In a world where substances like alcohol—known for their addictive potential, comfort through dissociation, neurotoxicity, liver and kidney damage, and social harm (e.g., increased rates of violence)—are not only legal but culturally celebrated, the continued criminalization of non-addictive, non-toxic psychedelic substances demands scrutiny. More than a policy oversight or bureaucratic inertia, this contradiction reveals something far more disturbing: legislation is used not to protect citizen’s health and safety, but to ensure the continuity of a system that profits. In short, capitalism uses the law to suppress pathways to insight and liberation, particularly when those pathways threaten the structures that monetize human suffering. Continuing this blog’s initial idea captured in its URL, I want to share some thoughts that might help us understand why shelves in our supermarkets aren’t filled with CBD drinks but are filled with alcohol. For another time, this is also a story of vasocomputation (Johnson 2023).
The Roots of Repression: When Liberation Becomes a Threat
The criminalization of psychedelics in the late 20th century was not a reaction to public health crises. There was no mushroom overdose epidemic, no LSD-induced wave of psychosis sweeping the youth. Instead, the War on Drugs emerged as a targeted response to political dissent and countercultural expression. Psychedelics—unlike alcohol or opioids—don’t make people docile, obedient, or easily manipulated. They destabilize rigid beliefs, open windows of perception, and in many cases, foster profound self-awareness and empathy. These are dangerous qualities in a population meant to be controlled and exploited.
The 1960s and 70s saw figures like Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, and countless indigenous healers advocating for altered states as sacred, transformational, and even politically revolutionary. In response, Western governments categorized psychedelics as Schedule I substances—declared to have no medical value and high abuse potential, despite contrary evidence.
This isn’t about public safety.
Mental Health: A Market Engineered for Unwellbeing
In our current system, mental health is treated as a chronic condition, not something to be cured but managed—forever.
Psychiatric medications, while helpful for many, are designed for daily consumption, often with dependency and withdrawal as side effects. Meanwhile, emerging research shows that a single high-dose psychedelic session, conducted with care and integration, can achieve results traditional treatments cannot. This doesn’t just pose a therapeutic alternative—it threatens a trillion-dollar industry that thrives on recurring prescriptions, not resolution.
Therapists and underground guides who dared to work with substances like MDMA or psilocybin during the drug war risked imprisonment. Their crime? Facilitating healing experiences that liberated individuals from their internalized suffering, often in ways that traditional psychiatric models could not explain, reproduce, or profit from.
The Neurochemistry of Control: GABA vs. 5-HT2A
This divide between permissible and prohibited substances is even more striking when examined at the neurological level. The contrast isn’t merely cultural or economic—it’s embedded in receptor pharmacology.
Alcohol primarily acts on GABA-A receptors, enhancing inhibitory neurotransmission. This produces the familiar relaxation and sedation, what we commonly call “lowering of inhibitions.” But this isn’t freedom—it’s a deliberate dampening of neural complexity. GABA-A modulation mimics the neurodynamics of deep sleep or even mild anesthesia—a quieting not only of internal noise but also of meaningful signal. After a brief episode of gaining wings, the next day they are suddenly taken away and replaced by hangover and emptiness.
Compare this to psychedelics like psilocybin, LSD, or DMT, which act as agonists at the 5-HT2A receptor. These receptors are densely expressed in layer V pyramidal neurons of the cortex—precisely the regions responsible for high-level association, feedback loops, and the emergence of top-down meaning. Activation here leads to increased entropy in neural activity, unlocking new patterns, associations, and states of openness.
Put simply:
- GABA-A modulation (alcohol) suppresses neural complexity to create a comfortable haze
- 5-HT2A modulation (psychedelics) increases complexity, enabling introspection, insight, and radical shifts in self-perception
One relaxes you into forgetting. The other awakens you into remembering.
This is not just metaphorical—it’s a neurodynamic truth that explains why systems of control might prefer a population that forgets rather than one that remembers. Substances that increase neural entropy threaten to dissolve the very cognitive boundaries that maintain social hierarchies and consumption patterns.
I agree with Graham Hancock. We are species with amnesia, and this goes deep.
Systemic Stockholm Syndrome: The Manufactured Consent
Why, then, do people not revolt? The answer lies in the brilliance—and brutality—of capitalism’s psychological manipulation. From early education to media narratives, people are taught to fear the very tools that could empower them. “Drugs” are equated with danger and degeneracy. Alternative healing is dismissed as pseudoscientific. TED talks are banned (cf. Rupert Sheldrake, Shamini Jain). Spiritual insight is trivialized. And crucially, people are exhausted—overworked, underpaid, and struggling to survive under the very systems that feed on their despair.
This isn’t complacency. It’s learned helplessness, embedded through decades of propaganda. It is easier, safer, and more socially acceptable to medicate symptoms than to question the forces that created them, especially when so many people ended up in prison for speaking up. Liberation and insight are painted as risks.
Structural Violence and the Illusion of Legality
When laws systematically prevent healing, when governments suppress consciousness-expanding substances while subsidizing pharmaceuticals that maintain suffering, this is structural violence. It is not accidental. It is not benign.
It reminds of a story of gnosticism. Or perhaps the rise or organised religion for-profit that took away the mystical experience from people in order to make them worship their representatives and believe in their version of the story of salvation.
Imagine a system that embraced psychedelics, breathwork, community integration, and self-knowledge as primary mental health tools. Imagine mental healthcare that didn’t depend on indefinite diagnoses or chemical management but on actual transformation. Such a system would render much of today’s psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries obsolete. And so, it is not welcome. MDMA, often described as inducing most loving experiences that people have ever had, is listed as a Schedule 1 controlled substance in the US and so is illegal to use outside research.
Why?
Ultimately, our system does not fear intoxication; it fears insight. Alcohol and opioids numb the mind. Psychedelics awaken it. The neurochemistry tells the story: one creates neural states conducive to consumption and forgetting, while the other creates highly associative networks and the potential for liberation and remembering.
Psychedelics were heavily criminalized in the 1960s and 70s, largely due to their association with anti-establishment movements, civil rights protests, and counterculture. This wasn’t just about the drugs themselves—it was about suppressing dissent. Nixon’s War on Drugs is often cited as a politically motivated campaign, and LSD, psilocybin, and cannabis were grouped with heroin in Schedule I (most dangerous, no medical use), despite very different risk profiles.
And so laws are written—not as ethical imperatives but as instruments of economic and psychological containment. They exist to channel the population away from self-realization and toward dependency, consumerism, and political disengagement. Every time a plant is banned, a tradition criminalized, or a healing modality silenced, we should ask: Who benefits from this suppression?
The answer, increasingly, is not us.
Fellow truth seekers, the true threat of psychedelics isn’t hallucination—it’s illumination. Not escapism, but clear-eyed confrontation with deepest aspects of one’s mind. When a substance increases entropy in the brain and dissolves the boundaries between self and other, between human and nature, between consumer and citizen, it doesn’t just change consciousness. It changes the very possibility of what a society can become. And that is precisely why some substances are celebrated with commercials and billboards, while others remain forbidden.
The war was never on drugs. It was on remembering.
Thoughts On Evolutions 
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