No, but they're fine.
Weed is fine. It's not 100% risk-free, but neither are alcohol or caffeine. That it's still Schedule I in the US is insane and ought to condemn this country in any rational mind. People are still arrested for it, and for decades tons of people were arrested for it and served long sentences.
I'm conflicted because on the one hand, I don't want the left to focus entirely on drugs. On the other hand, the American policy on drugs like marijuana, MDMA, mushrooms, mescaline, and DMT is insane and despotic. These drugs are all Schedule I federally still… that's the most federally illegal classification for a drug in the US. For comparison, methamphetamine, fentanyl, nembutal, cocaine, oxycodone, and pentobarbital are all schedule II. Benzodiazepines (like xanax) are all the way down in schedule IV, and they have considerably more addictive potential than marijuana, MDMA, or psilocybin.
I think something really interesting can be inferred from all this: America struggles to fit a lot of these recreational drugs into its capitalist model. The legalization push for marijuana, and now the push for the legalization of some psychedelics and the empathogen MDMA, has effectively hinged on an appeal that these drugs can be mass produced and mass marketed as medicine. That they are less harmful when used recreationally than many other, less illegal drugs doesn't matter; they have to take a medical angle, because allowing these drugs to be mass-produced and mass-marketed for recreation the way beer and cigarettes were would actually make these substances many times more harmful than they otherwise would be. Since the legalization process still hinges on making a profit, they have to re-pitch this stuff as medicine… which, ironically, is also probably harmful since this condition probably leads to exaggerated claims of medical efficacy for some of these things. The actual solution to all this would be to legalize the hippie drugs entirely but ban large-scale production and marketing so that the pharma cartels can't "oversell" (push) like they did with oxycodone, and people who are criminals now can have a chance to go straight if they're willing to only sell stuff that's less dangerous.
>>149467So you'll do revolution for 80 minutes and then crash hard unless you chase it? Stupid.