Upon putting magic mushrooms into my mouth for the first time last summer, I was intrigued by the spiritual experience and hallucinations that many people said would change my life.
It did exactly that.
Seeing a night sky full of glitter with purple and green auroras floating around me as I danced through the grass with someone I loved inspired immense feelings of joy and happiness that I didn’t know existed.
The trees were swaying and I was finally seeing the world in the most beautiful perspective.
As I came down hours later, I thought to myself, how could a drug that gave me access to dream-like euphoria and transformative thinking be so demonized?
It is incredibly plausible that the only reason psychedelics are still illegal is because the United States government fears people having the ability to reach deeper parts of their consciousness and higher levels of thinking.
Psychonaut and ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna said it best in his 1991 book “The Archaic Revival,” that psychedelics are illegal, but not because a loving government is concerned you may jump out of a third story window.
“Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and . . . open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong,” McKenna said.
After the “psychedelic ’60s,” former President Richard Nixon intensified America’s War on Drugs and passed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970. The policy resulted in “misperceptions of risk and highly restrictive regulation” that psychedelics, according to the Johns Hopkins Center of Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.
If the United States government and Drug Enforcement Administration continue to render psychedelics such as LSD, psilocybin (magic mushrooms), MDMA (ecstasy) and DMT as
Schedule I drugs, then they are perpetuating ignorance.
According to the DEA, Schedule I drugs “have a high potential for abuse and the potential to create severe psychological and/or physical dependence . . . with no currently accepted medical use.”
Psychedelics are powerful psychoactive substances that alter perception and mood and affect numerous cognitive processes, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. The center said, “They are generally considered physiologically safe and do not lead to dependence or addiction.”
Magic mushrooms offer a singular experience, different than other drugs. Unlike weed it doesn’t put you in a haze and it doesn’t waiver between pleasure and death like opioids.
Over 67,000 Americans died from an opioid drug overdose in 2018, according to data released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to Statista, 1,800 males and 687 females suffered narcotic and hallucinogen-related deaths in 2018.
Legal for medical use as Schedule II drugs according to the DEA, opioids had a death rate approximately 39 times greater than psychedelics in 2018. The fact that the DEA says psychedelics still have “no currently accepted medical use” is appalling and should raise suspicions about the government’s intentions.
Aside from their use in hippie culture and today’s rave scenes, adolescent psychiatrist Ben Sessa said in his 2012 book, “The Psychedelic Renaissance,” that psychedelics were once believed to hold great promise for treating a number of medical conditions as well as providing access to profound spiritual experiences.
“However, legal restrictions on the use of such drugs effectively forced them underground and brought clinical research to a halt,” Sessa said.
Taking a step in the right direction in 2000, the U.S. approved a Johns Hopkins research group to reinitiate research with psychedelics in healthy volunteers.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research has published groundbreaking studies that demonstrate therapeutic effects in people who suffer from smoking, alcohol and other drug addictions, existential distress caused by terminal illnesses and treatment-resistant depression.
“Studying healthy volunteers has also advanced our understanding of the enduring positive effects of psilocybin and . . . understanding consciousness,” the center’s website states.
The center said its upcoming studies will determine the effects of psilocybin as a new therapy for opioid addiction, Alzheimer’s disease, PTSD, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome and anorexia nervosa.
The U.S. should not be demonizing and criminalizing the use of psychedelics; it should be putting efforts behind exploring ways to harness their powers.
In a 2016 article, the Drug Policy Alliance said, “by decriminalizing possession and investing in treatment and harm reduction services, we can reduce the harms of the drug misuse while improving public safety and health.”
The article added that the benefits of decriminalization include “reducing the number of people arrested, reducing the number of people incarcerated, increasing uptake into drug treatment . . . redirecting law enforcement resources to prevent serious and violent crime [and] minimizing the social exclusion of people who use drugs.”
Oakland, Santa Cruz and Denver are the three cities in America that have decriminalized magic mushrooms and a few other natural psychedelics in 2019, according to CNN.
If every city in America could eventually get to the point of decriminalizing psychedelics, then researchers can make up for lost time in understanding the truth about psychedelics.
In an article published on the Aeon magazine website, professor Philip Gerrans, a researcher of self-representation in psychiatric disorders, said that the use of drugs such as LSD or magic mushrooms can help people dissolve their ego.
This moment of expanded awareness is enlightening, allows for a meaningful connection with the world around us, gives new insights, new perspectives and new ways of looking at the world.
For years, psychedelics have been labeled as drugs that make us crazy. If drugs actually make us more sane, that could be what makes the U.S. government so afraid.
Denying psychedelic drugs’ presence in U.S. society is simply keeping citizens from reaping their medical benefits, as well as the next step of human advancement.
