The Altered States of America
Americans have long been fine with certain consciousness-modifying agents.
Is the war on drugs giving way to a drugged war against human struggles?
The hallucinatory spillover effect from clinical trials is already increasing popular demand for psychedelics.
Are there intimacies between psychoactive substances and spiritual animation?
What used to be the United States of America might be more accurately called the Altered States of America. Perhaps what truly unites us is our collectively drugged state of mind.
The recent flurry of executive orders and rescheduling of psychedelics and cannabis not only signals a new wave of faith in mind-altering psychoactive substances for therapeutic and medicinal purposes. It also has more subversive religious potentiality as well, blowing the lid off what has been a long-standing governmental caution about, if not warfare against, your brain on drugs.
Americans have long been fine with certain consciousness-modifying drug agents. Coffee, tobacco, alcohol, and now pharmaceuticals have been ingrained elements of everyday life and economic drivers for consumers and corporations in the marketplace who value these existential coping mechanisms.
It looks like we are turning a page in the recent history of drugs in society and........
