Trevor Burrus and Terence Kealey on government regulation of psychedelic drug therapy
” I agree with everything Trevor said but there is unfortunately a complication which is to a surprising degree you can’t always trust what scientists say … This is definitely an area where we need informed, intelligent, lay people also to be perceived to have a very legitimate voice in the debate.” -Terence Kealey : Senior Fellow at Cato Institute
There is still this tooth and nail fight to get drugs like (MDMA, psilocybin, etc) this to people who might benefit enormously from them. And to talk about this, this issue of psychedelics and science and how governments use science, I am speaking with Trevor Burrus : Reasearch Fellow at the Cato Institute & Terence Kealey : Senior Fellow at Cato Institute. Research Fellow, Trevor : We need to be better at trying to understanding why people use different mind altering substances, why it’s OK to use mind altering substances in ways that are it’s beneficial to you to try to fix your depression or fix your state of mind and move towards a world where it’s where it’s broadly acceptable to use variety of substances to alter your mind. Senior Fellow, Terence : Let me just add something to that. I agree with everything Trevor said but there is unfortunately a complication which is to a surprising degree you can’t always trust what scientists say. It would be nice to think that politicians are the bad guys and scientists are the good guys and it’s just a matter of listening more to the scientists. Unfortunately, we know that scientists bring their own agendas to the table… for example, I was taught at medical school as an absolute fact that once you start taking heroin you will get addicted to it and your life will just deteriorate. And I discovered, just as living as an adult in the society, that lots of people take heroin at weekends particularly, as a recreational drug, and they go to work on Monday morning and it was fine. The point was the professor who taught me that at medical school was personally obsessed with the dangers of heroin and it gave me a very false view. We see for example scientists forever disagreeing with each other about fat, sugar, carbohydrates, and coffee. So, yes indeed, we absolutely and Trevor is quite right to focus much more on the science rather than the prejudices of the politicians or the perceptions that only bad people were hippies and they weren’t going to fight in Vietnam… but unfortunately we can’t trust the scientists 100% either. This is definitely an area where we need informed, intelligent, lay people also to be perceived to have a very legitimate voice in the debate.
Original Article (Cato Institute):
Trevor Burrus and Terence Kealey on government regulation of psychedelic drug therapy
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