Selling Psychedelics to Society

For a psychonaut, discussing the experiences that he or she has had is often difficult. There are a number of reasons for this but one is more disheartening the others. Describing the experience is difficult but this can be overcome with the cleaver use of language. Getting other people to listen, on the other hand, can be quite challenging. The general population has been conditioned to fear and mistrust psychedelic drugs and to view their users as unreliable. Many people, blinded by propaganda, will dismiss the lessons of the inner consciousness. They will judge the psychonaut. They will call the traveler of the mind and soul a criminal. They will, ultimately, miss a valuable message if they can not be made to see the trippy truth. There is hope, however. The world is changing and our voices can reach more people than ever before. Psychedelics are creeping back into popular culture and if we act now we may be able to change the public opinion about these useful substances and, with a little time and a lot of work, we may see a world where people are free to travel the mind without fear of judgment or repercussion.

Thanks to the decades of anti-drug propaganda and people's seeming unwillingness to question authority, a returning psychonaut will often find it difficult to share the revelations he or she had while tripping. For years, people have been told that these are dangerous drugs with dangerous users. When one admits to using these substances, he or she starts out as a criminal in the mind of whomever he or she is conversing with. Questing authority is difficult for many people. Their world view relies on the idea that the authorities can be trusted and have their best interest at heart. To them, these lies taste like truth. It is easy to judge these misguided individuals harshly but this is the wrong approach. If a psychonaut wishes to win the hearts and change the minds of others, he or she must understand the root of the issue before it can be addressed.

Questions and their answers are frightening to the ignorant and poison to propagandists. When a user tells someone that he or she has seen the truth and that we all have been lied to about these drugs, it is upsetting to many people. The lies of the authorities are designed to make people feel secure and righteous. When you tell them that you have asked scary questions about these substances and received frightening answers about the society which bans them, their security is replaced with uncertainty and their righteousness evaporates. Fear is what turns people away from the words of the psychonaut. This fear is the is the disease spread by propaganda and truth is its cure.

Knowing that fear is the source of resistance, one can now navigate around it. We can design our rhetoric to put their minds at ease. We can let them know that being fooled by the lies doesn't make them stupid and spare their pride. We can tell them that they are the victims of the propaganda and we are here to show them the truth. Once the fear is overcome, they will be more receptive to the our message. When people hear about the value of psychedelics they without the influence of propaganda clouding their minds they will come around. We all have stress, depression, and mental fatigue at times and psychedelics can improve these things. We all have questions about the nature of existence and of the "self" and psychedelics can help people find answers to these questions. We can all become more enlightened from examining things under the strange light of a psychedelic experience. These and all the many other benefits of psychedelic usage can be sold to society, if we try.

Right now there is a unique opportunity for those of us who would like to see the normalization and eventual legalization of, at least, some psychedelic substances. Tripping seems to be more popular than it has been at any other point in my lifetime. Society is warming to the idea of psychedelic drugs as a relatively harmless pastime and that makes our job easier. There is less fear to overcome. The lies have grown feeble. At the same time, technology has increased the reach of our voices. If you, like me, believe that psychedelics can make the world a better place, speak out on the subject if you can or support people who you think will push the cause effectively. We have seen (in the United States) the idea of legal cannabis go from being unthinkable to teetering on the edge of reality in less than a generation. With some work on our part we can, hopefully, make similar progress on psychedelics.

Peace.

All the images in this post were sourced from the free image website, unsplash.com.