Supporters of initiatives promoting recreational marijuana, and even the “therapeutic” use of psychedelic, mind-altering drugs like psilocybin, ayahuasca and ibogaine, thought they had it made this year—that America was on a crazy rocket ride into the future where marijuana and hallucinogens would be legal everywhere and we would all be taking them regularly.
They perceive America as the land of the free and the home of the stoned, with lots of nice, crisp money flowing into psychiatrists’ pockets and company bank accounts.
Don’t kid yourself. At its heart, this is not about “help,” “health” or “freedom.” It’s all about the money.
After all, approval of marijuana, and even powerful hallucinogenic drugs, has been on an unstoppable wave of success in recent years—24 states and Washington, DC, allow recreational use of pot and 17 allow it for “medicinal” purposes. Oregon and Colorado have approved use of psychedelics under the care of mental health “experts,” while many cities have adopted hallucinogenic drugs for “therapeutic” use, despite the fact that they’re still federally illegal.
Meanwhile, psilocybin, ayahuasca and ibogaine have been lovingly promoted by psychiatrists as cures for everything from PTSD to anxiety, depression, psychosis and even smoking.
For example, Dr. David A. Merrill, a psychiatrist, said, “In a medical setting under supervision ... psychedelics can be effective for depression, post-traumatic stress, and substance use.”
Then there’s Dr. Jerrold Rosenbaum, director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics at Massachusetts General Hospital (yes, they have a “center”) who said, “Psychedelics induce the brain to change transiently in ways that appear to allow a reset to take place and permit alterations in previously ‘stuck’ ways of feeling and thinking about things.”
But don’t kid yourself. At its heart, this is not about “help,” “health” or “freedom.”
It’s all about the money.
A Florida amendment that would have allowed recreational use of marijuana drew an amazing $90,441,407 in financial backing, mostly from organizations like Trulieve, a massive company reporting a third-quarter revenue of $284 million from their network of 220 retail marijuana dispensaries and over 4 million square feet of cultivation and processing capacity—ready to start cranking out tons of high-priced “wacky weed” as soon as it’s okay to puff pot in the Sunshine State just for fun.
If recreational use in Florida had been approved, Truelieve’s profits would have jumped sky-high. It was the most expensively supported ballot initiative of the year.
Pro-drug forces in South Dakota kicked in $1,393,000 in hopes of seeing recreational marijuana approved, with a large part of those funds coming from the marijuana industry.
North Dakota drew $540,000 from supporters, largely from marijuana-connected businesses like Pure Dakota Health and GR Holding OH-ND LLC, a company associated with Curaleaf, both of which profit from marijuana dispensaries.
Americans don’t want to live in a country where stoned people are driving around, stumbling around, all around, everywhere, all the time.
Supporters of a Massachusetts effort to regulate the use of psychedelic substances—including dimethyltryptamine, mescaline, ibogaine and everybody’s favorite “magic mushrooms”—spent an amazing $7,838,832, to try to convince Bay State voters to go along with it.
Oddly enough, one of the biggest pro-psychedelic forces has been Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, which makes the very popular liquid peppermint formula, but which also gives its employees psychedelic therapy, using ketamine, as a work benefit!
There are many groups that support the idea of making a huge fortune on providing everything from pot highs to full-on psychedelic hallucinogenic nightmare trips, all for their own—usually very financial—reasons.
But the leading pro-drug group these days is New Approach PAC and its New Approach Advocacy Fund, which spent $4.2 million of donor funds—in 2022 alone—to get voters to support a Colorado measure allowing the growing and sharing of psychedelics.
New Approach has raked in over $32 million since its inception in 2014, outspending everyone else in the drug legalization game.
“Our main argument to legislators and especially to the leadership is, look, even if you’re against legalization, most folks feel that this is something that’s inevitable,” said New Approach spokesman Jared Moffat. “We’ve seen four states now move forward with this. We’re likely to see a number of other states do so. The politics around the issue have just completely changed … so the writing’s on the wall. The question becomes: If it is inevitable, should we do it sooner or later?”
With all that support, the drug pushers are bound to win, right? New Approach is thinking: “We are going to take over!”
Not so fast. The big surprise for marijuana and psychedelics supporters is that, for all that money, all those corporations, all those experts and psychiatrists and pro-drug “activists,” virtually every pro-drug initiative failed at the polls this year.
That’s right—Americans don’t want to live in a country where stoned people are driving around, stumbling around, all around, everywhere, all the time.
They don’t want to go along with psychiatrists and corporations and pro-drug entrepreneurs who are happy to build their bank accounts and reputations on the backs of people whose minds have been scrambled and shattered by weird mind-altering substances.
Americans are tired of smelling the burnt-rope reek of marijuana every time they walk into a supermarket or when a car pulls up alongside with the windows open. They want life to go back to what they remember as normal.
America has undergone a sea change in opinion now that they’ve been confronted with the results of the pro-drug craze—of brains pumped full of high-power hallucinogens like ketamine, psilocybin, ibogaine or ayahuasca, in a society where you never know when one of these “patients” will have a “flashback” out in public, flipping out, tripping out and acting dangerous and insane.
Americans are now saying: “Hell no! That is not the kind of society in which we want to live.”
We know how this ends. What’s next? Heroin is great for sleeping and meth gives you energy, so should we rubber stamp them all—and soon find our sidewalks clogged with staggering, dazed zombies in the new, drugged-out America?
Face it—that’s not what we want.
Americans want to see legitimate help for those who need it, not some drugged-up fantasy world that converts sober citizens into stoners.
So Americans stepped on the brakes, and the big psychedelic revolution came to a sudden, screeching halt.
It’s about damn time.
