The Benefits of Hallucinogens

Former President Richard Nixon's "War on Drugs" was a complete failure. The government intervention, originally intended to free the streets of harmful drugs, has in fact not decreased drug use in the United States at all. In actuality, the "War" has wasted billions and billions of taxpayer's dollars, and caused more U.S. citizens to be imprisoned than ever before.

An additional effect of the "War on Drugs" is the increase in the stigma associated with the use of drugs today. Drugs that were once ingredients in soft drinks, and even in the Pope's wines, changed into terrible poisons that caused instant death as a result of ubiquitous nationwide anti-drug campaigning.

Though I agree that in most cases the changed image of drug use is very good, a recent article from The New Yorker, "The Trip Treatment", reveals how this change may have been bad. The changed image of drugs, and consequently the "War on Drugs" as a whole, may have taken away a key treatment option for people suffering from mental illnesses. 

According to the article, research from the 1950's revealed that hallucinogens (also known as psychedelics) , specifically LSD, and Psilocybin, found in magic mushrooms, were "useful in treating anxiety, addiction, and depression". The article goes on to explain that, between 1953 and 1957, the government allocated "four million dollars to fund a hundred and sixteen studies of LSD", and the results of the studies were "frequently positive"even if some weren't perfect in design. By the 1960's, LSD and other similar drugs were used "successfully" to treat alcoholism and end-of-life anxiety in medical patients.

Unfortunately for any patients that may have been treated after 1970, Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act, "prohibiting the use of [psychedelics] for any purpose". Therefore, research was abandoned and all of the promising results that had been acquired over the years "was all but erased from the field of pschiatry". And it was at this point that hallucinogens switched from being candidates for curing disease to drugs that only ruin lives. It is the result of the widely accepted belief in the latter that many find the topic of this post so surprising. And that belief was created entirely as a result of Nixon's act and more generally, the War on Drugs. 

Had Nixon's act not been signed, research and clinical trials with psychedelics would have continued, and psyschedelics may have gone on to become common drugs, tremendously helping to ease the suffering of those with mental illnesses, or maybe not at all. The point is that we will never know. Because of government intervention, one can only speculate what the effects of psychedelic drugs may have been.