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Hi everyone,

    Just like everyone else has said before, I really enjoyed our class discussion the tuesday before break, and I have been mulling over the topics and questions brought up during our class period since then.  Something that has recently been brought to my attention is that during our discussion I feel like I may have had an unfounded biased opinion against the widespread use of pychedelic drugs.  I completely agree with most who have previously posted that with the information that the assigned articles gave and that I have subsequently gained, that the research of, if not direct use of pyschedelic drugs in the treatment of disorders such as PTSD should be legal, and that preventing such drug research is unfounded and seemingly hypocritical, as many of the commonly used drugs today (SSRI's etc), have been shown to sometimes have deliterious consequences without absolute effectiveness.  However, although I do believe that the use of these drugs for medical treatment specifcally should be legal, during our discussion it was difficult for me to be fully convinced that legalization of psychedelic drugs would be a good choice (neglecting the fact that I think it would take a very long time for a government which has seen the non-conformist effects of drug culture in the 60's to ever allow legalization of those drugs in the U.S.) 

I felt discomforted in some way about the widespread use of psychedelic drugs, a thought which, being brought up by parents who fully enjoyed the benefits of a 60's hippie experience, was foreign.  But neglecting the government for a moment, when I think back to our discussion I think what made me most uncomfortable about the widespread use of these types of drugs is that it would somehow be unnatural or against our nature to use drugs which so obviously altered our mental state, in such a profound way, on a regular basis, that even if it were not proven harmful to our health, that it would in some way be going against a natural course of knowledge acquisition and thought pre-ordained by mother nature. 

Having thought about this more, I have changed my opinion about "naturalness" of these drugs, mostly because it began to occur to me that by taking these drugs we are simply tapping into a function or use of our own, evolutionarily gained brain that had we not used these drugs, we could not have known about, which definitely ties in to many people's points during class that these drugs can be used for creative purposes.  Thinking about it this way, it seems that taking these drugs is an incredible way of temporarily altering the mind to think in a completely different way.  When we spoke in the first or second session about the diseased brain, I think a lot of people brought up the notion that diseases such as autism are not in fact dysfunctions but instead allow some individuals to excel at very different things.  Perhaps drugs create the same type of mental diversity in a more transient setting, a fact that in the end seems simply taking advantage of a natural ability of humans to create a society which benefits from the diverse abilities of each individual brain (or at least to have this type of society be a future goal).