My New VOX essay:
The hallucinogens aren’t ordinary drugs. Therefore neither side of the ordinary drug-policy debate - prohibition v. commercial legalization - offers a good fit for them.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
View all posts by Mark Kleiman
It should be obvious by now that Schedule I was a mistake. It's where scientific knowledge goes to die, after liberal infliction of blunt-force trauma by the puritanically ignorant.
Psychedelics are half of "drugs like heroin and LSD," the almost-invariable cliche that gets tossed up every time a Serious Person starts talking about the legal status of cannabis, and how it maybe does not belong with those Hard Drugs.
Getting rid of the "we're not even going to think about studying that" category is going to be a big part of any general move toward a not-crazy, not-stupid set of policies on psychoactive substances, IMHO.
The government has no business getting involved in what we put in our bodies. All they are doing is perpetuating ignorance about drugs and that ignorance is what is doing all the damage.
For what it is worth https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25563446 has a brief review of a topic worth exploring.
Interesting perspective. Obviously, something is wrong with how we legislate drugs in this country, and this is an interesting path to understanding what we can do about it.