Doesn’t it actually have some medical benefits such as helping with cancer or mental health problems and depression?
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Aside from historical reasons – some people get lasting effects, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_perception_disorder , and they are really nasty. It’s basically disability for unpredictable period from months to years.
Also, they are hard to control. Drivers, pilots, machinists and other people at high-risk professions usually pass a quick medical checkup before every shift. It takes a simple breathalizer to check for alcohol intoxication, but it’s way more complex to check for all kinds of other drugs.
Ignore all the nonsense answers. Psilocybin is Schedule 1 due lack of proven medical uses. The main reason scheduling rarely ever changes is because it’s near impossible to get research approval for schedule 1 drugs.
It does not have an “established medical use” to get it out of schedule 1. Yes, there are a lot of new data and studies, but relatively speaking, they are quite small and do not need the standard criteria of “medical use.”
It is difficult to convince people to shoot each other in a war, or enforce unjust laws with a bullet when your enforcers can take mushrooms and see through all the bullshit.
Afaik, drug scheduling is based off potential for abuse vs therapeutic potential. What that means is if a drug has a high likelihood to be misused, with a low likelihood of being used therapeutically, it will be scheduled lower. If a drug doesn’t have a recognized therapeutic potential it will be schedule one most likely.
Tbh, anything that makes someone feel good can be argued to have therapeutic potential, but it’s also likely to be addictive.
It was associate with hippies and the anti-war left, aka Nixon’s political enemies. Jail your political enemies, and it’s easier to get your policies and bills passed. Of course, it’s more complicated than that, but at the time there was a lack of evidence that shrooms caused harm; it’s evident it was a political move.
Top dogs are still looking for the best way to capture the largest profit from legalization.
Direct quote from John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon:
“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Source- [https://www.vera.org/reimagining-prison-webumentary/the-past-is-never-dead/drug-war-confessional](https://www.vera.org/reimagining-prison-webumentary/the-past-is-never-dead/drug-war-confessional)
It would be hard for the government to make money from it. And could cut into pharmaceutical profits.
I’ll just say this: I’m not entirely against legalizing psilocybin. But it does have its pitfalls. For one, if you have schizoid traits or other mental health problems, there is a chance that it can intensify these problems or even lead you to into deterioration. Also, you can do some stupid shit while tripping – like wandering into someone else’s property potentially endangering your life. Overall, I think it’s fine and those examples aren’t always probable – but it has it’s own societal problems that are unique.
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