May 2, 2026 — Chemical is just another name for a tiny spatial mathematical pattern.

Some of these patterns, like oxygen and water, we require in large quantities.

For metabolism we consume a huge variety of patterns we categorize as food.

In general, consuming small does of these patterns has little noticeable affect on our experiences.

But then there are some patterns, that if you drop tiny doses on your tongue, will take your consciousness on a metaphorical roller coaster ride, that extends for many slow moving hours, and then continues to uplift your spirit for months afterwards.

I love trip report websites like Erowid and r/Psychonaut. Personally I've done more than 10, but far less than 50 experiments with psychedelics, so mostly would refer people who are curious to those far more experienced psychonauts rather than my own data on the matters.

What I want to write about here though is what I think is a very important issue that I want to add my voice in support of those trying to legalize these substances.

The problem of consciousness is upstream of everything and one of-if not the- most important in the world, and that we have such an accessible approach angle to conduct experiments on consciousness, and yet not only basically ignore psychedelics in our reporting of what's going on, and even worse, make them illegal is really a shame.

Psychedelics are to consciousness what sex is to reproduction. Sure, you could outlaw sex and have all reproduction and reproduction studies happen in a lab, but 1) that bottlenecks in labs something that should be widely decentralized and 2) where's the fun in that?

Not to mention the effects on well-being. Personally the handful of times I've tripped on mushrooms^[1] and LSD with friends are some of the best days of my life (surpassed only by having kids), and preceded long periods of physical and spiritual well being. In contrast, the times I sought help from "legal" channels were completely ineffective or worse.

From the experiments and data I've seen I expect it will turn out that making illegal the patterns of psychedelics while promoting far less effective patterns will explain immense numbers of individuals who needlessly suffer and die.

The fact that we put people like Pickard in jail for decades is mind boggling. For comparison, Jesus's campaign from preaching to crucifixion was only ~3.5 years.

How can we explain this tragedy?

Maybe there are strong second order effects I am not taking into account. Perhaps psychedelics are good now, but if they were legalized, the industrial optimization process will transform them into something with terrible effects. (my personal stance is that deleting IP law would reduce capitalism's tendency to enshittify things)

Or perhaps there is an explanation from natural selection: psychedelics are good patterns but societies that allow them see their members take them until they vaporize off to a collective enlightened harmonious consciousness, and so given you are having a conscious individual experience means you are likely living in a society that has temporarily reduced the enlightening patterns.

Maybe getting the right rules is a long annealing process. Maybe I'm just impatient and that in the years and decades ahead these laws will self-correct.

It could be utter incompetence. Maybe we are governed by fools.

It could be that everyone "knows" the law is not to be taken seriously. Perhaps I am a bit autistic in that I prefer people to tell things as they are and I believe things are as I'm told. Historically I took much longer than my siblings to realize that a lot of what we are told is bulls_it (I remember still writing letters to Santa when I was over 10, and dragging my mother to church well past the time my siblings stopped going).

It could be malice. It is well known how the government secretly experimented with psychedelics maliciously so it's plausible our true government lives in the shadows and does things against our interests.

It could be that we live in a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich; in reality the rich don't have to worry about the laws and can easily get psychedelics.

It could be that our system is so corrupted by financial interests that good things like psychedelics are banned so bad things (like big pharma) can make more money.

Boris Yeltsin has a quote after visiting a grocery store in Texas in 1989:

When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.

I often think about that quote when I walk through American stores. So much of these 'products' are actually poisons in disguise.

We are a nation with an endless variety of bad things and an artificially reduced supply of good things.

[1] "Woaaaaahh," I thought to myself after seeing a rock, which had been sitting motionless-as rocks generally do-suddenly slide multiple feet to the other side of the sidewalk.

That was my first visual hallucination on my first mushroom trip, twenty years ago in North Carolina. The next six or so hours hanging with my friends and fellow trippers were moments of pure childhood wonder, followed by months of physical and spiritual well being.

Ten years later was my first acid trip, similarly fun, profound, and restorative. I think stopping psychedelics after moving to Hawai'i was a huge health mistake.