It's only a treat if it doesn't have a productive medicinal purpose. Alcohol? Solidly a treat- when we prescribe it it's only to prevent seizures in severe alcoholics. There are very narrow contexts in which alcohol is useful for a very small subset of people. Cannabis? Trickier. I use it as a treat, but medicinally it has valid uses. A strong indica is a better sleep aid for me than ambien or trazodone without side effects. We have to consider the medical utility alongside its social usage and weigh the meaning of one with the superficiality of the other. And even then, I'm a Marxist despite smoking it at the moment. I'd be a Marxist if I didn't use it tomorrow. It has no bearing on my politics and as a treat is only a healthier alternative to any other treat I'd consume under any other system. If the revolution was won tomorrow I'd still use it both to sleep and because it makes boring things fun. I'd still have to do the dishes and would still garden and would still play video games before bed under socialism, all things markedly better while stoned.

For psychedelics to be an empty treat, they'd need to be recreational. Despite having access to as much psilocybin, DMT, and LSD as I could want, I've never taken it as a substitute for cannabis or beer. I've never considered it a fun alternative to boring sobriety. It's an emotionally intense and meditative experience which might be overwhelming. I feel the same apprehension toward taking it that day that I do when I'm about to get my blood drawn. It actively detracts from the fun I'd otherwise be having while camping, and while it makes sitting in a hammock pretty my idea of fun isn't sitting in a hammock for three hours feeling nauseous and anxious. But medicinally, there's a profound value there. With social anxiety I'd face the same issue sober or on a worse class of anti-anxiety drug or under a better economic system. Microdose and there are none of the side effects or addiction risk of a benzo. With trauma the prescriptions are physically addictive to the point of causing microseizures during withdrawal, are neurotoxic with your largest concentration of serotonin being in your gut's microbiome, and expensive. Psilocybin costs pennies per dose if you grow it and you're able to address that trauma in a novel way as if you're viewing yourself externally. With addiction the rehab industry is predatory and full of religious zealots. Psilocybin snaps you out of the negative thought loops which encourage relapse while providing a positive replacement for the self-medication.

It's more a tool in the psychiatrist's toolkit than it is a treat. Psychiatry has just been structurally denied this kind of drug for half a century and the ones that developed instead don't work as well. Reintroduce it to psychiatry and we're again seeing that it's a way to correct symptoms rather than control them because of how it interacts with the brain on a chemical level. In my ideal world it wouldn't be a contemporary movement clawing its way back to legitimacy- first stolen through religious justification and then by right wing justification- and psilocybin wouldn't be something I have to give people under the table. It'd just be one more compound and probably one of the first they try.

It is the system we all live in. The treats must flow.