I did the one for Washington State, with apologies to George, but it was too cluttered to keep his face.

of the weed, but did vote for the initiative in hopes it would help to reduce crime, increase taxes and decrease our prison population. Time will tell...

You don't have to be someone who uses cannabis for recreational, medical, religious or sexual purposes, but you can still support the sensible policy Polis and others have set forth.

If you read up on how marijuana became illegal, it would most definitely make you want to overturn the law.

If you care about things like the 4th amendment - you should support an end to the war on drugs, entirely.

I'm never going to use heroin or meth, etc. etc. etc. - but I want them to be legal because I think addiction is a physical health issue, not a criminal issue. It only becomes a criminal issue because it's illegal. I want addicts to be able to go to a local gov-run pharmacy, that also has lots of counseling for those who would like to quit entirely.

Let the cost be dirt cheap, comparatively speaking, and criminals will have to move on to some other activity to make money.

legalize the use of heroin, cocaine and other more potent drugs, because of the public health threat their use would pose to others. I'd support decriminalizing some aspects of these drugs like simple posession, if the trade off was the user got drug couseling

Decriminalization would be a good place to start.

Most everyone I know who wants to end the drug war (which is what we're really talking about), doesn't want to encourage drug use. We've seen, tho, that moving to a treatment model works for many drugs - including alcohol. Portugal has shown more than a decade of success with their program.

Most people no longer label alcoholics as moral degenerates - tho they did in the past (when it was legal, pre-prohibition.) This was part of the attempt to stop men from drinking up the paycheck.

What has worked, tho, isn't labeling alcoholics as degenerate. What has worked is to give them the space to get treatment for an addiction. Most people who drink alcohol aren't addicted. But for those who are, the current approach is better.

I would also like to see LSD re-legalized for potential use as a drug to help treat alcoholics. Did you know that the founder of AA used LSD to help treat his addiction?

When Leary, et al, started talking about LSD as a recreational substance - that's when the trouble started.

Anyway, many of the expenses that stem from drug abuse are health issues - like sharing needles. If addicts had free access to clean needles, the cost of treatment for addiction would be much less because it's HUGELY expensive to treat HIV/AIDS.

Those associated costs are the reason to put such things in a legal, clinical setting.

show earlier this month in which a young drug addict ultimately got treated for his addiction by a drug used in Europe, but not approved for use in the US ostensibly because the drug was so low cost that the cost of drug trials to get it approved could not be recouped.

Now I know this show is "based" on real events, but is the existence of such a drug a fiction of the show, or fact?

some people claim that it helps addicts deal with withdrawal - but, imo, most people need support from others to build a life.

But I can see how a psychedelic could be used for therapy in the same way that some use hypnosis - most of the natural psychedelics that I've read about (I have no personal experience with them) seem to be a sort of "detox" - that's what one doctor claims who was trying to get a patent to be able to remove the hallucinogenic aspect to use for drug treatment by isolating the "detox" element. This is a very western approach.

These natural substances all evolved their uses in spiritual settings in what are now marginalized groups. Who's to say their religious practices are any less valid than someone who fasts and prays and has hallucinations in a desert?

One doctor that I know of has been doing studies with ibogaine for a while now and there are also informal networks - underground sorts of things, addicts helping addicts. Alternet had a pretty interesting article about this a while back.

I don't know if it's that the low cost would be the issue. I don't think enough clinical trials have been done in settings that would allow people to quantify results over time, etc. etc.

but if it's not a substance that kills you, and it has helped some people - I guess I don't understand why something like that would be illegal. I think it goes back to the scare stories of psychedelic drugs and the fear of them in traditional western society.

which is why I think those things should not be be illegal. If someone wants to see if something helps with an oftentimes intractable situation - I guess I think adults should be able to make cost/benefit analyses - we do this all the time with pharmaceutical substances, and with all sorts of issues in life.

As far as LSD,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9131181/LSD-could-treat-alcoholism-because-trips-make-you-reassess-addiction.html

I never knew LSD was not addictive, it fact always thought the opposite. Learned a lot from you today. Thanks.

I've never had one of those, but I've gotten migraines in the past. I hear cluster headaches are worse - and migraines are pretty intolerable.

anyway, I saw a video about this guy in Texas who, every three months, iirc, sets aside a weekend day and takes psychedelic mushrooms.

By doing this, he does not have cluster headaches and go go about his regular life.

There's obviously some benefit for certain neurological issues with these substances and we, as a govt, shouldn't be so reactionary and backassward that we can't look at them dispassionately to see how they may help alleviate suffering.

Here's this horrible criminal in action:

sad to think that the therapeutic uses of LSD were a commonly known new hope and with few side effects back in 1967--then Nixon shut everything down

also is that they all seem to involve purging. Just about everyone wants to vomit before the hallucinations begin. Afaik, that's not common for LSD.

Again, it's a western view, but some people think part of the value of the natural psychedelics is their ability to rid the body of parasites - that's one claim about ayahuasca.

Another Nat'l Geo show featured an American woman who went to the Amazon and she swears she puked out demons. Me, I don't generally believe in that sort of thing, but it had meaning for her and what she hoped to accomplish by the ceremony (for her, it was dealing with long-standing depression and other things.)

What's also interesting is the way the Nat'l Geo section about the guy who treats his cluster headaches with mushrooms is the way it's framed. The guy is so very concerned that he's not identified as part of the "counterculture" surrounding mushrooms and he doesn't enjoy the experience - but I wonder if he would have a different experience if he didn't think he was breaking the law just to keep his sanity, so to speak, by dealing with his headaches. Nat'l Geo even provides "ominous" music when he talks about his anxiety before taking them.

What all of these seem to do, neurologically, is something sort of like MDMA (something else made illegal b/c of its recreational uses) - and that's to flood the brain with seratonin - from at least one receptor, and likely many more.

That's what I think serves as a "detox" function or a "reset" function for people. Over time, that person's standard production of seratonin lead to a return to the previous state, unless the substance also helped to create new receptors so that someone's seratonin function was enhanced over a longer term.

Anyway, that's my guess as to what's going on after the fact.

When you think about it - Nixon was like the oozing boil on the ass of humanity in the U.S. He gave us Karl Rove and all the southern strategy politics and the use of war as a dirty trick to win presidential elections.

It's like the U.S. needs to purge those demons from its consciousness - and the voting booth is too compromised to accomplish this, so we remain in a cycle of negative political behaviors.

brilliant observations and so true! it's agony waiting for the times to shift...