Drain on the medical industry? Not if they have to pay for their care themselves for any problems resulting from their own drug use. Then it'd give the medical industry a new market to feed off of.
Besides, look at the cost of the war on drugs, and you'll see that there's more than enough money there if you feel some obligation to help people. If anything, it's the cost of keeping drugs illegal that's the real burden.
I agree completely. I suppose I was a little ambiguous. By "drain on the medical industry" I was actually thinking about a future state of affairs. If many addictive drugs were legalized, I predict that the state of drug addiction would be covered by health care as a medical disease (especially if medicine is socialized in the future, and I'm not sure how I feel about that).
I believe this to be so because most people that are addicted to drugs do not have the money to pay for their own health care. So in a future world where cocaine is legal for example, I predict that cocaine addiction will be treated as a fully legitimate medical condition. But I may be wrong.
As far as entheogens go, I think most of them are illegal because they were inadvertantly swept up in the misconceived "war on drugs". People that have never had an entheogenic experience or even a psychedelic experience often operate on the assumption that hallucinating is very, very bad and that anything that makes you hallucinate is therefore also very, very bad. People are terrified of them. They aren't like normal psychotropic chemicals. They hold the poptential to change your life forever.
I have a particular vested interest in keeping Salvia divinorum legalized. The active ingredient Salvinorin A binds to and produces analgesic and anaesthetic effects at k-opioid receptors in the CNS. This has never been observed before. It holds great promise to lead to new discoveries in safe general anaesthetic drugs, and since I will be working in the medical industry this is of primary importance to me. If it is made illegal, research could not be performed without a DEA liscense and progress/discoveries will slow to a halt.
Also, from what's been said and that thing inside our brain is causing a "spiritual effect"...Is anything spiritual at all then? If it's just something in our head that's causing it, I don't see how anything could be labeled as a spiritual experience.
This was the point that I raised above, and here was my response and interpretation of it:
In either of these examples, does the fact that the experience was derived from an alteration of normal neural activity invalidate the spirituality of it? I say no, of course not. People that experience such things often change their lives completely afterwards. To them, it's more real than reality itself. What would one want to be a "true spiritual experience"? God speaking to you directly? And how would one separate that experience from a simple auditory hallucination?
So in my view,
every "spiritual" experience is inseparable from a temporary neurological change, but that doesn't make it any less spiritual. It's the lesson that you learn from it and the actions that you subsequently take in life that validate it's spirituality
EDIT: I think a lot of people make the mistake of assuming that spiritual experiences come from
without instead of from
within. Just because a near death experience is caused by DMT and just because you may not actually be talking to your dead grandma while experiencing one doesn't make it any less spiritual.
