Drug use changes the way you vote. The people who were running the country during the Vietnam war recognized this and, along with the people who owned industry/media, didn't want that kind of change to go mainstream.

Psychedelics desolve the conceptual prison your mind is in, the government made them illegal because they build those prisons.

Charitably, you could argue a functional society involves some amount of indoctrination into a set of shared beliefs and a large percentage of people losing that indoctrination would destroy society. Could the US function if everyone was a pacifist, anti-capitalist, hippie? I think that was and still is the primary concern.

We hear a lot about LLMs lately, they solve reasoning, mimic empathy, and awaken consciousness miraculously. As long as we do not understand the workings of the mind and brain, it reminds me of the days when machine learning or Bitcoin were the cure for everything.

We don't fully understand the workings because it is (was?) classified as a drug, making research into it a lot more complicated. Thankfully there are charities and organizations that lobbied to make it more researchable.

It's a drug that makes your neurons more susceptible to forming new connections. Of course it's going to be useful for a lot of brain treatment. In addition, it's highly illegal which means these things didn't get found out a lot sooner.

Here's yet another anecdote of near-zero real value to add to the pile: I treated my severe treatment-resistant depression with ketamine infusions. It's obviously not the same as psilocybin, but I believe the current thinking is that psychoelics and dissociatives both have some positive effect on neuroplasticity, and that sorta checks out in my case. I'd say you need to combine it with some good cognitive behavioral therapy - it seemed to make CBT a lot more effective for me where it failed in the past because my brain was more open to rewiring. I haven't been re-treated in a few years now, but I still feel a lot better.

But you're also totally right - my story is just an anecdote, and these sort of headlines that used to have cannabis as a miracle cure for all types of things seem to have been replaced with headlines about psilocybin (or occasionally, ketamine) curing everything instead. I totally get the skepticism, but I'm a believer that we might be onto something w/r/t depression or other things that are treatable via CBT at least - the article mentioned "combined with talk therapy" ... not sure what therapy method was used alongside the psilocybin.

SciAm really should prefer a headline such as:

Psilocybin opens up new pathways to treating anorexia