Another big question surrounding Hallucinogens and Medical use and research is the question of how and why Psychedelic drugs were even classified as a Schedule 1 drug. For reference sake I’ll define schedule one by the currently accepted dictionary definition: “Substances in this schedule have a high potential for abuse, have no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and there is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug of other substance under medical supervision”. So basically the government decided that all drugs they want to label with this can be deemed dangerous and unworthy of further examination. The same way the patriarch of the 17^th century determined that only lower class individuals would use or say the word AIN’T – which for the record folks, is a perfectly acceptable and existing word.

A large part of why psychedelic drugs have been labeled as Schedule 1 comes back to the 60’s and the backlash of the government against the ideas of free love and hippies. Truth be told these drugs were originally used with medical intentions, but recreational use grew so large during the Hippie-Era that the growing stigma connecting these drugs to nothing but misuse and ‘heavy tripping’. A great deal of research proving that these drugs were dangerous and had serious side effects was published around the same time that the government was finally warming to the idea of making the drugs illegal. It was only in recent years that most of this so-called research was proven to have been either faked or simply retracted by their original authors. So, what little research that is currently available and hasn’t been proven false suggest that this classification is not only wrong, but just plain close minded.