LSD

Alternet: Psychedelics and Zen: Teach your Children Well

[John Perry Barlow:] I consider LSD to be a serious medicine, but by diminishing the hazards in our cultural drugs of choice and demonizing psychedelics, we head our children straight down the most dangerous path their youthful adventurism can take. (…)

Laugh at authority in America and you will know risk. LSD is illegal primarily because it threatens the dominant American culture, the culture of control.

[University of Massachusetts professor Nick Bromell:] Why these drugs? What is the synergistic connection between these drugs and coming of age – of middle class adolescence? Clearly this is something fundamental and still unresolved. (…)

There was nothing noble about lounging all afternoon in a suburban rec room and feeling that life sucked. But there was (and still is) something mythic about dropping acid and descending into a maelstrom where the nameless nagging insecurities of the everyday become tempests and nebulae in the void of inner space.

[Ram Dass:] It’s a great gift, a profound sacrament. You can’t put it down. We just don’t know how to use it, for the most part. … I feel sad when society rejects something that can help it understand itself and deepens its values and its wisdom.