[krohling]

I respect that perspective as I believe it's an experience many have had with drugs. My anecdotal experience with psychedelics (psilocybin specifically) is that it is a qualitatively different substance. Non-toxic, non-addictive (experience actually discourages frequent usage), and genuinely healing. It has helped me personally and many I have spoken to with depression and a range of other mental illnesses. The key to efficacy with these substances is education and responsible use, neither of which will happen in the current environment of criminalization.

[confuseddesi]

Couldn't this be handled instead by allowing doctors to prescribe these substances like they do other medication? Why decriminalize non-prescription possession instead?

[krohling]

I will add to other comments negating the value of doctors as gatekeepers by simply referring to the state of mental health care in our country. As someone who is fortunate to have only had to deal with it for a short amount of time I was still absolutely shocked. Until you've had experience with it personally (or via someone you care about) I think it's difficult to understand how abhorrent and sad it really is.

Additionally, I will add that for a drug like psilocybin the financial incentives are unlikely to ever line up. Large pharmaceutical companies will have no interest b/c it would cannibalize existing product lines. Psilocybin would never be a cash cow b/c it's so incredibly easy and inexpensive to produce. Microdoses can literally be manufactured by amateurs for fractions of a penny per dose and a bit of internet searching.

Mental health care is in an awful state and people are suffering terribly from illnesses that this drug can help with. It's cheap and easy to produce. Trusting it to the current system of us pharma and healthcare is too dangerous in my opinion.

[Bud]

Because the medical profession is demonstrably hostile towards this sort of thing and unable to act as a functional conduit for such substances.

So for purposes of what is going to be legal vs. what is going to get a lot of (almost entirely black) people tossed in jail, doctors are NOT the right gatekeepers.

[wutbrodo]

Expecting medical institutions, taken as an entity, to prioritize the well-being of their patients is a fool's errand. I want to be very clear that I don't believe this about any individual doctors I've met. But there are a lot of doctors in my family, I've had minor to moderate brushes with the medical system, and I have immediate family that's significantly and chronically ill, and all those experiences and conversations have exposed me to the combination of a poisonous culture, institutional rot, insane legal restrictions, and doctors' (somewhat understandable) anti-patient biases adding up to a system that really doesn't give that much of a shit about your well-being if you don't fit into a clean box. Psychiatric issues in particular almost _never_ fit into a clean box, and the medical establishment is somewhere between criminally incompetent, negligent, and malicious when it comes to psychiatric issues.

Now despite all that acid cynicism, I'm not actually suggesting that you fully refrain from medical or psychiatric treatment. It's just not a system that's amenable to the kind of blind faith and surrendered autonomy that you describe, especially in the case like psychedelics where they've aggressively abdicated their responsibility for half a century.