The movement to legalize psychedelics is gaining steam. Last week Michael Pollan published a guest essay in the New York Times titled "How Should We Do Drugs Now?", suggesting some directions we might want to go and things we might want to think about as we lower the curtains (finally!) on the Drug War.
I'm in the process of trying to get a couple of op-eds of my own published, so I won't go into too much detail here, except to say that I think most formulations of the legalization argument rest on facile and romanticized versions of what legalization will mean. As Kevin Sabet, a noted critic of legalization, put it, the people who will profit most from the legalization of psychedelics will be people like John Boehner, former GOP speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives who vowed he would never support legalization of marijuana--until he realized how much money was to be made. In 2019 The New York Times suggested Boehner stood to make a not-so-small fortune from the legalization of marijuana, thanks to his ownership of a substantial number of industry shares. As a recent convert, he wholeheartedly joined the industry's team of evangelists, appearing in an infomercial: “This is one of the most exciting opportunities you’ll ever be part of,” the Times quotes him as saying. “Frankly, we can help you make a potential fortune.”
My own critiques—or the ones to which I can speak with greatest authority—concern the idea that Indigenous knowledge and experience create, as Pollan puts it, "a user's manual for the safe and constructive use of psychedelics." I used to think so too. Then I spent a decade studying traditional and contemporary Amazonian knowledge and practice around psychedelics, particularly ayahuasca. The picture is not always as pretty as the evangelists of psychedelia—my former self included—would like us to believe.
The Drug War has been a catastrophic failure. It must end. Prohibition is not a viable strategy for dealing with drug addiction and other problems associated with intoxicants. But not all psychedelics are created equal, and we need to take a measured and thoughtful approach to how we begin integrating them into our society. The current hype around psychedelics is not conducive to the level of discretion and forethought—and in my opinion, broader social and cultural reform—that are warranted if we are to do this thing, and do it right.
