Part of why I consider psychedelic law special is the dual identity of psychedelics as sacraments and drugs simultaneously, subject to completely different legal restrictions.
This contradiction should be a subject of interest in policymaking, since it indicates that psychedelics are a technology whose effects are beyond our current comprehension.
How can a “medication” induce a “religious,” “mystical,” or “spiritual” experience?
How can you process the idea that the greater degree of a mystical experience could correspond to a higher degree of “efficacy” in mental health care?
Much of the news these days is about the unexpected consequences of technology.
If psychedelics are a cognitive technology, then what could be the unexpected consequences of legal mass markets for psychedelics? There are already multiple markets for the multiple forms of psychedelics out there, with varied consumer populations. Markets don’t sit still, especially with hot new commodities/technologies/spiritualities: presumably the consumer populations will evolve as well as for-profit interests market new products, possibly targeted to neurotransmitter systems in accordance with the latest theories of personality and motivation, and new spiritual practices synchretize.
I wonder about the legal consequences of perceived dramatic personality – if not identity – change in the context of estate disputes, custody disputes, child neglect proceedings, and insanity defenses. I wonder whether pharmaceutical tort lawyers will try bringing a class action suit.
I wonder how psychedelic technologies will interact with other s in the commercial market for mental health care, including companies selling non-psychedelic substances spun off during research into therapeutic uses of criminally-prohibited substances and the medical device industry.
Markets don’t sit still and they interact with governmental economic policy.I assume that the primary interactions between psychedelics and the consumer markets will be in terms of government public health care expenditures whether in terms of reductions in the public health budgets or, conversely, increases due to unexpected public health (and public order) expenses.
When I say consumer markets I mean both the “medical system” and some kind of general “adult use” market under state laws.I see no reasonable question as to whether is a need to take action under state law to regulate the psychedelic markets because the “adult use” market already exists, and markets don’t sit still, as we have seen in cannabis. The unlicensed psilocybin market is coming aboveground quickly and fusing easily with the cannabis-consuming mass market. It’s an obvious cross-over – two naturally-occurring psychedelic substances whose use dates far back before the beginning of “modern medicine” with solid religious/spiritual lineage. Cannabis is a perfect prototype for psychedelic mushrooms and their extracts (except to the extent it’s not). At a minimum, cannabis familiarized the paradigm of a versatile medicine that has been wrongly banned.
Do policymakers understand psilocybin?
There is no choice but to understand how the unlicensed psychedelic markets will react as the psychedelic medical markets heat up and media coverage continues, as it did in the late 1950s and 1960s, to tout the breakthrough effects of psychedelics and the message that they are the future of mental health care. People want relief now.
The markets are only as safe as the regulators are effective, and the official regulators may not be able to regulate the markets as well as the existing market can.
How does one a regulate a market for a medication that can induce a mystical experience?
Where does a race to the center of consciousness mean especially when device manufacturers are also in the markets?
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