Switzerland has perhaps the most ambitious approach to treating heroin addiction. The government gives you a prescription for heroin but then makes sure you have a job, decent housing and therapeutic support, on the theory you will no longer need the drug after your circumstances improve.
Many people (myself included) are surprised to learn that the overwhelming majority of people who take hard drugs do so without becoming addicted. We think of addictiveness as a property of certain chemicals and addiction as a disease that people, in effect, catch from those chemicals, but there is good reason to believe otherwise. Addiction may be less a disease than a symptom — of trauma, social disconnection, depression or economic distress. As the geography of the opioid and meth crises suggests, one’s environment and economic prospects play a large role in the likelihood of becoming addicted; just look at where these deaths of despair tend to cluster or the places where addiction to crack cocaine proliferated.
But the prospect of magic mushrooms being commercialized like cannabis — advertised on billboards and sold next to THC gummy bears in dispensaries — should fill us with trepidation. Microdoses perhaps, but a macrodose of psilocybin is a powerful, consequential and risky experience that demands careful preparation and an experienced sitter or guide