It’s not hard to see a parallel between today’s ban on psychedelic research and the ban on planetary research in the Seventeenth Century. Then the prohibited instrument for gaining knowledge was the telescope, today it’s LSD and psychedelics generally. Then Galileo was imprisoned, today an academic scientist who makes a stand on LSD risks loss of reputation, academic post, and research funds. A favorable word brings unwelcome attention.
The loss to science is the opportunity to put LSD to work as an instrument for pressing an inquiry into consciousness. Consciousness research is stalled at the primitive and probably futile level of taking the computer as a model of the brain and its software as a model of "the mind." One day consciousness research will be freed from the shackles of political control and many new vistas will be available to explore. True consciousness exploration could shed light on self-understanding, self-development, the mechanism of making things unconscious, the process of thinking, intuition, creativity, and perhaps the ultimate nature of the cosmos.
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