Mother Earth provides her own remedies, why psychoactive substances deserve a chance

Eric Hill

Opinion Editor

This week in San Jose California, a host of researchers, doctors and psychologist will gather to discuss one of mankind’s oldest medicines.  According to the New York Times, the medicine discussed will be psychoactive hallucinogens such as Psilocybin (magic mushrooms).  This is the largest conference held in over four decades, since drug policy has shifted to allow limited research of scheduled substances.

According to research conducted in a study at Johns Hopkins University, psilocybin has showed promising results in resolving issues of depression and anxiety for patients experiencing life-threatening diseases like cancer.  Participants in the study like former clinical psychologist Dr. Clark Martin, found the use of psilocybin to aid in resolving difficult emotions caused by his cancer, allowing him to connect to the world in a self described “spiritual experience.”

Shamans of both North and South American indigenous peoples have used drugs like psilocybin, mescaline, peyote, salvia and others to resolve communal problems for hundreds if not thousands of years.  Western medicine has failed to do the same because of a fear developed from psychoactive abuse during the 1960’s and 70’s.  Under the Drug Scheduling Act of 1973 many drugs associated with the hippie movement became illegal in the U.S., creating barriers for researcher to explore the potential uses of these drugs.

Psychoactive drugs are still treated with a stigma.  For instance last year salvia divinorium was banned in Virginia because a few teenagers experimented with it, raising concerns about a new potential for abuse.  The problem with this sort of knee jerk reaction to drugs, is that while on the surface these might seem like open and shut issues about protecting citizens, users of psychoactive drugs rarely abuse them.  People don’t trip on acid every day, they don’t take salvia to “calm down” and anyone who has been on an eight hour magical mushroom journey doesn’t want to talk to the Smurfs regularly.  Usually these experiences help people learn about themselves and experience a dissociate state of mind that can be therapeutic.

The most common drugs of abuse are the ones you find in your pharmacy.  Yet the problems these drugs are designed to address are often exacerbated by drug dependence or replaced by a plethora of new side effects.  I could probably ramble for ages about the failure of U.S. drug policy but that would be a waste of paper, the public has known for years that drug policy needs to be revised.

What should be advocated for, and what this conference shows, is that the public deserves a chance for researches to examine and study these drugs.  We do not know enough about the human mind to discount the usefulness of natural substances that have been used successfully in indigenous cultures for generation.  So if you take pharmaceutical drugs, or know someone who does, go online and do a little bit of research first.  You may find that the pill you are holding is a poor substitute for something our ancestors may have in their medicine bag.