Legalize Shrooms in the US

Signposting Intro Shrooms are Safe Shrooms are Wonderful Shrooms have Medical uses Logic and Morality of Legalization Problems with Prohibition Intro What the heck are shrooms? They are around 200 mushrooms that contain psilocybin and psilocin (and baeocystin and norbaeocystin), psychedelic substances that alter consciousness. Why do people take them? For spiritual, religious, recreational, and medical purposes. What do they do? Shrooms change your perception of time, light, sound, and reality; you feel deeply connected to other people and forms of life; your ego and selfishness is suspended; and you feel a profound range of emotions, while understanding yourself and the world in a fresh perspective. Why were they made illegal after thousands of years of profound use? Throughout the 1960's counter-culture movement the US government and media portrayed hippie drugs (e.g. shrooms and LSD) as dangerous and immoral, leading to their ban in 1968. No sufficient reason for the ban, but the closest guess is that “There is no money to be made with a non-patentable drug that is given only once or twice in a lifetime.” Yes, Big Pharma. Check out Big Pharma: How the World's Biggest Drug Companies Control Illness. 1. Shrooms are Safea. Toxicity Shrooms are the second least toxic drug in most analyses, next to marijuana when taken orally. [http://www.theatlantic.com...]. There is no direct lethality with shrooms, while legal pharmaceuticals and alcohol kill frequently. [4. http://www.popsci.com...].b. Addiction Shrooms are the least addictive drug [http://upload.wikimedia.org...]. Furthermore, there is virtually no withdrawal syndrome when chronic use of this drug is ceased [How Drugs Influence Behavior 1996]. And even if the user wanted to take shrooms daily, he’d get diminishing effects as tolerance builds up immediately [http://oi47.tinypic.com...].c. Societal Cost Unlike the well-known violence from alcohol, shrooms have negligible societal costs, as they reduce blood flow to the cingulate cortex, the region of the brain responsible for extreme thoughts or behavior [http://www.psychologytoday.com...]. Some researchers would argue, they offer a tremendous societal benefit: more open, less selfish, happier people [http://karmajello.com...].d. Psychosis Shrooms can’t produce psychosis in mentally healthy people, but it can rarely elicit pre-existing (and subsided) psychological conditions, such as schizophrenia, even though no physical harm is possible from psilocin [http://www.psychologytoday.com...]. e. School Users did not believe that psilocybin negatively impacts their academics, mental health, or physical health [http://www.sciencedirect.com...]. f. Overall Harm When evaluated on 16 criteria (e.g. physical, psychological, social) shrooms was found to be the least dangerous drug in a recent study [http://www.sg.unimaas.nl...]. 2. Shrooms are Wonderfula. Tripping You get to experience the “other side of the coin.” [see Intro] “You are an observer experiencing something but you are not a human being who has a certain identity. You are pure agency capable of experiencing the true nature of the universe [http://www.psychologytoday.com...].”b. After-Effects “The after-effects the research participants reported included feeling more patient, optimistic, inquisitive and being better able to engage with friends and family after their psychedelic experience, and the effects were still there more than a year later. All the volunteers in the studies at Hopkins seemed authentically connected to their deepest aspirations and purpose [above].” 3. Shrooms Have Medical Usesa. Depression Most people experience euphoria and positivity after a shroom trip (most likely due to psilocin’s closeness to seratonin--a ‘feel good’ neurotransmitter). Additionally “Psilocybin decreases brain activity in regions such as the medial prefrontal cortex,” he explains, “that are overactive in depression [http://medicalxpress.com...].”b. Cluster Headaches In a 2006 study, half of cluster headache patients reported that psilocybin aborted the attacks, and most reported extended remission periods; similar results were reported for LSD [http://www.maps.org...]. Here’s some footage for those of you unfamiliar with cluster headaches: [http://goo.gl...].c. PTSD Researchers discover that psychedelic mushrooms can grow brain cells; erase conditioned fear response in mice [http://ultraculture.org...].d. Mental Health “Researchers found that lifetime use of psilocybin or mescaline and past year use of LSD were associated with lower rates of serious psychological distress [http://www.scienceagogo.com...].”e. Reducing Fear of Death “Administering psilocybin to terminally ill subjects could be done safely while reducing the subjects’ anxiety and depression about their impending deaths [http://www.nytimes.com...].”f. Addiction Treatment Shrooms has been proven to treat addictions to cigarettes and alcohol. “Researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that magic mushrooms may be the best smoking cessation therapy available [http://ultraculture.org...].”4. Logic and Morality of Legalizationa. Morality: Self-Ownership The US government does not own the bodies of individuals. No one else alone or combined has a higher claim to your body than yourself. You own your own body, and as such you have the exclusive right to determine what goes in it: shrooms, kale, eye drops and all. Legalizing affirms this moral principle.b. Logic: Peanuts The argument Scare story X :. Ban Shrooms is a non sequitur. The deaths each year from peanuts (75-125 direct in US) greatly exceed shrooms (0 direct, 1-5 indirect), and there’s even a 0.6% incidence of peanut allergy in the US. Did the US ban peanuts? No, because millions of other people safely enjoy peanuts. The same holds true for shrooms: if millions of people safely enjoy them, one scare story of some guy with pre-existing psychological conditions jumping out of a window doesn’t change that.5. Problems with Prohibitiona. Black Markets Instead of education, research, and safety in the shroom industry, we’re left with buying the drugs from thugs without confidence of their quality, hunting them in the forest (associated with inadvertent mushroom poisoning), or risking everything we have growing them ourselves.b. Enforcement Costs Police officers, probation officers, courts, prisons, prisoners cost time and money, plus the loss of economic productivity from the arrested user.c. Societal Costs When a mushroom user/grower/seller/transporter is incarcerated a family loses a father, a business loses an employee, a man/woman loses their life, liberty, and property.d. NAP The non-aggression principle argues that it is immoral to initiate violence against someone who hasn’t done so to to you or your property. It is immoral for the US Gov to initiate violence against a man simply using shrooms, because he owns his own body and has not aggressed against anyone else.Now I'll turn it over to the Con :)