The use of psychedelics within Western Society has been plagued by controversy since the very beginning. The moniker ‘psychedelic’ translates etymologically as psyche- (the mind) + -delom (to show or reveal).

Despite millennia of deep-rooted cultural & historical use of entheogens in countries around the world, these mind-altering substances have earned a tainted cultural reputation in the Western world. Albert Hoffman’s accidental discovery of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) in the 1940s catalyzed a nation-wide movement of psychedelic use within the United States. This movement was further popularized by musicians such as The Beatles, Scott McKenzie, and Pink Floyd, as well as pro-use scientists, whose embracement of the drugs posed a threat to the structural integrity of the U.S. government.

Under pressure to respond to counterculture sentiments, the U.S. Congress (led at the time by President Richard Nixon) signed into law the Controlled Substances Act. This legislative enforcement aimed to hinder the psychedelic movement by criminalizing the production, sale, and use of these drugs across the country.

In one sweeping declaration, Nixon started the war on drugs.

“Public Enemy #1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive.” — Richard Nixon

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This decision to wage a war on drugs has cost the U.S. more than $1 trillion since 1980 and has resulted in over 40 million arrests for non-violent drug offenses. Nearly half of these have been for marijuana alone. On top of this, we remain legally bound to the consequences of his war right now.

Nixon’s decision to ban psychedelics was made in 1971 and still holds today, preventing any sort of scientific clinical studies to be conducted on “Schedule I” psychedelics.

Imagine if Trump held a press briefing in response to a failed NASA launch and stated, “We’ve found the conditions in outer space to be potentially dangerous, therefore we are declaring war on the cosmos.”

This analogy, while imperfect, illustrates a simple truth: prohibiting the scientific study of anything erases the opportunity to discover the benefits and consequences of that thing.

Recently, however, after 50 years of pushback from the scientific community, controlled studies of psychedelics (namely Psilocybin) have been officially approved by the FDA. These studies have produced some staggering results in regards to anxiety, depression, fear (of death), chronic illness, mental health, addiction, spirituality, and transcendence.

Several studies show that the efficacy of medicinally-administered mushrooms far surpasses other leading and highly-profitable western prescription medicines; this fact poses an imminent threat to large pharmaceutical companies. We will discuss these results soon.

Although a multitude of Schedule I drugs fall under the label of psychedelics (LSD, Mescaline, Psilocybin, Dimethyltryptamine, etc.), this story will focus primarily on one of the most widely used psychedelic substances in the U.S. — Psilocybin mushrooms — and how our perceptions of the drug could be more damaging than the effects of the drug itself.