Recreational Drugs May Be More Beneficial Than Once Thought

The deeper we get into the 21st century, the more research suggests that recreational drugs might not carry the harm we once assigned to them. If that holds up, it has real consequences for the War on Drugs, which drains enormous sums of public money that could be redirected elsewhere. The word recreational itself just points to anything experimental a person might try during their free time. What follows is a look at substances like LSD and the case that, used thoughtfully, they can contribute to someone's personal growth.

So where does the stigma come from? Before the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, there were studies indicating that compounds like LSD could help a person become more attuned to their own psyche, and that this heightened contact with the self might ease a range of mental disorders. Whatever sits underneath the fear of psychedelics is the same force driving the War on Drugs. Governments pour millions, arguably billions, into chasing cartels and locking up young people caught with recreational substances. A single arrest can follow someone for years, making it hard to land a job or get accepted into a decent school, which blunts whatever they might have given back to their community.

Look closely at LSD and its relatives and the core problem becomes fairly plain: it comes down to a lack of education and a lack of self-control. Those two tend to travel together, because self-control usually grows out of knowing more about the thing in front of you, including a drug and whatever role it might usefully play.

Suppose LSD and similar substances were legalized. What would take the place of the current enforcement machine? Part of the danger now is structural. Because these drugs are banned, people buy them on the street or through black markets, where nothing is regulated and a dose can be cut with other chemicals. Without any instruction, users also have no idea what a safe amount even looks like. And there is such a thing as a safe amount. By some accounts the therapeutic range runs around 20 micrograms a day on a microdosing schedule, and somewhere between 100 and 250 micrograms for a session of LSD-assisted psychotherapy. The stories from the 1960s about people hallucinating and leaping out of windows came from taking far too much in settings that offered no support. The substance was never the real culprit.

We have spent decades and staggering amounts of money trying to scare people off through fines, prison, mandatory rehab, and outright prohibition. A smarter use of those funds might be teaching kids candidly about the risks involved. At the same time we could explain what psychedelics like LSD may offer for self-understanding, with the caveat that it be done under the eye of a primary care doctor, a psychiatrist, or other medical staff. The obstacle is getting physicians, researchers, and drug companies on board, since Big Pharma in the United States is a business worth billions. Pushing genuine wellness threatens a chunk of that profit.

A lot of what gets labeled science-backed medicine is really pharmaceutical money paying scientists to endorse conventional treatments. Set cannabis and LSD next to SSRIs (antidepressants) and neuroleptic tranquilizers (antipsychotics), and the latter clearly carry the heavier side-effect burden. Antipsychotics can bring on diabetes and tardive dyskinesia, and they tamp down dopamine, the brain's own reward chemistry. There is a reason psychiatrists get called shrinks and these prescriptions get called shrink meds.

Maybe the so-called party drugs deserve a second look. Life gets heavy, and stepping away from reality for a while is not automatically a flaw. That is a big part of why LSD shows up so often at concerts; people go to concerts to break the grind of ordinary days. Since the '60s, rock and roll and psychedelics have offered a shared doorway out of the mundane, which is partly why religious circles took to calling rock the devil's music.

What actually damages our growth probably is not the escape through LSD or other psychedelics. It is the manner of it, the tendency to overdo it, and that excess traces back again to missing education, which breeds the shame people feel after they use.