As a society, Americans are committed to the principle that the production of knowledge should be uninhibited and access to it should be universal. This is the democratic ideal. We think that where knowledge is concerned, more is always better. We don’t believe that there are things that we would rather not know, or things that only some should know ⎯ just as we don’t believe that there are points of view that should not be expressed, or citizens who are too wrongheaded to vote.

This book documents psychedelics as a source of intellectual knowledge and cognitive processes. Of course, they also provide psychotherapeutically valuable knowledge (Grof 1975, 1980, Winkelman & Roberts 2007), but that is for other chapters. If we apply Menand’s standards, then current psychedelic drug policy is anti-American, anti-democratic, and anti-knowledge. Will policy experts figure out a way to broaden Menand’s ideal to include psychedelic ideas and thinking processes?