If alcohol was as restricted as MDMA, we just might start calling alcohol a therapy tool. But right now anyone (of legal age) who wants it can order a glass of wine or two, so the people that benefit from it have it. Nobody thinks twice.
You sound incredulous that psilocybin or mdma could be therapy tools. Are you a psychologist? Do you have any firsthand experience with these chemicals? Why are you skeptical?
The point being made is that alcohol is legal, and massively harmful, and the public health measures around alcohol aren't great, and so maybe we need to be cautious when decriminalising and legalising other drugs to ensure that we have some health protections in place.
At the moment we don't have those.
We have strong denial in lots of people that cannabis might cause harm in some people.
All the stuff currently being said about LSD, MDMA, ketamine, etc was also said when prozac was introduced. We need to watch out for pharma companies who'll take something that's probably effective in some people (ketamine infusion for people with severe and treatment resistant depression) and rejig it to make it patentable (eskatamine) and repackage it so it can be used much more widely (nasal spray instead of infusion) and marketed much more widely.
> The point being made is that alcohol is legal, and massively harmful
Harmful relative to what? An ideal world where nobody drinks?
We've tried idealism via a prohibition and last I checked, that caused so much harm we went back to letting people have a drink.
A comparison of drugs vs no drugs ignores reality - we are not lab rats, we live within a society and a little vice lubricates the cogs of society. To deny that this is how it is, was and always will be is not helpful.
Your point regarding for-profit companies is valid - the likely solution to that is to control advertising so that it doesn't advertise drugs, as we have already successfully done with cigarettes.
The larger point is that there needs to be a balance of individual good vs collective. When society tips too heavily in the direction of collective, drugs/corruption/disobedience/crime will always be a 'problem' because there'll always be people who aren't interested in living to enable arbitrary collective goals somebody has decided everyone else ought to follow.
The real distinction here is mechanism of action. Psilocybin helps fix psychoemotional problems in an enduring sense. You take one, or three, doses and your personality and self-understanding are permanently altered.
Alcohol works acutely. So I totally agree the term therapeutic is an arbitrary label; all drugs have effects and thus can be therapeutic for condition X and deleterious for condition Y. But worth noting that psilocybin and MDMA produce enduring benefits whereas alcohol appears not to.
You sound incredulous that psilocybin or mdma could be therapy tools. Are you a psychologist? Do you have any firsthand experience with these chemicals? Why are you skeptical?