Viewpoint: Be wary of promises that psychedelic drugs will revolutionize mental health

Whether a psychoactive drug will bring about utopia or dystopia is a question not limited to fiction but rather increasingly salient in our modern world. As the likelihood that psychedelic drugs will be available medically and through state legislation has increased, so too has a common refrain popular in the 1950s and 1960s: that widespread psychedelic use will contribute to the creation of a better society—a world in which people are anti-war, pro-environment, and filled with love and appreciation for their fellow humans. 

[Professor David] Yaden thinks that over-exuberant promises and assumptions about global impacts could have a serious consequence: getting in the way of the research that’s going on now.

Even saying that the medicalization of psychedelics will completely solve the mental health crisis is an overstatement.

“Vast wealth inequality is being mobilized via venture capitalists to monopolize and own this space,” [Psymposia editor Brian] Pace said. “And big predictors of mental health outcomes are things like debt, political violence, systemic structural violence, climate change. Psychedelics aren’t going to solve those problems.”

Psychedelic drugs don’t need to bring about utopia in order to be valuable as research subjects or to be decriminalized.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here.