<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>betterunix2</author><text>&amp;quot;As a society we have always outlawed drugs that can drastically alter perception&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Actually, in America nationwide drug laws began in the 20th century, and it had nothing to do with health or unknown effects.  Opium was outlawed as part of a general effort to &amp;quot;protect America&amp;quot; from Chinese immigrants.  Heroin was outlawed because a German company held a patent on it.  Cocaine was outlawed because, according to the people in Congress at the time, it drove black men crazy and made it impossible to kill them with standard police-issue sidearms (also, according to an article from the New York Times just before cocaine was banned, Jews were selling it).  Marijuana prohibition was principally driven by racism and as a form of regulatory capture by industries that competed with hemp.&lt;p&gt;LSD was discovered decades before it was outlawed and the effects were well understood before it was banned.  LSD happens to be one of the safest recreational drugs; in fact, the biggest danger is the poorly regulated supply chain i.e. most &amp;quot;LSD&amp;quot; on the market today is not actually LSD (as with most drugs, the ban poses a greater health risk than the drug itself).  The government conducted its own extremely unethical LSD study to determine if it could be used as a mind control drug (it cannot) and knew the safety profile long before the ban.  LSD was banned because of concerns that it was contributing to the &lt;i&gt;moral&lt;/i&gt; corruption of American youth (i.e. think of all those white teenagers out partying with hippies); in other words, it was viewed as a threat to the prevailing social order (probably not a coincidence that this coincided with the civil rights movement, which was a direct challenge to that social order).</text><parent_chain><item><author>corporateslave3</author><text>Was the threat to the traditional American way of life really the reason they were made illegal? It seems more likely that it was due to the unknown and possibly dangerous nature of the drugs. As a society we have always outlawed drugs that can drastically alter perception (aside from alcohol).</text></item><item><author>TheAdamAndChe</author><text>On one hand, I understand that psychedelics should be more studied than they currently are. On the other hand, I understand why they were originally banned. In a country that valued a monoculture and having a single way of life, psychedelics spurred a complete revolution with regards to social and cultural norms. It was seen as destabilizing, and a threat to the American way of life.&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, our country is very different. There is a widespread sense that there is no right or wrong way to live your life, and anyone who goes against multiculturalist viewpoints is labeled as ignorant or a racist. I think in this environment, the introspective, antiauthoritarian thought processes that psychedelic use brings about wouldn&amp;#x27;t have nearly the kind of social impact that they had in the 70&amp;#x27;s.</text></item><item><author>WhitneyLand</author><text>For decades, there has been a near complete effective block on medical research for certain classes of drugs. Timothy Leary and that kind of 60’s stuff chilled legitimate science. Only recently have small changes started to happen, to the point the government, the flipping FDA, has started to think Ectasy (MDMA) might be a viable treatment for some of our most horrible mental illnesses.&lt;p&gt;So many people wonder when science will let us do things. When will we land on the moon, when will we cure cancer (most cancer anyway, a handful have been effectively cured), when will all of mankind benefit from the next great insights? We ask this yet in a lot of ways, we won’t even open our minds enough to give it our best shot.&lt;p&gt;How much can x, mushrooms, ketamine et al really change devastated lives for the better under the right conditions? We may never know.&lt;p&gt;I fully respect the opinion of people who say these drugs shouldn’t ever be used, or that disagree with me on any issue in general. But I will never respect someone who doesn’t want to know the answers and the data.&lt;p&gt;It happens with drugs, gun control, so many political issues, people actually do not want, and even work against collection of, objective data. Of course of any given data set can be biased or flawed, and that has nothing to do with getting the best data you can, iterating, and improving it.&lt;p&gt;If we are opposed to something, it’s ostensibly for a reason right? Why would we ever not want to strengthen our argument, or discard it, based on better understanding of our “reason”?</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>I was in the MAPS MDMA for PTSD study</title><url>https://www.psymposia.com/magazine/maps-mdma-ptsd-study-freed-childhood-abuse/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>09bjb</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think there&amp;#x27;s a firm consensus on the reasoning, but it&amp;#x27;s generally acknowledged that the Sch. 1 classification of the psychedelics was motivated to 1) quell their threat of cultural and political destabilization and 2) to keep hippies and blacks in check.  The 60s were similar to Occupy Wall Street: there&amp;#x27;s major (valid) fear on the part of the establishment when a radically different movement picks up steam.  Psychedelics were (rightly) considered a partial fuel to the new movement.&lt;p&gt;I also agree that the U.S. is much less of a monoculture now and people generally agree that others should be able to live, think, and believe whatever and however they want.</text><parent_chain><item><author>corporateslave3</author><text>Was the threat to the traditional American way of life really the reason they were made illegal? It seems more likely that it was due to the unknown and possibly dangerous nature of the drugs. As a society we have always outlawed drugs that can drastically alter perception (aside from alcohol).</text></item><item><author>TheAdamAndChe</author><text>On one hand, I understand that psychedelics should be more studied than they currently are. On the other hand, I understand why they were originally banned. In a country that valued a monoculture and having a single way of life, psychedelics spurred a complete revolution with regards to social and cultural norms. It was seen as destabilizing, and a threat to the American way of life.&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, our country is very different. There is a widespread sense that there is no right or wrong way to live your life, and anyone who goes against multiculturalist viewpoints is labeled as ignorant or a racist. I think in this environment, the introspective, antiauthoritarian thought processes that psychedelic use brings about wouldn&amp;#x27;t have nearly the kind of social impact that they had in the 70&amp;#x27;s.</text></item><item><author>WhitneyLand</author><text>For decades, there has been a near complete effective block on medical research for certain classes of drugs. Timothy Leary and that kind of 60’s stuff chilled legitimate science. Only recently have small changes started to happen, to the point the government, the flipping FDA, has started to think Ectasy (MDMA) might be a viable treatment for some of our most horrible mental illnesses.&lt;p&gt;So many people wonder when science will let us do things. When will we land on the moon, when will we cure cancer (most cancer anyway, a handful have been effectively cured), when will all of mankind benefit from the next great insights? We ask this yet in a lot of ways, we won’t even open our minds enough to give it our best shot.&lt;p&gt;How much can x, mushrooms, ketamine et al really change devastated lives for the better under the right conditions? We may never know.&lt;p&gt;I fully respect the opinion of people who say these drugs shouldn’t ever be used, or that disagree with me on any issue in general. But I will never respect someone who doesn’t want to know the answers and the data.&lt;p&gt;It happens with drugs, gun control, so many political issues, people actually do not want, and even work against collection of, objective data. Of course of any given data set can be biased or flawed, and that has nothing to do with getting the best data you can, iterating, and improving it.&lt;p&gt;If we are opposed to something, it’s ostensibly for a reason right? Why would we ever not want to strengthen our argument, or discard it, based on better understanding of our “reason”?</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>I was in the MAPS MDMA for PTSD study</title><url>https://www.psymposia.com/magazine/maps-mdma-ptsd-study-freed-childhood-abuse/</url></story>