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by ModernCannabist 742 days ago
I dislike this article.

It has some ideas worth discussion but it's wrapped in a thick layer of what seems to be purposeful misunderstand, and misstatements. It lacks crucial context.

> "Turn on" meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers engaging them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. "Tune in" meant interact harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. "Drop out" suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. "Drop Out" meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily, my explanations of this sequence of personal development are often misinterpreted to mean "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity" ~ T. Leary

That's Leary on his own use of the phrase, and I think this article is continuing this purposeful misinterpretation. Further, the article treats the phrase as if it is synthesis of everything the psychedelic movement stood to offer.

While I'm rather interested in exploring where the psychedelic movement moved from counter-culture to grind-culture, to do so with such hyperbolic statements as

> By contrast, the lifestyle influencers hawking psychedelics today lack the intellectual ambition and the incentive to offer their audiences anything other than another consumption niche.

leaves me feeling the author is more interesting in exploring their own opinions.

1 comments

You made Tim Leary cry in his grave!
Nawh, it was Aldous Huxley. I could hear the wailing from here drowning out my downstairs neighbor's 2 inappropriate-breed-for-apartments yapping and howling dogs.