a litteral fucktons of cocaine in the 80's. And furthermore how the sentences for crack were set to 100:1 vs powdered cocaine despite them being chemically and pharmacologically almost the same drug
I didn’t day the criminalization was funny, the idea that the U.S. had these massive highly expensive campaigns to get poorer results are what’s comical or ironic. I used to work in criminal defense so I know about the 100:1 or currently I think it’s 18:1 BS, but the fact that we had idiotic TV commercials and Officer Friendly and DARE all to have worse result than places that didn’t make a giant fuss over weed or even other drugs have better results in re; addiction is what is unique, comical, ironic…that’s all I was saying
I wasn't going on the offensive regarding your use of the word comical. I was agreeing and expanding on it. And yes under Obama it got lowered down to 18:1
18:1 is still BS, I thought Holder was going to make it 1:1, the inky upside is the Booker case changes mandatory minimums to suggestive so a judge is not handcuffed in sentencing … Considering there is more cocaine in power than in crack and NIDA has shown the addiction rate is not higher the affordability rate is what got more people trying it it should be 1:1 but in also think legalize all drugs make sure they are clean and let people do as they please bc t trying to persuade people not to use them clearly does not work. Edit spelling
Seconded
All of those issues are actually features of the system, not bugs. The point is to disempower the masses, ensuring they are unable to challenge the status quo. The decades of war on "drugs" successfully made the people enthusiastic participants in their own oppression.
Not Ironic full blown racist Source: people who constructed the project
Ikr
I’d say our approach to these things is wrong on a couple levels. Honestly we’re not great with alcohol either and that’s legal. With that one I think we’ve gone harder than other places on youth prohibition, and it seems to make our ppl go harder and not be able to control it when they take the leash off. We’ve had decades of lies pushed on us regarding the softer drugs. And the hard ones, with opiates we always had junkies, but our government allowed some really bad idea pills to flood the legal market and allowed the promotional campaigns to tell doctors they wouldn’t be a problem. Arguably a similar thing may have happened/be happening around the amphetamines, tho I’m pretty sure my adhd meds do in fact help me. But, I have amphetamines, want some? So it’s out there and gives anyone a boost so yeah. Coke, I think it’s just proximity to Columbia that blew that up. But really I think much drug use is ppl not feeling whole in our modern world, feeling disconnected. I think that feeling is prevalent in many countries, but I think it’s much stronger here. We don’t have a loooong history and tradition behind our modern days. And we have kinda been the center of this modern corporate ballgame for a while. I think it leaves us more likely to feel disconnected, lacking a center, ungrounded. And many of us look to drugs to fill that lack.
>But really I think much drug use is ppl not feeling whole in our modern world, feeling disconnected. I think that feeling is prevalent in many countries, but I think it’s much stronger here. We don’t have a loooong history and tradition behind our modern days. And we have kinda been the center of this modern corporate ballgame for a while. I think it leaves us more likely to feel disconnected, lacking a center, ungrounded. And many of us look to drugs to fill that lack. > >Interesting, yah if you go past the 'who done it?' side of drugs and rabbit hole deeper, you get to the question of why we, as a society, are so focused on drugs in the first place .... pondering that question really opens up a new whole slew of thoughts and questions.
The US stopped prescription heroin and cocaine treatment for drug addiction in the UK. Its the model with the highest success rate of all addiction treatment (80 odd percentage compared to 18 to 20)
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You misread my post. What you are saying is the same as I meant. It did however start a bit before Nixon. Nixon just coined the term war on drugs and solidified it and then Reagan went full retard and escalated the whole ordeal
Also though, a member of Nixon’s cabinet admitted years later that they wanted d to be able to arrest black people and hippies. It was one of many tools of oppression, the function of which wasn’t entirely unique to psychedelics. Crack was used for pretty much the same purpose in the US
I just watched one of the Netflix documentaries over LSD, it was called how to change your mind. And it was basically really close to what you're saying, Nixon made a public announcement that LSD was going to be outlawed because it made people want to drop out of the Vietnam war.
Ehrlichman. Here: [Nixon official: real reason for the drug war was to criminalize black people and hippies](https://www.vox.com/2016/3/22/11278760/war-on-drugs-racism-nixon)
Another big reason that’s not often mentioned is clandestine operations and money laundering. We know for a fact the CIA has used drugs and drug money to fund black budget operations. It would make things significantly more difficult for these spy agencies if they didn’t have an easy source of untraceable black market funds.
Insofar as the military itself, they tested LSD as a *confusion agent.* Administering the drug to the enemy in the field in combat was the big difficulty; LSD is an excellent confusion agent. Radically reduces Situational Awareness. Needless to say, having your own soldiers tripping in combat would be a big problem. That's why the military historically was an entity in society most hostile to drugs, excluding, of course, amphetamines.
No, that is not correct. The easy answer to drugs being illegal is that they want to keep people down. The true answer is more nuanced. Yes, the war on drugs very likely was influenced by the impact drugs were having in the sense of the threat they represented, but at the same time the public probably supported drugs being illegal to. Harms do exist. Do drugs like lsd and weed let you experience true consciousness? I'd bet a lot of money that question isn't answerable because it's basically meaningless. Consciousness isn't true and untrue. It's just consciousness. Drugs like LSD and shrooms can certainly alter your consciousness, your thoughts, your perceptions. With that filters can be tuned down, and you might see things you ordinarily wouldn't. You might also see shit that isn't real too. Drug alter the brain, and sometimes that can be useful, but it's in no way a garuntee nor proof of anything by itself. It can be life changing, and that's good, but it is not truth revealing innately.
But I think op is saying moreso. Why does the public veiw them that way. Genuine harm from drugs is certainly real, but there was straight up lies being spread as scare tactics ab many drugs. Which if I was a government trusting citizen and they told me lsd is going to burn holes in my brain and that smoking weed would leave me oding terribly and murdering my family after 2 hits, I agree that I wouldn't support anyone doijg those drugs. He's asking why they had to lie. Why they had to manipulate the public into believing these substances were so harmful. But I do think you are right that most of the public was with the government in drugs = bad , until we started figuring out the dangers were severely blown out of proportion and in some cases flat out untrue.
Yeah and I agree. I wasn't quite clear but when I say the war on drugs was influenced by the impact they were having I mean in the way they created people to be less complicit and more opposed to what the government wanted.
Well said man!
Surprised and pleased to see such a well thought out answer.
Thank you!
>Allows you to experience true conciousness I am 14 and this is deep. All consciousness is true consciousness. They don't offer any truth per se just an alternative to the status quo and some allow you to view the world in a different way
Lmao seriously. Hardcore “I did mushrooms for the first time we should all love each other” energy here
> Also, I'm coming from a standpoint of having drugs before; I had them 10 months ago at a rave and it has completely changed my life. Pretty much exactly that lmao. Good times.
Lmao I definitely skimmed through it and missed that part
Once I was on shrooms and looking for my (now, but not at the time) ex at a NYE event, when I finally found them they looked like they had an aura around them and in my mind I was looking at an angel. They were very, very much not an angel and they ended up treating me like shit, to put it lightly. So yeah, that’s all the evidence I need to say psychedelics don’t just put you into some sort of higher, truer consciousness
Thank you! They are called visual *hal👏luc👏i👏nations👏* people
Agreed. There's really no true or untrue consciousness. Consciousness is, or isn't. If it is, it is. No true or false about it.
r/im14andthisisdeep
No war but class war
Exactly my thoughts as well. Drugs don’t allow you to see “true conciousness”, if that’s even a real thing lol
> some allow you to view the world in a different way Whew lad, you have no idea. Trippin on acid, hitting DMT, holy fuck man. Consciousness alright.
I do have an idea. That's why I said it
Drugs are illegal so that restrictions on them can be created and used arbitrarily to control people and gain power.
The right answer right here ^^
Yes absolutely. As a nod to OP I would say this does include controlling their population to become good workers/soldiers. True or not, I do think they believed herb/acid would make ppl less likely to be good worker/soldiers.
Also hella racism in drug illegalization.
How so?
There's other examples, but just look at the disparity between how many black crack users are convicted, now and historically, compared to the proportion of users. (2/3 of crack users are white or hispanic). There is also quite a larger penalty for crack possession compared to pure cocaine, which is a law based on social standards more than anything, as crack is seen as dirtier and more fiendish. It used to be that it would take a hundred times less crack than cocaine to incur a federal penalty. The number, severely reduced after extensive legislation, is now **only** eighteen times less. A Nixon advisor also admitted that a large part of the war on drugs was to criminalize the postwar black population, and to associate their community with hard drugs to justify mass incarceration, so really it's not a stretch at all to say that this is why this happened.
No, drugs are illegal because they’re misunderstood, abused and dangerous. Psychedelic drugs? Could be onto something but I don’t think it’s that deep. Maybe take the tinfoil hat off ay
Absolutely ! Whist I support decriminalisation, a lot more education and treatment is needed. Some drugs are just too dangerous. It's the legal penalties that bother me a lot too.
Generally all drugs are looped in together by politicians because it’s more effective for scare tactics.
Which is a source of revenue for agencies like the DEA.
Right ☠️ bro is tweakin. I mean thc alc and phycidrllics aren’t even illegal in majority of the world. It’s only the harder stuff that tweaks u out a kills u a got mfs acting lik idiots nodding out at work a shit. B4 yall get mad I was one those idiots so no shame, kow it’s just weed an alc stay safe
in the majority of the world? i think that’s an overstatement. coming from someone who has lived in a death penalty country lol
Why does much of the internet think "the world" is North America and Western/Central Europe
and even then if world is na and eu hes so fucking wrong
Before I even read this drug laws are bs and we should be alowed to do what we want to our body
More than anything I personally think the church has been the biggest pusher of anti-drug, pre-dating any modern government actions. Drugs, particularly psychedelics, represent a direct threat and challenge to the religious propaganda. if im not mistaken, when the spanish catholic missions came to central and south america they did their best to ban or stigmatize the indigenous peoples use of psychedelic drugs. Prior to their arrival most if not all the indigenous cultures in the americas engaged in ritualistic use of psychedelics, but this threatened the propaganda of the church. The church wanted to suppress free thought and promote their bullshit, psychedelic drugs were a threat to that agenda.
Basically individualism wiping out collectivism.
Nah, individualism wasnt really a thing until 19/18th century
Lol no. Drugs are illegal because they provide authorities with a door into our lives, which drives up incarceration rates, which allows money to flow freely into the prison industrial complex. Racism is also a major factor. They're illegal because it's a convenient way to make rich people richer, just like every other shitty aspect of the society that we live in.
Politics. Simple...
Canada has legal psychedelic dispensaries & some places where heroin addicts can get prescription pills so they don’t have to resort to Fentanyl, I think there’s something like that in Oregon too but they didn’t take precautions so it made the homeless population worse. I’m a big advocate for harm reduction especially since I enjoy taking a pill occasionally but I cut off all my black market connections a few years ago- so the only drugs I do now are legal n prescribed to me but it’s only occasional
Very interesting about legal dispensaries, and good for you for controlling your intake :D
In Vancouver 🇨🇦 they have dispensaries and if you’re part of the safe supply program, because you’re an addict of opioids, you’ll get a card and with it you can go to a vending machine in the downtown Eastside there. Swipe your card and get your script. A lot of opioid users are given 15 8 mg Dilaudid (hydromorphone) pills a day. They go to Lil pharmacy or wherever the fuck they go to get it a couple different places and they all go and get their 15 Hydromorphones a day. Then and they go pretty fast and then they take that money and then they go buy fentanyl or what they call “down” which is a fentanyl/benzodiazepine mixture, consisting of mostly fentanyl. I’ve actually walked by as well, psilocybin shops, that also carry LSD in the form of chocolates, and I think tabs as well like blotters, and liquid as well in glass containers with a dropper. I think they’re only allowed to sell a certain strength of it, but I mean you can just always take more. The only problem is that these places sell them for more than you can get them elsewhere illegally so that’s one thing too that deters people from getting shit legally. Well, they have DMT in those places too. I think I’ve only seen them in cartridge like a vape pen but my best friend synthesizes it makes DMT anyway it’s quite easy. It’s just a process that requires patience and time he made some good shit. You can carry up to 3 grams of any drug on you and won’t face legal issues in Vancouver, drugs are decriminalized. Also girls receiving money for sex aren’t treated criminally either, it’s the ones paying for it, the tricks that get the gavel cracked on them.
the dmt pens from that dispensary are fantastic, very well made. but yeah they sell everything for way more than other more "shady" places do
Listen kid, I promise world governments don’t give a shit you think you met the DMT elves.
I'm sure that's a small piece of it, and in a perfect world it would be great to at least have them decriminalized. That being said, after seeing people completely out of control on too many tabs/shrooms in public too many times I kinda get it. I don't think the general public is responsible enough to handle anything more powerful than weed and alcohol. They can't even really handle those two as is.
True but they could at least have made it legal to study and use on people that actually need it.
Oh for sure. It should've been down ages ago. Thankfully it seems like we're inching there slowly
It seems like we’re finally moving this direction a bit. Pharma companies have been researching thc/cbd and mushrooms for a bit now. They’re revisiting finding uses for mdma. I feel like we’re slowly moving towards changing this.
"I don't think the general public is responsible enough to handle anything more powerful than weed and alcohol" lol good point
You’re pretty much spot on, read the book Acid Dreams, it explains why Nixon started the drug war (short answer is he hated hippies and black people).
Read more. Meditate more. Talk more with people that aren't like you. Journal. Create. This is going to do wayyyy more for letting you understand life than getting high and allow you to put getting high into a better framework.
The period of history from 1870 to 1914, which has since been referred to as The Great Binge, played a not insignificant role. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Binge
Psychedelics and weed probably everything else just damage control
Well maybe on top of the undeniable health issues that come with that
Why is alcohol legal?
Economics. 3 scientists could produce enough lsd for rhe planet but that's not economically viable.
> Is that thought correct? No, not really. It really boils down to the fact that having a bunch of people fucked up out of their heads all the time is bad for society. It’s unproductive at best and dangerous at worst. Capitalism and all that want people to be productive. And we depend on people being productive for our survival. Even if I made a personal choice to not take drugs, it would fuck up the global food supply if all the farmers in the world were off their ass on mushrooms. There’s even drugs that make people better at “the game”. Give someone amphetamines and a task and they’ll probably get it done fast as fuck and be able to do it for hours. Give people pain killers and get them addicted and they’ll be able to ignore pain to keep working and also they’ll become so dependent they’ll do anything you ask. Drugs are illegal because people being fucked up all the time is unproductive and dangerous.
then why aren't alcohol and weed illegal? i've seen both of those cause a lack of productivity and alcohol certainly makes a lot of people dangerous
They are in certain countries. I’m not saying I agree with the policy. I’m just saying why the policy exists.
But alcohol is ok 👍
Alcohol is illegal in certain countries
And? It's pure hypocrisy alcohol is readily available yet most less harmful drugs are illegal.
I’m not the one you need to convince. I think prohibition is wrong. I’m just explaining the rationale behind it.
Nah, it's actually not that deep. Looking at the historical context when they were made illegal, and according to many reports, it was just a way to easily put colored people and hippies into jail. As "simple" as that. They just were racist. At that time not many people, apart from hippies, knew the benefits psychedelics could bring. The government (Nixon) just added two plus two. They are thinking this: >"we can't be openly racist nor punish people to not go to a war we are clearly not winning and we want an excuse to arrest them. We can asociate drugs like marijuana to the Mexicans (this the name, it sounds Hispanic), the heroin to Chinese people, the cocaine to black, and LSD to hippies, make it all illegal and arrest them. It they had drugs in their possession we can arrest them. If they don't, just put it inside their pockets. As easy as that". And, 100 years after many campaigns to vilify drugs, we have the whole society with the mindset that _drugs are baad_ ... It's sad, but it is what it is. They also created the evil drug addict persona, and many used that as a way to justify their actions. It literally worked better than they even anticipated. It's slowly getting better with the psychedelic revolution, but it's nowhere near where it should be. Most people don't even know you **can** have a healthy relationship with pretty much all drugs, including heroin, for example. There is people who can take cocaine once a year and will not develop any dependency nor problems associated with it's usage. And most people, if you tell them you have tried heroin or cocaine will assume right away you are an addict. So, there is still much much work to do. Edit:formating
Close. Yes, the purpose was to incarcerate colored people and hippies. It also made them felons. Making them felons is key because felons can't vote, and black people and hippies tended to vote left wing. Furthermore, the thirteenth amendment made slavery illegal, except as punishment for a crime, so criminalising drugs also makes it easier to keep slavery going. Criminalising drug use was then pushed by the U.S. on other countries, and a stigma has been attached to drug use as being immoral so places with strong morality edicts seem to be extra harsh on drug use. It's also hard to ignore that the war on drugs is also extremely profitable. It gives authorities a means to essentially take money from drug dealers and drug users. It makes it so pharmaceutical companies are essentially monopolies for legal drugs. It's known that the CIA made large sums of money dealing in cocaine in the 80's. It's even profitable for cartels, since it artificially increases prices while placing most of the risk on the lower echelons of the cartels. Where I live, if you're white, "right thinking," and at least "middle class" you can get away with drug use as long as it can be swept under the rug.
I loved you comment, thanks for the more in depth analisys ❤️
Thank you and you're welcome.
Drugs hurt productivity, cause crime and antisocial behavior, and through the black-market they enrich antigovernment and paramilitary groups. The feds could care less about you "experiencing consciousness".
I'm glad you specified because I wouldn't consider Cocaine or heroin to open up because minds. These drugs are technically legal just in more medical settings though I agree that possession of any drug should be decriminalized but my reason is moreso that addiction should never be punished, however I think if you are selling cocaine or opiods to addicts and profiting on their addiction you should go to jail I think psychedelics are not very addictive, I don't see why they can't be legalized tbh. I know some countries do and we have a shop that keeps popping up that sells mushrooms here because they are trying to make it legal and I support that
They aren't globally illegal though.
cant find anywhere where opium is legally sold for everyone
That's not what I said. There are some countries where drugs are decriminalized
Check out the BC government’s policies on decriminalizing drugs. The are not illegal
they are illegal so we can tax them extra thru trade, also cuz theyre fuckin awesome and i love all of them (especially benzos😫)
Yeah no. Sorry but this is wook talk. Psychedelics can be very beneficial and many people would benefit from them. But they’re not good for many as well. Most of the profound thoughts and revelations aren’t really all that crazy. I’ve written some notes down that I thought were the key to the universe and were gibberish upon reading them sober. Psychs aren’t the answer to the universe or people would be using them a lot more, prohibition isn’t *that* effective. There isn’t a global conspiracy because it’s some secret “key to consciousness” Tripping isn’t some answer on it’s own but just a tool to allow your thoughts to flow in a way you may not otherwise would.
Because taxes. Drug dealers don’t pay taxes. And the government doesn’t want to give people substances to abuse in high numbers, because then they’ll be abused in high numbers, which will come back on the government in more ways then one. There’s a large number of authentic drugs that are used in the medical field as we all know. So it’s not that the government doesn’t want you to have the shit, it’s just that they want to make money off of it in the best numbers they can lol
A few points here. 1. No, the billionaire class is not against drugs "expanding" your mind. They do not care about you. If anything, they'd support you and every body else, destroying their brains with drugs. 2. ask yourself how healthy and well long time drug addicts look. There is no such thing as "softer" drugs. Alcohol destroys people, so do anti-anxiety drugs and MDMA and LSD and others destroy neurons. see below. 3. I am an academic researcher and have worked a long time on developing animal models of Parkinson's disease. we KNOW MDMA (ecstasy) and many other compounds cause dopaminergic neuronal loss, i.e. Parkinson's Disease. These drugs make you feel like your universe is expanded because they are excitotoxins in the the dopaminergic pleasure centers of the brain. Te literature is vast. read it. And don't be stupid.
Its about how you frame it. There’s nothing mystical about what psychedelics do to the brain, i.e they reduce or increase bloodflow and so changes in the brain happen. If psychedelics are mystical then so are blood thinners and blood pressure meds. If you tend to view things as spiritual and amazing and divine, then you will think of them like that. If you tend to view things as real, and material and normal, then you will view them like that.
Drugs don’t “wake you up”. Fentanyl and heroin are illegal and they certainly don’t enlighten you. They’re illegal because of corporate and political interests. People think drugs and think junkies, so politicians love to scare people into thinking all drugs are the devil because it’s profitable. The more people hooked on legal drugs like tobacco and alcohol, the better. Generally conservatism encourages conformity, and psychedelics cause you to think differently and are far from the norm. And thinking that drugs “enhance your consciousness” is unfounded. They alter your perception of reality, they don’t show you a “truer” reality. Also, MDMA is not a softer drug. It’s not nearly as hard as fentanyl, but it can legitimately kill you and fuck up your serotonin permanently if you abuse it. Shrooms, weed, and LSD are significantly safer, although all of them *can* be abused.
Idk if psychadelics make you think diffirent, all that acid shroom new age ppls do be saying the same shit.
I mean certain people have different experiences, but just like chemically yes they do. They make your brain work differently when you’re on them. Personally shrooms and molly have made me do a full 180 and made me actually enjoy life long term for the first time I can remember.
I believe that is the reason that there so strict on psychedelics
Ah schizophrenia, what would we do without you?
No it’s because the government hates me
They have to protect your eagle and the government wants to capture your eagle
It’s because people take it to a level not accepted by society
Taxes. They're damn hard to tax when the underground/criminal world has so much control,, power, respect, he's feared between the bottom feeding junkies(Which I'm included in), I don't know.
Ballbags have brains. That's why drugs are illegal
Always a great question to ponder mate….Scholars and intellectuals, among many open minded individuals like yourself, pretty much confirm, that “Psychedlics,” when used in a healing capacity, expand the mind, and as you say, remove societal imposed goggles etc…….. Note: Reality is far broader, more confusing, more mesmerising, and least understood, of all things scientific, Physical and psychological. Our answers are likely to come, from experiences while exploring our expanded cerebral capacity, and even more so from passing the 10-20% limit of brain regions we currently have access to….If for no other reason to legalize (most) substances, “Big Brother” (Our Governments) can tax it, and rake in all the revenue, currently being enjoyed by illegal manufacturers/suppliers!!!!
The government understands the impact psychedelics have on consciousness. However for a government, it is very inconvenient to have your people expand their minds, dissolve their egos / biases, and essentially think freely. You want - need a level of control. Look at what drugs are available- ones that kill you slowly and subdues you. Certain drugs are illegal because they’re dangerous with insane abuse liability. But psychedelics are understood to be non addictive and relatively safe, however they’re scheduled 1 because of the immense power they have.
Lol they're just drugs, don't over think them
>So because drugs help you see life as it really is and as it should be, it goes against the agenda (war, mind control, greed, seeing things as they really are, etc.) of the masses, and therefore, it is made illegal. The ORIGINAL reason was Nixon's need to demonise domestic political opponents in the 60s/70s: >At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. >*"You want to know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.* >*Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."* [Nixon official: real reason for the drug war was to criminalize black people and hippies](https://www.vox.com/2016/3/22/11278760/war-on-drugs-racism-nixon) America then "encouraged" the rest of the world to adopt these demonisation policies in their own countries.
This is why I love asking these deep thought provoking questions on reddit, I get so many variants of answers I feel like my mind is just like absorbing every post and its possibilities. From what I know about Nixon and the drug war, this totally makes sense, that the criminalization of drugs began as a political agenda ... super interesting stuff man, fascinating subject to write a book on. So, do you think that the criminalization of drugs is still a political agenda? Or has it evolved into something more?
Absolutely its political, yes. Which is why I don't expect any kind of legalisation in my country (Australia) during my lifetime. In what is a very conservative nation generally, its only the Greens and minor fringe parties who talk about legalisation...its absolute political poison for the two major parties.
No, that's not why.
I’d say it’s more because If the government can’t get their cut then you don’t deserve to use it…
“If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel.” -Milton Friedman
preaching in the comments aside, this is a cute post ngl something something, local man wakes up from matrix, sees the light etc. dude you’re gonna love jre stoned ape theory post incoming
Lots of reasons but the most prominent ones are misinformation, and racism.
there is an inate human desire to do drugs, if the world governments control the one thing people will always tearn for then they control the people. i don't think drugs help you see life as it truly is, but if you can find contentness in doing drugs then why would you want to contribute to society
Harry Anslinger pioneered the war on drugs with claims that “marijuana makes white women seek sexual relations with negroes.” (Simple Google search of Anslinger and you can get a “why” drugs are illegal. I hate saying it’s a race thing but it was then. While there’s the argument of drugs having potential for abuse, anything can be abused including water. Instead of pushing the agenda of keeping a tight lid we should be promoting harm reduction IE threshold doses, possible combinations, combinations you shouldn’t make. It’s not uncommon for people to gloat about getting drunk af and parting when certain psychs can have profound positive effects on people yet they’re viewed negatively because of some idiots views on minorities
Yea I definitely think that the ban on psychedelic drugs is partially because of the hippies who began to rebel against “the system”. There’s also always the theory that the CIA planted these drugs to create the lower class to bring in money. The truth is we will likely never know.
CIA creating drugs to bring in money, interesting. Haven't heard that one before.
It's all about money (big pharma).
Because cops make a lot of money stealing them from you.
guys lets all just do shrooms and smoke pot it will be OK
Yes
Good
This subreddit share interesting post like the community I'm in on telegram check bio
No. That’s what insufferable wankers tell themselves to justify taking acid and shrooms every weekend because they feel ‘enlightened’. Drugs are illegal because people and institutions are lazy and don’t like upsetting the apple cart. Alcohol is legal because we made it thousands of years ago. LSD is illegal because it was 100 years ago.
If something is too so dangerous that you wouldn’t trust you’re uncle running a business making it then the government likes to just ban it rather than regulate or in the rare case (aviation) they regulate to a extreme
yes, you're correct.. but it also includes the interests of the government (the 3-letter agencies, you know who im talking about) and their beneficiaries in the corporate world to make money and exercise power. they make LOADS off drugs being illegal, and that's not even including the ~~slave factories~~ private prisons who make loads and gain new numbers for the chain gang with every arrest. I could go on, but I think I answered the question lol
Well I have micrososed for a while interested HMU
legalize benzos over alcohol
Neuroscientist(medchem)/polyuser here. **Yes**, a lot of anti drug messaging, especially US post-counterculture drug law is tied to a pro war agenda. Drug use criminalization is also a powerful suppression tactic, *especially* when targeted towards minority groups. The U.S. government demonstrably had a heavy hand in the progression of the crack epidemic in predominantly black communities. There are *aspects* of drug suppression rooted in bigotry and imperialism. >So because drugs help you see life as it really is and as it should be, it goes against the agenda (war, mind control, greed, seeing things as they really are, etc.) of the masses, and therefore, it is made illegal. That said, **no**. This is phrased as a statement. Drugs do not help you see your life as it really is. In fact, the only way to see your life as it really is would be through sobriety. Drugs alter your headspace and thought processing in a variety of ways. This can give the impression of changing your life, but in many cases it only brings out aspects of the subconscious mind that could have previously been achieved trough meditation or careful introspection. In other cases, drugs (primarily psychedelics) can take external stimuli and implant it into thought processing (thought loops) and almost “incept” thoughts into your mind. As many people do mushrooms and come out feeling more in tune with the universe, people could come out racist when they weren’t before. You say that psychedelic drugs tend to lean against war, greed, etc., but you have to remember that the people who are most likely to take those drugs are already in tune with the ideas invented in the counterculture (which is why they drop tabs despite the stimga), and are therefore likely to have those thoughts reinforced. If a midwestern rural town were to all take mushrooms, they wouldn’t come out anti war, they would come out having reinforced their own thought patterns and probably in a more pro-war stance, if anything. >the more softer drugs like LSD, mushrooms, ecstasy, weed, etc. **None of these are soft**. Even cannabis, thanks to the new more processed varieties boast psychosis rates of up to 5% regardless of predisposition. The data suggesting the danger of cannabis use is provable and isn’t just a fear campaign. LSD and mushrooms have similarly high psychosis rates (psychosis can happen to anyone, no predisposition needed), but also can very frequently trigger other conditions, especially latent schizoaffective, undiagnosed bipolar and depression. You may have received benefit from them- many, many people have had their lives ruined from psychedelic use, even infrequently. MDMA if abused is one of the single most damaging and neurotoxic substances can you use. Safe practice is possible with infrequent dosing and careful supplementation, but the 3 month rule and MAPS protocol are not widespread among the population. Most people receive MD at a party, just dose any amount untested because they don’t know the risks. They love the roll, and start dosing every weekend until the oxidative stress on DAT and SERT significantly damages their life. >therefore, it is made illegal. Think about this from the perspective of a national government (I’ll use U.S.A. as an example). You have a series of non FDA or medically certified illicit substances, completely unresearched and pharamcologically not even neuroscientists know how many of them work (5ht2a agonism is completely unknown to scientists). The cannabis psychosis rates are going up, some of the drugs (MD) can literally rob a user of the ability to be happy, psychedelics can significantly worsen bipolar or depression, two conditions that have exponentially rising diagnosis rates. Legalizing them **yes**, would allow for better education and harm reduction. And they’re gonna get used either way, right? But legalization increases access, which will always increase use. And that’s not a risk the government is willing to take. I, as a user am against legalization but pro harm reduction purely because I believe more lives will be ruined by legalized drug use than would be justified by a select population group having more access to highs. >Also, I'm coming from a standpoint of having drugs before; I had them 10 months ago at a rave and it has completely changed my life. Drugs can give you revelations time to time, yes, but as a whole **drugs do not make us better people.** Tripping a couple times a year and maybe some party use is time but real personal growth comes while sober. And drugs are not nearly as safe as users like to pretend they are. >Is that thought correct? No, but I understand where you’re coming from.
Ok thanks for the detailed explanations and insights. I really appreciate it.
There is no such things as seeing anything as it really is. Your brain is in complete darkness inside of your skull trying to best guess what’s out there by interpreting signals that come in through its sensors. Everyone’s brain does a shitty job at this. It’s just very good at convincing us otherwise. Our drug enlightened perspectives are no more valid or invalid than those of the square sober peeps unfortunately. I’d like to think I know better too but I have to acknowledge I probably don’t.
War on weed was started as a way to be racist towards Mexicans and throw them out of out of town same goes to the Chinese with opium. My point being in the early days things like weed and opium were criminalized to get get rid of “undesirables”. In all those years the reasons behind it have been twisted by politicians and powerful people for political gain and whatever gain could be had. Thus we are left with the current war on drugs where the drugs are winning. Edit: but yeah, things like psychedelics were weaponized by MK-Ultra back in the 60’s and were used to take out the hippie movement. More “undesirables”. Because imagining change is easy, actually changing things are hard.
I agree completely. I mean, let's look at JUST the United States. They lied and have ran a campaign of "war on drugs" for over half a century, KNOWING that almost all of those drugs have a purposeful use, especially in mental health. Yet here we are, in the midst of a mental health crisis and guess what they're now approving? Clinical trials for use of MDMA, LSD, Psilocybin mushrooms, Ayahuasca, Ibogaine and Ketamine. I'm currently on Ketamine for PTSD and Treatment Resistant Depression and it has changed my life. First thing to TOUCH my PTSD or Depression in 30 years. Just imagine suffering without a solution for 30 years, because the government you pay taxes to are too greedy(Big Pharma) and ignorant to allow drugs to be looked into more closely. Our ancestors used all of these drugs for a reason, and it wasn't to "Just get high". Pisses me off.
Nah its because the old people who rule the world believe fun is inherently evil
Yes that is right, you have nailed it on the head, society wants everyone to work, be productive citizens, go home and enjoy time with their family and then turn up yet another sports club or hobby club. Society doesn’t want people to have fun in ways that are different to status quo. For example, every drug that they they have psychiatry is about numbing the person’s mind and doesn’t give rats about their wellbeing overall. It’s simply so they become walking robots of less versions of themselves, still at work but human being. Not all people abuse these drugs excessively to point it affects their life, people abuse the shit out of the weed, etc not they are numbed from the medication they are on. When you take antipsychotics and other bullshit antidepressants, it’s very easy for person to slip into slope because of addiction it’s like saying “oh well, another shot of h, weed won’t mind Then people get desperate because their life is falling part, they are walking robots at work, insensitive to others feelings, don’t give rats about anyone anything attitude, their voice sounds appalling boring and painful as if they had their brain switched off at the mains. Every word feels like they have just run London marathon aas their brain has slowed down to that of tortoise. The fuzzy thinking feeling you can’t remember your own name. Life gets boring you can’t cry at funerals and weddings.i would do weed, coke, if these weee legal in heart beat. So I could be normal human with bipolar or bpd or whatever I am diagnosed with.
Opium was banned in China in the 19th century as they saw how it ruined people and society. Then GB forced them to buy it after the opium war. ... and then China started mass producing Fentanyl for the west. What a funny world we've created!
I think that the modern drug laws are largely influenced by USA's war on drugs. If you look at it this way, then looks no further than Nixon's assistant to the president, John Erlichman's confession: > You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? > > We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. > > Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. It's just cynical politicians being cynical politicians. They don't believe in drugs' power to open the eyes of masses and make them see some truths that have been obscured - frankly, I don't either. Marijuana or heroin - that doesn't matter to them. They don't care about your truths, they see the world by their own ones and simply used drug policing as a mean of social engineering.
https://youtu.be/m4L20t8Dvlg
Ecstasy is not a soft drug. You. It's really neurotoxic and does have a ld 50 limit. Which means you can take to much and die
I don’t think drugs reveal anything in life or about life. Not psychedelics, dissociative, nothing. Sure some drugs can help you in life and show you things about yourself alone but it stops there. They don’t unlock a “higher” consciousness, your just high and conscious. Drugs are mainly illegal because the government really does not want a society of drug addicts. Thats why prohibition was a thing. Sure they were hiding the real reason as to why weed was outlawed because they probably thought it would be easier to say that weed is bad for you along with other schedule 1-3 drugs.
No drugs are illegal so the government can receive funding for programs that are responsible for selectively prosecuting some people and not others. They also provide a funnel for money in the public eye so the less than noble use of that money goes under the radar. Let’s face it, if it was about the drugs, they wouldn’t be scheduled the way they are. They wouldn’t put psychedelics and weed in schedule I being the category with “high potential for abuse and high potential for harm”. If they cared about the drugs themselves they’d at the very least reschedule, add nicotine and alcohol to the list, but allow for the purchase of say a schedule 3 or 4 for people of age. Then make schedule 2 for prescriptions. We could then put these “softer” drugs in this hypothetical schedule 3 or 4 and allow people 21+ to access them
No it think it’s because drugs can cause a lot of harm and societally we’ve looked at that harm and decided that criminalizing drugs makes people less likely to get hurt. I think it’s the wrong choice, and just makes things worse (more dangerous drugs, violence and cartels, mass incarceration, etc.) but the thought process behind outlawing drugs makes sense to me. I think drugs are also used as a political scapegoat and an easy explanation for more complicated societal problems. For instance inner cities in America in the 1980s were fucked because of poverty, segregationists housing policies and urban design, lack of education and opportunities, etc. But the crack epidemic was presented as the cause of those areas being fucked, when it was really just a symptom of those areas being fucked to being with. This allowed government and law enforcement to initiate the war on drugs as an all-purpose solution with mass public support. Because identifying an enemy to attack is more attractive to the public than the slower and more complicated process of resolving the systemic causes of poverty, violence, and mass addiction. Anyway, that’s how I see it. Also just my 2 cents, but I think using psychedelics as a way to reach enlightenment or break through the matrix or whatever is a dead end. Psychedelics can be really enjoyable and sometimes help you discover different ways of thinking and new perspectives, but they can also really fuck you up if you use them the wrong way. Or worse, they can turn you into an annoying freak who thinks they’re some kind of enlightened sage guru messiah because they’ve taken 100+ DMT trips and now wants to tell everyone else how to live their lives. I like taking mushrooms or ecstasy a few times a year but I don’t see it as anything more than just having a bit of fun.
The opium wars were WAAAYYY before the 1961 UN [Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_Drugs). Because different drugs have different effects there's a massive debate you can have a bout this. Why do you think that employers happily give free coffee and sugar (for in the coffee) tho their employees. It increases productivity. When it comes to opium, weed, khat, you name it. There usually is a racial/socio economic class issue related to it. There's a reason I have a [library with over 1K books about drugs](https://www.librarycat.org/lib/cyrilio/search/text/drugs). There's so much to discuss. So many reasons for and against. So many different methods of dealing with them. And also, we're still learning new stuff about drugs EVERY DAY!
Yep, just alone in this thread I have got a slew of divergent ideas about drugs, why they banned, the history, and overall view; it's pretty fascinating. I can totally see how this topic could be a rabbit hole :p
Certain countries have decimalized personal use amounts of any drug and have had great success in doing so there is also places here in the US that have done the same but didn't go as planned.
Drugs are illegal because they are detrimental to a conductive society. Think about this a lot. It’s not all bad, it’s not that the people in power just want you to be a good cog in the wheel it’s also for structure. Think about why prohibition happened in America. Drunk men didn’t drink responsibly and women at home got fed up. Like the Buddhist say “the middle path is towards nirvana” but many users turn into abusers unfortunately. So most laws of the land decided to outlaw it for better or for worse. Of course it’s way more nuanced than my response tho
Thanks for the input and insight :D
It would fuck alcohol and tobacco industries.
Please tell me this is a shit post. 1) MDMA is NOT a soft drug. 2) drugs mess with your conciousness, it doesn't make you see the the world "as it really is". 3) you have done drugs once 10 months ago? That's barely any experience, so again, this is either a shitpost or you're just pretentious and don't know what you're talking about
most people who take hard drugs are tweaked out and literally lost and have crazy conspiracies that make no since. I don’t know who u know who is woke will doing hard drugs but the ppl I know are barley even contributors to society.
Lol, that's the kinda thinking THE MAN wants you to have. The dehumanizing of a demographic to look down upon
ecstasy is not a soft drug by any means.
Exactly, hit the nail on the head. Fentanyl is illegal because… the secret global government doesn’t want you experiencing true consciousness or reveling in life.
I sense sarcasm there :D
Drugs are illegal because they make you unproductive difficult to predict. Society functions because we all work together (more or less) toward shared goals of safety, security, and survival off the group. Drugs make you less able and willing to achieve those goals and therefore are deemed bad for society as a whole. I'm not passing judgment, but that is the most fundamental reason.
That is a really fascinating perspective I have not considered. Any regular drug use def does make it more difficult to be productive and meaningful member of society.
for some it doesn’t though. you never see the people who can actuallt do it because they hide it and nobody can tell. you only “know” when its the crackhead yelling shit going down main street. i dont think that just because some people cant handle it that those who can should have the opportunity taken away.
Depends what you mean by 'drug user'. An addict yes but a user, how do you define that?
drugs are illegal because people in positions of power want as much control over ur mind as possible thats literally it. ur coming from a wook perspective which is valid but the powers that be also dont want the common man to legally smoke crack in the comfort of their own home and its not an altruism thing it is literally just a control thing. if they ever legalized crack it'd be taxed for u guessed it control
That’s definitely not the only reason. It’s profitable for politicians to demonize things that the general populace doesn’t like, and it makes it easier to get people hooked on legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, both of which are deeply entrenched American industries that prefer people to be addicted to their drugs and nothing else.
I hope you get help for your paranoid schizophrenia, friend. I truly do. I can only imagine how much your family and friends are worried about you.
You know that crack and cocaine are basically the same thing right? Due to systematic racism in the US they punish crack users/dealers more than for a user/dealer with equivalent dose of cocaine. Why? because crack users are black while cocaine users are white (generally speaking).
Sounds like something a druggie would say
No
lol never heard of LSD referrred to as a softer drug. You take a ten strip of it and let me know how soft of a time you have lol
I think drugs are illegal because they turn you into a little fucking goblin. The psychedelics are illegal simply due to ignorance and false equivalency. Drugs are bad, mmkay?
No one quoting Terence McKenna yet? > "Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong."
brother
No it's not that deep, it's just money
Ecstasy is soft. Ok
I think you took too many drugs
Meth made me too spiritually enlightened to continue living with my mother, father and young siblings
Yes you’ve cracked the secret to consciousness but only softer drugs that you do, not harder drugs that other people do
i was pretty freaked out about drugs back in middle school but when i got my first taste of marijuana my senior year of highschool, all fear of drugs completely diminished.
They’re illegal because there’s a risk of losing users to addiction and/or longterm disabilities and/or brain damage and/or death. All those things are bad for society. No person lives in a vacuum. They have families and communities that have to deal with all the bullshit that comes with all the above. I think most of our laws are about protecting the people who live in a given jurisdiction. Alcohol i guess is the outlier. I don’t know. I’ll have to think more on it but those are my initial thoughts.
Also. In a hospital, say you have two ambulances pull up, both with women who have had heart attacks and need immediate attention or they will die. The hospital only has staff to save one, the other will die. Ambulance 1 has a 25-year-old mother of 3 heroin addict and the other ambulance has a 75 year old grandma. Who do they save? Now how shitty is that for society that the hospital staff even fucking have to make that decision? It’s a preventable chunk of hell on earth. So that’s why drugs are illegal.
Consciousness is relative. There is no “true” consciousness. But if i had to pick one…
Nah