Ending The War On Drugs Would Get People Socialising Again

Everyone is lamenting the lack of sociability among young people in recent years. Even Boomer media like Fox News is asking whether the nightclub scene is dying out. The sociability crisis is being blamed for increasing rates of depression and for plummeting birthrates. No truly effective solutions have been offered yet, so this essay suggests a way to get the party (re)started.

This lack of socialising is not good for society. Socialising is how social bonds are created (hence the name), and these bonds are what prevents us from falling back into a dog-eat-dog pre-civilisational jungle. Successful societies, however large or small, are made up of people who are friends. Absent quality socialising, the stress of proximity makes people into enemies.

The problem is that the usual methods of socialising are either absent (as in third spaces) or no longer desired (as in churches or pubs). So many would-be socialisers have become discouraged from the lack of quality social options, leading them to sit at home on the Internet.

I am an early Millennial, which is not young, but it’s young enough to be tired of pisshead culture. It’s so boring. I’m tired of listening to sad old fools droning on about how great they used to be when they were young. I’m also tired of watching young people turn into chimpanzees, and the general narcissistic toddler vibe. I want a different buzz.

These are common sentiments among people younger than 50. We’re tired of alcohol. Moreover, we know how dangerous it is now. People today have access to research like that of Professor David Nutt, which suggests that alcohol actually does more harm than any other drug. People didn’t know that even 20 years ago.

Many young people know this now, though, which is why they’re increasingly choosing to sit at home, on weed, watching YouTube or Netflix, rather than going to pubs. The vast majority of those young people would rather socialise if they had a decent environment in which to do it, but they don’t. This is not an accidental tragedy, but an inevitable result of bad laws.

There’s one obvious solution: end the War on Drugs.

Already it’s very common among people younger than 50 to socialise on the basis of doing drugs other than alcohol. At the moment, the vast majority of this activity takes place in private, by necessity, owing to the law. An alternative to pubs could bring this activity into the sunlight and, with it, the people who are into those alternatives.

Here I’m not talking about places to do hard drugs, such as injection rooms. My approach is simple: anything recognised as a potential social substitute for alcohol, with a safer harm profile than alcohol, should be made readily available to reduce alcohol harms. This means that heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine would remain underground.

If there was a cannabis cafe in my city it would be ideal. I would love to be able to meet interesting travellers without the ever-present threat of violence that comes with pubs. Dutch-style cafes are all that anyone needs in this regard. Cafes in New Zealand could be even better than Dutch ones, because in New Zealand it’s easier to have a sunny courtyard.

MDMA lounges would also attract a younger crowd back into the cities. Like alcohol, MDMA is an entactogen that makes social interaction easier and more fun. But MDMA doesn’t make people violent or aggressive. As such, it could achieve many of the benefits of alcohol use without so many of the drawbacks. People already use MDMA regularly, so being able to access a safe and measured dose of it would improve life for many.

Of course, psychedelic dens would also exist if the War on Drugs ended. Imagine a place like a bar where one could melt into a sofa for a few hours, listening to Shpongle or Alan Watts drum ‘n’ bass remixes. Or not melt, but have great conversation with intelligent people. Somewhere like this could happily sell a basic solid dose of LSD, psilocybin or mescaline for $20-30 and then sell Vs or Red Bulls for $5-10.

The ideal outcome would be a range of venues that offered various combinations of psychoactive experiences, decor and music. All of these places would be safer than pubs, but all are impossible dreams as long as the War on Drugs continues.

The Boomers who oppose this need to get with modern science. Not modern morality (I’m not arguing that), but science. Whether the use of drugs other than alcohol is degenerate is not relevant, because modern science confirms that many of them are much less dangerous than alcohol. And because no-one – especially not me – is arguing for alcohol to become more restricted, the logic is that these safer alternatives to alcohol should be legalised.

The contention of this essay is that young people want to socialise just as much as young people in previous generations. They just no longer want to do alcohol, which is the only realistic choice in most cases. So they tend to stay at home. This is a great tragedy. The solution is ending the War on Drugs.

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Some Very Basic Advice For The Mentally Ill, From A Veteran Of The Mental Health System!

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of my entry into the New Zealand mental health system. It’s been a frustrating and horrifying journey, a blend of Brave New World and Dante’s Inferno. Because much of what mental health experts have told me in this time has turned out to be false, I have had to teach myself about psychiatry to a major extent. If I could summarise what I have learned about dealing with a psychiatric condition oneself, I would give two basic pieces of advice.

First, understand nervous system regulation.

Modern psychiatric theory has abandoned the chemical imbalance model for the traumagenic neurodevelopmental (TN) model. This means that no well-informed person still believes that mental illness is mostly caused by chemical imbalances that can only be corrected by expensive pharmaceuticals.

According to the TN model, early childhood trauma plays the major role in mental illness by causing the brain to develop in unnatural ways. The brains of highly traumatised people tend to respond much differently to stress: some anxious and neurotic types powerfully over-react, some bluntened and depressed types under-react. Such abnormal responses to stress can make it much harder to live a normal life.

This model has implications for those who have, until now, believed that their condition was the result of something intrinsically wrong with them mentally or spiritually. It turns out that most psychiatric conditions are actually physiological in nature.

Somatic symptoms such as headaches, insomnia, nausea and migranes are often stress responses, and signals that the nervous system is already hyperaroused. Anxiety and depression are common consequences of suffering this hyperarousal for an extended period of time. As such, keeping the nervous system well-regulated is crucial for lessening the impacts of most psychiatric conditions.

The best way to do this is to avoid stress, which is not always possible. The grim truth is that most stresses are forced on people by the needs to find food and shelter. Nonetheless, there’s a lot each individual can do to minimise the stress on their nervous system.

Learning to meditate is one of the best things that anyone with a psychiatric condition can do. Cultivating the ability to not physiologically react to distressing thoughts is as good as taking any pharmaceutical. Dedicated meditation practice can downregulate the nervous system more effectively and more permanently than anything else.

Another great move is learning to avoid toxic narcissists. This is also not always possible, because of family and work obligations. But it’s very useful to learn the typical early warning signs of toxic narcissism, so that those displaying it can be shunned as early as possible.

Second, understand the importance of connection. This means connection at every level: to family, to community and to the divine.

The simplest and easiest way to feel connection is through one’s family. But, if you have a psychiatric condition, chances are high that your family environment is psychotogenic. If so, then interacting with your family can add to the stress and nervous system dysregulation. This is where the community comes in.

Connection to the community is relatively easy, but here a person has to be realistic. A mental illness will mean that certain avenues into the community will be closed off. However, it will also mean that solidarity can be easier to find in some other ways. It’s very easy to feel solidarity with other people who have had to deal with the psychiatric system. Groups organised on this basis that meet physically can be challenging to find if one doesn’t live in a city, but there are numerous online groups devoted to every psychiatric condition.

Divine connection is harder to find. The main problem here is that Westerners have been lied to about spirituality for centuries. The native Western spiritual traditions were destroyed by the coming of Christianity, so that when Christianity died, we were left with only memories of the divine. When the European spiritual traditions, such as the Eleusinian Mysteries, were lost, the Western soul was lost to confusion.

The answer here is a combination of meditation and spiritual sacraments. Correct meditation will silence the mundane thoughts, and correct spiritual sacrament use will bring the glory of the divine back to consciousness. This combination of meditation and spiritual sacrament use is the basic formula espoused by some New Age religions such as Elementalism.

Cultivating a divine connection can help create a sense of belonging, which many people do not otherwise have. It’s common to feel like an alien on this planet and in this society. Meditating or taking spiritual sacraments with friends or family can create powerful feelings of connection with the rest of reality.

Society might never have been more mentally ill than today. However, it has (probably) never been easier for an individual with a mental illness to cope with it. Advanced knowledge of the causes and treatment of mental illness is now available through the traumagenic neurodevelopmental theory, and communities of meditators or spiritual sacrament users have never been easier to find.

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‘California Sober’: Could It Catch On In New Zealand?

Many lifestyle trends that originate in California then spread to the rest of the world. This is because California is where the Spear of Destiny is: the focal point of world cultural influence. The West Coast of America has more soft power than anywhere else on Earth. The latest trend that might spread from there to the rest of the world is called California Sober.

Many people say that life is best with no drugs at all. But for many others, this isn’t realistic. Billions of people feel the need to use chemical assistance to take the edge off the intensity of life on this planet. For those living outside the Abrahamic moral paradigm, using recreational drugs is no more immoral than seasoning one’s food.

The term ‘California Sober’ refers to a lifestyle in which one still uses drugs, but in such a manner that one does very little harm. In fact, one does roughly as little harm as a sober person. The main aspect of the lifestyle is to abstain from the typical drugs of destruction, in particular large amounts of alcohol. In this lifestyle, cannabis replaces alcohol as the go-to everyday social lubricant.

In contrast to the puritanical forms of sobriety so common to the West, in which all psychoactive substances are considered from the devil, California Sober usually involves indulgent cannabis use, with the occasional use of alcohol or psychedelics. Alcohol is still used, but sparingly, such as for celebrations. Psychedelics are also used sparingly, but more for spiritual or mental health reasons.

This arrangement is not merely a fashion. It reflects actual psychological and medical science. Professor David Nutt, perhaps the world’s foremost expert on relative drug harms, conducted a study that found alcohol to be the most harmful drug of all. Figure 3 in this paper (link goes to .pdf) suggests that alcohol is twice as harmful to other people as heroin, and about as harmful to the user as heroin, crack cocaine or methamphetamine.

According to Prof. Nutt’s research, cannabis is less harmful than tobacco, and much, much less harmful than alcohol. Magic mushrooms are considered by this research to be the least harmful of all those surveyed.

The logic of the California Sober lifestyle is to take this modern science into account when making recreational drug choices. As such, the use of alcohol is much less common in comparison to wider Western society. The use of cannabis and psychedelics, by contrast, is much more common.

The lifestyle hasn’t been designed by the dispassionate scientific analysis of a few elites, though. It is, for the most part, an organic development.

Many people have found that they like to use alcohol to take the edge off the stress of daily life, but they really don’t like the side-effects of alcohol: the sickness, the bloating, the hangovers, the mental dullness. For them, cannabis does the job of taking the edge off without the physical suffering.

For these people, replacing alcohol with cannabis seems like an obvious idea.

Some Kiwis, your author among them, have been living California Sober for a while already. I worked as a barman for several years to help pay for university, but by the time I graduated I had come to realise that cannabis was a better lifestyle choice than alcohol for many reasons. Foremost among these reasons: cannabis users seemed much less prone to violence and sluttery.

Using more cannabis, I found that I felt a lot better physically than I did using alcohol. So phasing out the alcohol seemed like a natural choice. Occasional psychedelic use, usually to mark a solstice or equinox, also seems like a natural choice. I believe that many people, if given the freedom to do so, would live a lifestyle similar to this.

The main difficulty with leading this lifestyle in New Zealand, of course, is the law.

Cannabis has been fully legal in California since 2016, the year 57% of Californians voted to legalise it at referendum. New Zealand, unfortunately, voted away our chance at cannabis freedom in 2020. As such, we are now eight years behind California, and counting. It’s not likely that the Sixth National Government will change the cannabis laws, and they might not lose power until 2029 (assuming they win three terms, as National governments tend to do). So New Zealand probably won’t get legal cannabis until 15 or 16 years after California.

Despite this, cannabis is easy to get in New Zealand – Kiwis are some of the world’s heaviest users of it. Thus it’s possible to live a California Sober lifestyle here, but not with the same level of acceptance as in North America. Moreover, medicinal cannabis is now very easy to access in New Zealand.

Most of the reasons that caused the California Sober lifestyle to become popular in North America also apply to New Zealand. We also have severe problems with physical, mental and social damage caused by alcohol, and would benefit from a shift to lower-harm substances. It may be that natural adoption of this lifestyle among Kiwis is what eventually forces a change to the cannabis laws.

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An Open Letter To The Minister Of Justice Regarding Psychedelic Use For Spiritual Purposes

Dear Minister of Justice,

I am writing to seek clarification on New Zealand’s current stance regarding psychedelic substances, particularly in the context where these substances are considered spiritual sacraments.

The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act states in Section 13 that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief”. Section 15 states that “Every person has the right to manifest that person’s religion or belief in worship, observance, practice, or teaching, either individually or in community with others, and either in public or in private”.

A fair reading of these sections suggests that New Zealanders have the right to use spiritual sacraments.

Indeed, this is already true with regards to the religious use of wine in the Christian Eucharist. New Zealand Anglicans use wine as a spiritual sacrament, the psychoactive ingredient being, of course, alcohol. But there are many other substances that serve as spiritual sacraments in the religious and spiritual traditions of the world.

The use of psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca and other entheogens has been deeply rooted in various spiritual and religious practices around the world for millennia. These practices often regard these substances not merely as drugs but as sacraments crucial for spiritual exploration, healing and connection with the divine or the deeper self.

The Eleusinian Mysteries were the most famous of the mystery schools that characterised pre-Christian European spirituality, running for 2,000 years and attracting anyone who was anyone in ancient Greece or Rome: Socrates, Plato, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Thucydides, Herodotus, Marcus Aurelius and the Emperor Julian were all known or believed to have participated.

Cicero wrote of them that “Though Athens brought forth numerous divine things, yet she never created anything nobler than those sublime Mysteries through which we became gentler and have advanced from a barbarous and rustic life to a more civilised one, so that we not only live more joyfully but also die with a better hope.”

Initiation into these mysteries involved the consumption of a drink known as kykeon. The mycologist R Gordon Wasson, the chemist Albert Hoffmann and the historian Carl Ruck have argued that the kykeon contained an entheogenic substance. Their book Road to Eleusis made a compelling argument that the use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments played an integral role in the creation of Western Civilisation.

Robert Graves believed that linguistic evidence revealed the kykeon to include some kind of mushroom. Terence McKenna supported this assertion, pointing out that psilocybin-containing mushrooms had both the capacity to cause extreme psychospiritual change and the safety profile that would have allowed thousands to use them every year without getting a reputation for being dangerous.

The claimed benefits of the Eleusinian Mysteries included losing one’s fear of death, gaining a belief in the afterlife, learning to understand the will of the divine and improvement of moral rectitude. These benefits are very similar to those claimed by modern psychedelic users – Erowid.org lists hundreds of mystical experiences of people who have taken psilocybin.

It’s apparent from these arguments that the use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments played a role in the moral and civil development of Western peoples during our greatest ages. But the potential of psychedelics to induce spiritual insight is not limited to the ancient age or to the West.

The Marsh Chapel Experiment conducted by Walter Pahnke in 1962 discovered that psilocybin is capable of inducing powerful spiritual experiences in modern people. A long-term follow-up questionnaire found “experimental subjects wrote that the experience helped them to recognise the arbitrariness of ego boundaries, increase their depth of faith, increase their appreciation of eternal life [etc.]”

One of the participants in the Marsh Chapel Experiment noted in the long-term follow-up, regarding death, “I’ve been there. Been there and come back. And it’s not terrifying, it doesn’t hurt.” Such an insight is profoundly spiritual. Many of the other participants made similar observations. One remembered their experience as “one of the high points of their spiritual life”.

This experiment demonstrated that the link between psilocybin and spirituality can be established within a modern, scientific paradigm. More recent research has supported this, with a 2024 paper in Current Psychology finding that “psychedelic use is linked with a variety of subjective indicators of spiritual growth, including stronger perceived connections with the divine, a greater sense of meaning, increased spiritual faith, increased engagement in religious and spiritual practices, an increase in feelings of unity and self-transcendence, positive changes in worldview, increased connectedness with others, and reduced fear of death”.

Albert Hofmann described how the teonanacatl of the Aztecs was a psilocybin-containing mushroom. This teonanacatl, or “flesh of the gods”, was used as a spiritual sacrament to commune with the divine. Indigenous North Americans have used psilocybin-containing mushrooms as entheogens for thousands of years. The Aztec use of entheogens, including both mushrooms and others, is extensive.

R Gordon Wasson believed that the soma referenced in the Rig Veda was the fly agaric amanita muscaria. Supporting his contention was the fact that Siberian shamans were still using this mushroom for spiritual purposes. More recently, Russian researchers have found evidence suggesting the active ingredient in soma was psilocybe cubensis. In either case, psychoactive mushrooms have a history of religious and spiritual use in India as well.

Although the record of historical psychedelic use is not as strong in Europe as it is in the Americas and Asia, there is still evidence of magic mushroom use in Spain from some 6,000 years ago.

In New Age spirituality, psychedelics are used extensively. In Nelson, where I am from, it’s common to use psychedelics as spiritual sacraments outside the purview of any institutional authority. “Mushroom Season” describes the time of the year beginning in early winter and ending around midwinter when psilocybin-containing mushrooms are foraged, dried and consumed as spiritual sacraments.

In light of all this, significant questions arise concerning the human rights implications of New Zealand’s drug laws as they pertain to psychedelic substances. Once it is understood that psychedelics are spiritual sacraments, there’s a compelling argument to be made that restrictions on their use infringe upon the freedom of religion and belief, a fundamental human right protected under various international treaties to which New Zealand is a signatory.

Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to freedom of religion” and “to manifest his belief in practice”. Given the widespread use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments throughout time and space, this right must surely encompass the right to use psychedelics to manifest spiritual belief in practice.

An appropriate reading of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act suggests that the right to use psychedelics for spiritual purposes is guaranteed. In reality, however, a hierophant who wanted to conduct a sacramental ritual akin to the Eleusinian Mysteries could potentially face life imprisonment for the supply of Class A drugs.

This letter seeks to understand how current New Zealand drug laws reconcile with the rights of individuals to practice their spirituality freely, especially when such practices involve substances that are currently classified under the Misuse of Drugs Act.

The laws against the use of psychedelics for spiritual purposes reflect, to a major extent, the historical Christian dogma against pharmakeia. This is the same dogma that led the Christian fanatics under Alaric to destroy the Eleusinian Mysteries in 396 by killing its priests, that led the inquisitors of medieval Europe to burn witches at the stake for using spiritual sacraments, and which inspired the Catholic invaders of the Americas to eliminate the sacramental use of teonanacatl by murdering the shamans who specialised in it.

It has also been suggested that much of the modern opposition to the use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments comes from organised religious groups who want to position themselves as ticket-clipping intermediaries between the people and divinity. However, as can be seen from reading the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, Kiwis have the right to commune with divinity without the need of an intermediary. This necessarily means the right to use spiritual sacraments.

As other laws based on Christian prejudices – such as those regarding marital rape, homosexuality, prostitution and abortion – have been discarded in favour of greater freedom, the laws prohibiting the use of psychedelics for spiritual purposes ought to be discarded. Indeed, many countries and territories have reformed their psychedelic drug laws, based on arguments such as the ones made in this letter, plus others.

In closing, I respectfully request a detailed clarification or review of how New Zealand’s drug policies align with the principles of religious and spiritual freedom and human rights. Understanding the government’s perspective on this matter would not only inform those within New Zealand who use psychedelics as spiritual sacraments but would also contribute to broader discussions on drug policy reform that respects cultural and spiritual diversity.

Thank you for considering this important issue. I look forward to your insights and hope for a dialogue that can potentially lead to policies that honour both the law and the deeply held spiritual convictions of many New Zealanders.

Yours sincerely,

Vince McLeod

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
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