Today VoidTraveler found an interesting link:

Psychedelic Drugs Still Popular in the U.S.

It is about the use of three common psychedelics in the USA; LSD, Mescaline and Mushrooms. According to a very broad survey that they performed they estimate that about 32 million US citizens used psychedelics at one time in their life, many even recently.

It also goes a little into misconceptions that the general public has about psychedelics, like the wrong assumption that psychedelics must be addictive.

I think it is an interesting read.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

Very cool article. Not much new news aside from the demographics, which is very interesting. I especially liked the Steve Jobs quotation.



much love,
tat

..thanks Traveler for finding this..

psychedelics are on the whole, i guess, 'quieter' as they're not leading to people in addiction clinics..only through clearly false/inaccurate claims of 'madness'/psychoticism can the media/propaganda demonize them..but the stats show otherwise..

funny how the iPod messiah lends mainstream credibility to their possible positive creative influences..
.

Besides the generational changes, gender differences (discussed recently in the Nexus in a couple threads) are interesting as well.

Thanks for bringing it up, Trav. I'm leaving the paper of the study attached here, it has a few more statistical details.

32 million... That's roughly a tenth of us. Not too shabby.

Thanks for the links, both Traveler and Vodsel!

Yea guyomech one out of ten admittedly is not bad at all. Probably a good guess is to say many more than that in reality, one out of 5 we could hope?

One out of ten is pretty huge. It has been said frequently that 10% of the populations of most modern nations are gay. While this number depends a lot on the definition used, many leaders of the gay community itself are saying the number is significantly less. (see this recent article http://theweek.com/artic...no-longer-the-10-percent)

I think a quote in this article applies quite powerfully to our own rather oppressed community.

"Why on earth does it matter if we make up 10 percent or 1 percent? A minority’s civil rights are not dependent on how many of them there are or how large a segment of society they form. Do we say: sorry, guys, you only form 2 percent, you don’t meet the minimal bar for becoming a minority?"

Drug legalization should be looked at as a civil rights issue... in addition to being a religious freedom issue and all the rest.

Considering the rapid and all too recent change in popular opinion on GLBT members of society... we can only hope that our community will eventually receive such an upswing. Just as with homosexuality, I think Hollywood will probably wind up leading the way. Characters like Walter from Fringe might not do it for us, but they are at least a start. When characters on a mainstream TV show are shown to use psychedelics responsibly and without the usual obligatory negative consequences, our day will not be too far behind.

IMHO

are we winnin?
my flank feels covered.