When the military tested cannabis and LSD on soldiers, it made them lose discipline indefinitely. They probably thought of it more as "turning them into hippies" than "waking them up to the bullshit", but either way they didn't like it.
Prohibition makes a lot of sense from the point of view of an army that might need to draft a lot of men and make good soldiers out of them quickly.
Funny, a Liberal Arts education can have a similar effect on people. Bell Telephone ran a program where managers were given a humanities education, and by the end of it most of them wanted to work less and spend more time with their families:
Is a hippie a kind of Animal? How can you go full hippie? They're f'ing soldiers! They were becoming apathetic and moralised when they had brief moments of realisation that they were all brainwashed by their drill sergeants.
Whilst I generally agree with you that these drugs alone don't magically "wake people up", wouldn't you agree that one of the primary functions of government is to ensure social stability?
It would therefore be strange for governments not to try to control substances that had the potential to upset this. No conspiracy is required, just pragmatism.
When the Controlled Substances Act was passed, it included many, many drugs that had been previously criminalized under several different and conflicting laws. That act was an attempt unify drug policy. Nothing can be inferred from that act about why any given drug was or was not criminalized. However the timing of the act is a bit curious, given it happened shortly after a rise in drug use in a class of people who were anti-authoritarian and talked a lot about the cultural effects of drugs.
For your links, here are 2: the first espouses the premise -
These past two statements illustrate pretty clearly why very little research has been done on this subject. One mention of LSD, or many drugs for that matter, and you have people jumping to two extremes (that have nothing to do with the original topic of off-label treatment / pain-management.
I have no experience, so I can't say who's right or wrong. I just think it's sad that these type of arguments have given some drugs so much of a stigma that it set back medical research in this area for 40+ years.
Please, tell me what extreme statement I made. I am in favor of drug research (and in many cases, responsible drug use) and have even posted a scholarly paper below referencing how the effects can be positive.
What I am not in support of is the fallacious "X illegal drug has effect Y, therefore it is illegal because the government doesn't want you to experience Y" argument.
I think the short of it is that if you need LSD to make you see that there's something wrong with the system, you're probably not out of grade school. LSD was used to treat criminals and reduced recidivism -- what does that say? It certainly isn't going to turn us all into Weather Underground types.
I have a bit of tripping experience. I'll try to explain something.
The things you see and think and feel on acid are often highly personal, possibly embarrassing (vouch), and difficult to express. There is an aphorism, which, like so many aphorisms, is uselessly true: "enjoy the little things". It's hard to take this advice if you've forgotten what the "little things" are, never mind appreciating them; if you try to take this advice, you might just emulate some clichés you saw in a movie or a show and bore yourself.
This is what it's like to roll a joint on mushrooms:
One of my friends, who has tripped many times, when I was describing a novel psychedelic to him, asked:
"Does it do that thing, where you're like ..."
snaps fingers slowly several times
And... yeah. That thing. You forget yourself, you notice yourself. It is totally exquisite.
Psychedelic introspection draws on this. It is an utterly human phenomenon that one thinks of their beliefs and ideas as part of them, when they are nothing of the sort (cf. Five Aggregates). It becomes much easier to realize you have a drinking problem when you have first realize that you lose nothing by realizing that you have a drinking problem.
Perhaps you have done something wrong: it does you no harm to accept this. Perhaps you have aligned yourself with bad company: seeing them for who they are makes them no worse than they were before. Perhaps you have been wasting time: you waste no more time if you start working.
Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing in it to steal.
Ryokan returned and caught him. "You may have come a long way to visit me," he told the prowler, "and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift."
The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.
Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. "Poor fellow, " he mused, "I wish I could give him this beautiful moon."
It is a common lament of the e-lucy-diated: so many of the world's problems would be resolved if those people could see this beautiful moon. But who should take acid? What would it do? And how could the world possibly benefit?
Consider the case of the police interrogator who tortures a false confession out of an innocent sixteen-year-old and destroys a life. How does one survive an encounter with a mirror after such an abhorrent act? A person will recoil in abject horror at even the possibility of admitting to have done such a thing. The belief that you have done it becomes a demon, and it is as though it attacks your mind, and so your mind runs and hides.
In a state of constant renewal -- which is the only true state of the mind -- a memory can be seen for what it is, and one can react honestly, appropriately, and ethically, with true humility. But when people are denying reality, they are helpless to change it. And perhaps the moon can remind a person that theft is not a very good life-track to follow.
I do not mean to present LSD as the solution to the world's problems. I mean to present LSD as LSD. From my perspective, I feel as though I have barely scratched the surface, and already I am caught up in dramatic overexpression and gratuitous use of italics. I had hoped to write a good post. That did not happen.
Last year I've realized (mostly from reading some pretty cool books) that I still had a lot of implicit assumptions about how the world goes. To my surprise, I find myself leaning towards a soft form of conspiracy theory (or class war, if you will), of "us vs them".
To me this came from having access to a historical perspective. But the resulting shift was so subjective, so much like seeing the same things from a different perspective that I can no longer say with conviction that drugs like LSD could never do the same thing. The fact that a dose of a drug gives you no new information may not be so important, as long as it helps you rearrange the knowledge you already have.
The effects of LSD (and whether or not I personally have done LSD) are completely irrelevant to your claim that it is Schedule I because it will "awaken the masses." I don't doubt that it can lead to meaningful introspection-- there are very reputable studies that show that psilocybin (the hallucinogen found in "magic mushrooms") does this for even non-drug users.[1]
The original claim which I was responding to is so baseless that I do not feel that the burden of proof is on my side.
The original claim may be floridly expressed, but I don't think you can write it off as baseless.
Wouldn't you agree that one of the primary functions of government is to ensure social stability?
It would therefore be strange for governments not to try to control substances that had the potential to upset this. No conspiracy is required, just pragmatism.
Given that LSD advocates in the 60's and 70's loudly proclaimed its power to transform society, whether accurate or not, it would have been irresponsible for governments to ignore this.
Although I think that LSD and other psychedelics have great potential for aiding therapy and introspection, I think there's a lot of evidence against the idea that it automatically 'wakes people up to the system'. It takes more than just the drug to do that.
I grew up in the UK, and witnessed the rave and drug scene from 1988 onwards. Millions of doses of LSD were consumed, and continue to be consumed. I don't see millions of people awakened to the system.
I'd bet that the net consequence of every single person in society dosing acid once, like the Merry Pranksters dreamed of, would have been more along the lines of a slight decrease in net societal productivity than a total counter-cultural revolution.
