In 2019, Oakland effectively voted to decriminalise mushrooms- a progressive move for a city with a long history of punishing its black residents for drug use. Now some black residents are using them to heal from the racial trauma they deal with in everyday life.
Psilocybin as mutual aid is going to be a powerful force. /r/unclebens is the easiest growing technique and will give you a large enough surplus to gift without thinking about the cost.
yeah, it's driven by capital and it's not being used to push decarceralization. you can also imagine much the same neoliberal motives as the current pharmaceutical industry if, like me, you don't think recreational drugs "expand consciousness" in a meaningful sense without a new social context accompanying them.
me and 5 CIA guys all huddled on a bench in the park, with our hands in our pockets, looking completely unsuspicious
:fedposting::fedposting::fedposting::fedposting::fedposting::fedposting:
possibly to increase general passivity? weed can make it easier to just get home from work and sink into a bowl without ever reflecting on larger mechanisms, rinse and repeat until you die.
This is the marxist answer. The state exists to reproduce the social hierarchy, and the contradictions caused by capital threaten that. So state actors must work as "crisis managers" to prevent the working class from realizing these contradictions and overthrowing capitalism. One of the easiest ways to do this is distracting the public with cheap comforts, a la "bread and circuses." Psychoactive drugs seem like a great distraction from the miserable alienation of working life.
IIRC before the Temperance movement it was common for employers to provide booze during the workday (as part of the pay) and to pay people in it outright for similar reasons.
Honestly just smoking weed for a few years. Actually just starting to smoke weed, should teach anyone to understand its not great shit for the brain
There isn't NIMBY opposition to psychedelics. A supervised injection site or needle exchange would be great but the issue of where to put it threatens wealthy crackers. With psychedelics there isn't the same use stigma, criminal black market, or medical grey area that they can seize on. When we were passing Prop 122 locally the main opposition was right-wing Christians who oppose everything good. That bill also came from a grassroots groundswell, so the state wasn't pushing psychedelic legalisation on us. The state for its part has been adamant about banning them and research into them for decades, something we chipped away at slowly and with significant structural barriers. We were forcing it on them because the substances work.
An illegal shroom shop opened in my city not long ago, made billboards and everything. There was a line stretching around the block right up until the owners were arrested - and people lingered in line through the arrest itself!
I'm glad Colorado's decriminalisation bill didn't allow for retail sales. With cannabis I get dispensaries- it's hard and expensive to grow worthwhile shit. Psilocybe mushrooms are so easy to grow on such cheap substrate that a commercial op would be doing so for a penny or two per dose at most. Then the customer base is scattered and atomised, so while it helps some people others will take it irresponsibly. With our gift economy you can grow yourself, receive it from non-commercial growers, or fall in with an org like the NIN one they mentioned in this video. Psilocybin becomes the community drug that you get from friends that care about you, give to people you care about, and take with supportive people who ideally are working toward some bigger social project.
people lingered in line through the arrest itself!
cannot even imagine being this based. "howdy officers, when you're done with that arrest id really like to talk to them about the shrooms they were selling"
Psychedelics are cool and good and the more people who have access to them, the better off we will be. I have no doubt that there is at least some nefarious intent from the capitalist class to just keep people placated, but psychedelic use tends to increase empathy and it will eventually have the opposite intended effect.
Tryptamines in particular run counter to social control arguments. Hippies are certainly recuperative social control but it's only a hippie drug because they made it illegal for all other communities that had something to lose. I hate hippies and love psychedelics from a psychiatric perspective. Beyond the empathy its real power is causing introspection. Psilocybin strips your personality and worldview at an existential level, then gives you a blank slate to reconstruct yourself. If you do a more radical version of what NIN is doing, it's inherently a drug of liberation. People come with their trauma, take it in a positive environment with an authentically supportive community, and get an extremely powerful sense of the universalised ecology our politics grow out of. If a group like the Black Panthers or mutual aid orgs have it as a tool in their de-alienation tool kit, my god is it powerful shit.
