Trippy “Medicine”
Listening to some of the opponents of medical marijuana over the last few years, one could be forgiven for thinking that they have never heard of a psychoactive substance being used in medicine before. These people might be surprised to learn that in England the doctor can send you home with a prescription for pain called diamorphine, a fancy word for heroin. They might be equally surprised to learn that the anti-obesity prescription Desoxyn is nothing more than methamphetamine in a pill, or that the popular ADHD medication Adderall is very similar to methamphetamine chemically and physiologically. If you've had throat, dental or nose surgery there's a chance the anesthetist used cocaine to numb your senses as it restricts the flow of blood more than any other local anesthetic (the cocaine alkaloid is extracted from coca leaves for medical use and the leftover de-cocainized extract sent to Coca Cola for flavoring). You won't hear it put this way. No doctor says to the cancer patient, “I suggest you use smack from here on out,” and no weight loss specialist asks whether you've tried meth yet. Imagine a dentist telling their patient to open wide so they can inject some blow into their gum line. Of course, medical vernacular replaces street names for drugs to provide a line of demarcation between highly stigmatized illicit activities and their pharmacological corollary under medical settings. In its online guide for safe diamorphine use for cancer sufferers, Cancer Research UK chooses to omit the word heroin completely, to obfuscate any connection with its recreational use.
Unfortunately, a consequence of hiding normally illegal drugs in plain sight in the medical world is to make them seem especially fringe and troubling when used in other contexts. It should come as no surprise then that a recent Vox poll found that most people are overwhelmingly opposed to legalizing psychedelic drugs like magic mushrooms for both recreational and medical use, despite a majority in the poll supporting marijuana legalization. This is unsurprising given that the same poll finds most people do not want cocaine, heroin, or meth to be used medically either. Presumably, most people polled had no idea that these drugs have already been in medical use for decades and therefore can't be expected to look favorably at the medical use of other drugs. But as the marijuana legalization debate is slowly being fought and won, in its footprints will emerge the great new legalization debate about psychedelics. Already in Oregon and Denver, where marijuana has been legalized for recreational use, measures are being put on the ballot to decriminalize magic mushrooms, two hundred species of fungi containing the hallucinogenic alkaloids psilocin and psilocybin.
There's no clear line separating drugs that make it into club psychedelic from those that do not—marijuana, ketamine, ecstasy and all sorts of substances can at times produce the hallucinogenic effects commensurate with a psychedelic experience. But normally when we talk about the classical psychedelics we refer to a narrow class of fungi and plants—or the substances derived from them in a laboratory—that change levels of serotonin in the brain and produce vivid hallucinations and shifts in consciousness. Not all of these substances are illegal. The mint plant salvia divinorum exhibits powerful and unusual psychedelic effects and remains legal in most countries outside the British Commonwealth, while magic mushrooms can be legally bought in some countries like Jamaica and Brazil. A special exemption even exists in the United States to allow members of the Native American Church to consume the hallucinogenic cacti known as peyote after the Drug Enforcement Administration was sued by the church for trying to prohibit a plant that had been used for four thousand years by Native Americans.
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