SPECIAL REPORT - Twenty-First Century Illicit Drugs and Their Discontents: Driving

The parts below will discuss the history of psychedelic use, the early scientific interest in their potential therapeutic uses, their decline and fall as legitimate treatment tools, the rebirth of research into psychedelics over the past two decades, and the arguments supporting and questioning the use of psychedelics as an adjunct to psychotherapy. [...] The metaphysical bad trip is a devastating extension of this in which everything is implicated in the drug taker’s misery, his wretched feelings are seen as revelations of the ulti- mate nature of the universe, and he experiences some version of what mystics have called the dark night of the soul.165 Psychotherapy accompanying psychedelic use is offered as the solu- tion to those problems.166 As D. [...] That is in the states’ bailiwick.186 How, therefore, can the FDA ensure that dan- gerous drugs are not distributed to people who use unqualified therapists? And who should answer those questions—states, which regulate the practice of medicine,187 or the FDA, which regulates the interstate distribution of pharmaceuticals?188 Further complicating the issue is the development of telemedicine: the use. [...] Whatever the FDA’s decision on that application might be, one promising result of cur- rent events to which the nation appears willing to adhere is the traditional practice that the country has long used for the evaluation of the safety and usefulness of a new drug. [...] The FDA or another branch of the federal government—such as the Department of Health and Human Services or the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP)—could issue an official advisory to drug manufacturers, physicians, and the public about the dan- gers of driving under the influence of a prescribed psychedelic.