Illegal drugs are, on average, very bad. How about a policy that if you use illegal drugs you are presumptively considered not yet good enough to be in the community?
The risk profile of a drug isn’t correlated with its legal status, largely because our current drug laws were created for political purposes in the 1970s. A quote from Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
A 2010 analysis concluded that psychedelics are causing far less harm than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco. (Psychedelics still carry substantial risks, aren’t for everybody, and should always be handled with care.)
Big +1.
Really important to disambiguate the two:
”People shouldn’t do psychedelics” is highly debatable and has to argue against a lot of research demonstrating their efficacy for improving mental wellness and treating psychiatric disorders.
”Leaders & subgroups shouldn’t push psychedelics on their followers” seems straightforwardly correct.