Scientists observe and elucidate the mechanism for psychedelic neurogenesis.

Schedule I heavy criminalization cannot make sense to any reasonable person any longer, right? What reasonable argument could possibly be left? Am I missing something?

Now what? How do we regain our personal freedom to access nature without intrusion from government? We have science fully behind us. It has spoken loud and clear. This is a social movement now, I don't think we can say "let science take care of it".

Science does not give rights back, social movements do.

Paper published June 2018 is attached.

How about a march on Washington to raise awareness? We can get millions into festivals around the globe, so the body mass to bring attention to the cause is there.

Here are some slogans:



Any other slogans?

Could we pull off a pychedelic freedom march on Washington?

Another slogan:

its happening but it will pervade mass consciousness at its own pace

might not be as many "reasonable" people as we hope, as of now.

We plant the seeds of the future psychedelic utopias.

Unfortunately the puritanical views in our country and much of society win out over logic and research. Not to say that it's not worth fighting for, but the fact that we're just now legalizing in some states and thinking about decriminalizing cannabis just goes to show...

The war on drugs has countless casualties worldwide. As long as it's an ingrained income generating mechanism for the entire planet it will probably continue. The trick is to come up with a means to replace that income so infrastructures can survive the full decriminalization of all controlled substances. Peace is gonna probably take negotiation and non linear thinking as well as a big shot of activism. Pushing the science aspect is a good way to start changing opinions.

So I've read this kind of stuff before, about harmalas, dmt, and other substances having this effect. My question then is this... has anyone tried using these substances as a study aid (in manageable doses obviously)?

I suppose this is what microdosing is all about. Haven't tried it yet myself.

It could be argued that the tech revolution in silicon valley was catalized by these functional neural plasticity beneficial drugs. Psychedelics could be a contributing reason we have enjoyed prosperity and technological breakthroughs in computer technology over the past few decades. Leaders in the field have bravely come out and spoken about how psychedlics experiences helped fuel their creativity (one example here).

This may be parallel to the situation milenia ago when human monkeys started eating the mushrooms that grew out of the patties from the animals they were following/hunting. The time for this seems to align well with the time we experienced a quick expansion of our brains.

It's mindboggoling how psychedelics are still illegal. Future generations will look at us and wonder how we allowed these damaging arrogant laws against natural plant and fungi to exist for decades. If one looks up "unnatural law" in the dictionary, there should be a picture of the controlled substances act.

It's not as simple as we may like to think.

These plants and natural compounds are not assimilated with Western culture. Unlike the indigenous people, we have no elders to show us how to use them, to teach us the responsibility that comes with their use. Think of the Salvia videos on Youtube from years back where people smoke 100x extracts and do (or their sitters / 'guides' do) irresponsible or dangerous things.

Abolishing all laws prohibiting the use of these compounds wouldn't be the best avenue to go, we're not ready for it yet.
Their prohibition is not the root of all evil and it's not an evil conspiracy against mankind, but rather a consequence of how unbalanced and broken our world is.

Arguably, the prohibition protects them while allowing them to slowly seep into mass consciousness and attempt to heal the world. Since entheogens are controlled, their use is mostly limited to those most responsible and most able to benefit from them. You can still procure them, it just takes more research and effort, and when you take the effort to learn to brew Ayahuasca, grow your own mushrooms or extract your own tryptamines, you're more likely to also learn how to use them safely and responsibly.

Well, what about those thrown in jail over plants? What about those bleeding to death from synthetic Cannabis?

These criminal laws are doing tremendous damage. Sure, one can see a little good on them, but I think that on the balance they are a disaster.

The benefits you are suggesting could simply come from regulation (+accurate information) instead of criminalization (+missinformation). The laws should be even more effective in that framework, as criminalization enables adulteration and other dangerous and risky behaviours. This is a consequence of the monetary incentive workings in criminal vs. regulated enterprises.

For example, as I understand it underage people have easy access to directly buy criminalized drugs, but they cannot directly purchase regulated drugs such as tobacco and alcohol.

We do have elders. Yes, in the form of these surviving indigenous wisdom traditions, but also in the form of the baby boomers who have integrated LSD over the last 5 decades, and the last 3 centuries of scientific rational inquiry on who's giant shoulders they stand. In the ancient texts digitally archived a click away, in the myths and songs and stories we each carry in our hearts and memories, in our parents and grandparents who may still remember the way their grandparents did things. The hoop is not yet broken.

If three million years of hominid evolution hasn't made us ready to eat that thing that grows out of the ground, when will we be ready?

Cannabis is easier to use for the average person than true psychedelics and that makes it easier to legalize, which is already happening in many parts of the world.

The substances that get adulterated are mostly street hard drugs like coke, meth and heroin, which are not something someone looking for entheogens would choose as an alternative. It would be hard to adulterate whole dried mushrooms for example, and it's not a bad thing that people learn to grow them themselves or procure them from close, trusted friends who grow them. Also, mushrooms don't provide as much monetary incentive as people don't get hooked on them and take them every day.

Regulation is the way to go, but it's a long and winding one as we walk in largely uncharted territory. Even the regulation of tobacco, one of the most and longest accepted psychoactives in Western culture, is changing. Where I am, smoking in restaurants etc. was only banned a decade ago.


While this doesn't seem to happen very often, when it does it is sad indeed.
I also understand that this is more of a threat in the US, while in many parts of Europe for example things are more relaxed and even though these things are illegal, you're very unlikely to get in trouble for brewing DMT-containing tea for your personal use.

You are ready, I am, but the average Joe may not be so ready for psilocybin candy being sold at gas stations.

If you think three million years of evolution has made us grow up, consider that slavery was only officially abolished within the last two centuries, within the last 100 years we've had some crazy totalitarian regimes and mass murder on the scale of millions, and we still have wars, elect Donald Trump for president, etc.

Good points!

But, what about the other kinda sorta cool stuff we've done this century. In the last 100 years we've gone from a horse drawn carriage to landing a remote controlled mobile science lab on mars. Gone from Phrenology to fMRI. Gone from telegraph wires to a global 4g LTE high bandwidth wireless network. Overall, genocide rates are on the decline and standard of living is on the upswing. We still have a long ways to go undoubtedly, but criminalizing sovereignty over our own consciousness is most assuredly heading us in the wrong direction on this avenue of progress.

There is plenty of evidence that the war on drugs creates a LOT of harm and virtually no good at all. Im on my phone now so it´s a bit of a pain but you can look through google scholar and statistics related to the social/health costs of prohibition.

Prohibition creates a dangerous black market, adulteration (even within the psychedelic world), people taking substances without being educated on the dangers (set and setting etc).

Yet another thing is that prohibition creates a social taboo, it is way harder to be a researcher of a substance that is illegal, so any second passing with laws controlling such substances means less knowledge being created on them. It also destroys families because of misunderstandings (¨oh my son is using those evil drugs?! Gonna kick him out of the house and never talk to him again¨ ). People may also lose job opportunities for having their google name associated with some psychedelic conference presentation or some such publication and/or research, or even not get visas to some countries.

Also, you can look at the effects of decriminalization (not enough but at least a step in the right direction) in countries that went towards that way and you´ll see plenty of benefits, reduced or equivalent use but no increase, reduced deaths, reduced health costs.

Legalization isn´t simply ¨removing drugs from laws¨, its also creating harm reduction measures, increasing drug education in schools, etc.. But all of this has to /can be done simultaneously, there is no evidence that points to the benefits of mantaining drug laws before we get some sort of enlightened society that is finally ¨ready¨ for it. Treating adults like children is a sure way to make them act like children. And morally, who is anybody to say what other people should consume or not, or possess, if they arent hurting others? Who are you, or anybody else, to say someone is ready for it?

As for ¨conspiracy¨, im not one to go for conspiracy theories because I think they often shift the focus from what is important, but you are also wrong to say that there isn´t at least in part some conscious hand being behind drug laws. Read up on the reasons why Nixon started the war on drugs it was definitely a control measure on a specific population. Also there´s tons more evidence of pharmaceutical lobbies against legalization, the prison industrial complex benefitting off drug encarcerations, banks making billions from drug cartels, high profile politicians involved in drug trade, involvement of government agencies like the CIA in drug trafficking. You´d be in a very difficult position to argue there was and is no active force to keep certain drugs illegal.

Lastly, to say you want these substances to keep being controlled is painful to read when there are many brothers and sisters out there in jail due to ethnobotanicals. You say it doesnt ¨happen very often¨ and yet you quote no statistics.. and even the unjust law meant only one person is unjustly locked up, how much is that person´s life worth ? If you don´t know them, maybe not much for you, but if it´s someone dear to you, you´d probably think differently.

Research chemicalsare legal or semi-legal. Technically, 4-aco-dmt, ald52, 1p-lsd, etc, are just another form of all those illegal substances we know and love.

As far as i know, there have been no casualties yet, despite these substances being legal and easy to obtain (There have been casualties from more dangerous alternatives like nbome's or bromo-dragonfly though).

In the netherlands, psilocin is a sort of semi-legal as well. Of the millions of tourists who come to amsterdam each year to take psychedelic truffles, only a handfull have ever done weird things like jumping off buildings. And those who do such things, usually had some psychiatric disorder already, before they went to amsterdam, or choose to combine their legal shrooms with insane amounts of alcohol.

And salvia, a much more serious drug than LSD or mushrooms in my opinion, is legal almost anywhere. There don't seem to be any problems with salvia use anywhere though. Those places where it became illegal, there usually has been some teenager filming his own suicide and putting it on youtube, after the use of it, wich then triggered a media storm, causing it to become illegal.

So no serious problems, in my view. The link between salvia and suicide has bever been established, as far as i know. Teenagers commit suicide. With or without salvia.

No, i understand your concerns. But i think reality luckily turned out to be less grimm.

In the 60's, hippie culture sort of derailed itself. All that bagwhan shit, and people ended up doing heroin eventually. But that probably was because there was no intellectual framework to fall back onto, after rejecting the old values from their parents. They entered an intellectual, cultural and spiritual vacuum after they had turned their back on everything they knew before.

I think that is different now. There are sites like this. There are books. And most people who're into psychedelics do have a more intellectual leaning or character.

The cool stuff shows there are some great minds among us. But those are a small fraction of the population. Technological progress doesn't say anything about society at large. Even a handful of geniuses per million quarter-brained individuals can drive technological progress.

I don't support criminalizing sovereignty over our own consciousness. I'm all for regulation, but we need to tread carefully.


Research chemicals are still relatively obscure.

The Netherlands has a culture and tradition of cognitive liberty and it may work well there. The tourists who visit Amsterdam are not representative of the world's population. They are better off, better educated, more open minded.

From my personal experience this is true to a degree but theres still a lot of people who take psychedelics and dont have a clue on how to handle them. They usually take LSD once and freak out because they didnt prepare properly.

I'd tend to argue that your average blue collar, television news media and pharma medication fed Joe-6-pack probably has much moar potential to benefit from the psychedelic insight than the highly intelligent, university educated, open-minded explorer types that tend to self select in seeking these things out.

Then again...