The Drugs Do Work

A Third Thought on psilocybin, minority rule, and democratic capture

I am not very 'hip'. Until a few days ago, my recreational drug use ran to sugar, caffeine, alcohol and the occasional cigar. I had tried marijuana to see if it could relieve pain during recovery from my artificial hip operation while in Spain three years ago. So the microdose of psilocybin I took a few days ago felt like a bit of a leap at fifty-eight. It is the hardest drug I have ever done. For the legal record this also happened in Spain at a private residence. It concerns me I must take legal consideration into account here because I find the State's assumed right to prevent me from altering my consciousness is an invasion of my personal agency.

I was careful to pay attention and audit the experience. It was not a 'trip'. My expectation was for a faint lift in openness or nothing at all. Three small things happened.

The first was visual. Looking down a street, depth became more salient — more interesting. Strangely at the same time the scene seemed flatter, more two-dimensional. Those two perceptions contradict each other. The striking part was that the contradiction created no pressure to resolve. Normally these perceptual differences would automatically integrate and not be noticeable separately. But the contrast just sat there.

The second was my baseline mood lifted slightly. And things that would normally have produced irritation produced none. There was an affective and faintly somatic quality to the absence of irritation. Not the flattening you get from THC. A specific lightness where the friction usually sits.

I noticed the above two effects precisely because they were not expected. The third effect was expected: it was easier to be generally happy, without excitement. I was a more peaceful version of myself. "Easier to feel good" is cliché for psychedelics. The second effect seems to be the only one that may have lingered. But the whole set could be placebo. One session proves nothing. That is not the point.

The point is that having now actually tried psilocybin, I cannot locate the basis for the legal prohibition in Australia. Non-addictive. No hangover. No health cost I can find that comes within a postcode of drinking a bottle of wine. The effects were gentle and benign. And I am left holding a question I cannot answer from the effects themselves. Why is this a crime in my country?

A week ago I would have said Fuckwittery and stopped. But Fuckwittery is a verdict, not an explanation. The explanation turns out to matter, because it is much bigger than mushrooms. Sadly I did not get this insight until long after the psilocybin was gone from my system, so the whole expanded consciousness thing is not part of a microdosing as far as I can tell.

Australia just conformed

Australia simply fell in line with the 1971 UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances without properly examining the harm profile of psilocybin. We signed the treaty and mirrored it into our own Poisons Standard. The scheduling decision was psilocybin had no accepted medical use and high abuse potential. The legal result: possession and use of psychedelics became a criminal offence.

It seems to me the Nixon administration from United States pushed the agenda in the US and with the UN, though this is contestable. In 2016 Harper's published a 1994 interview with John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic-policy chief. The Nixon White House, he said, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. They could not criminalise being against the war or being black. Instead they associated the hippies with marijuana and black communities with heroin and criminalised both heavily. This meant they could raid homes, break up meetings, and vilify their opponents on the evening news. Did they know they were lying about the drugs? I think so.

But that quote surfaced twenty-two years after the interview, single-source, and Ehrlichman's family disputes it. Two other things hold my conclusion up. A separate Nixon aide, H.R. Haldeman, said much the same in his own diaries — that the whole problem was framed around a population they wanted to target while devising a system that recognised this without appearing to. Then apply Occam's razor to what came next: If the scheduling had been an honest read of the pharmacology, it would have survived contact with the evidence. It didn't.

In 2023 Australia's own Therapeutic Goods Administration rescheduled psilocybin so authorised psychiatrists could prescribe it for treatment-resistant depression. The State that told us for fifty years psilocybin had no medical value now allows doctors to prescribe it. The original classification was wrong or the new one is. You cannot have it both ways. My conclusion is that the US prohibition was politically motivated rather than out of public health interest. It is the simplest story that fits all the facts. Ironic that presenting this analysis sounds a bit like a conspiracy theorist on drugs!

Capture

Notice what kind of act this was. A government identified citizens it found inconvenient — not for any crime, but for their politics — and used the criminal law to manufacture criminality where none existed, so it could disrupt and discredit them. That use of state power against political opposition is anti-democratic in the most basic sense. The law was not protecting the public from a harm. It was protecting the incumbent from a constituency.

What should bother us is not that someone tried this. Someone always tries this. What should bother us is that it worked, and kept working, and works still — half a century and an ocean away, in a country that had no stake in Nixon's domestic problems at all. A weapon built to win an American election in 1968 is still loaded in Australian law in 2026. That persistence is the thing to understand. It shows how democracies get captured.

How did we end up here? Why did Australia so meekly follow the US political agenda pushed into the UN?

Here is my steelman: In 1971 Australia had genuine reasons to sign. The convention was the price of membership in the rules-based order. It validated Australia as a reliable international citizen. Not signing carried diplomatic cost. The rational trade was cheap conformity now, in exchange for valuable international standing.

The counter view is we adopted a criminal prohibition over our own citizens' private conduct because refusing would have looked bad in a room full of bigger countries. We took on someone else's culture war as domestic law to show we knew how to fall in line. This is the national version of being a Sheeple. We outsourced a judgment about our own people's freedom to an external authority whose motives we never examined, and then never revisited it once those motives were exposed. America's chief export in this affair was not a drug policy. It was the habit of dressing political control as moral necessity and pressing it onto the rest of the world as settled wisdom. We bought it. We are still paying for it. And the US continues to insist on pushing its political values onto the rest of the world.

Minority rule

The takeaway is much bigger than mushrooms being illegal.

Democracy is supposed to track the majority without oppressing the minority. I am now disconcerted that for the most part it does not. The reason is structural, not conspiratorial. You do not need a secret room of people with an agenda, just an asymmetry of intensity.

On one side is a small cohort with an active preference about what other adults may do in private. Their defining feature is not that they dislike drugs. It is that they want the law to compel others to live as they would prefer. I think this cohort is driven, at bottom, by a fear of disorder — the same fear Nixon weaponised — and a discomfort with the wrong people being free to alter their own consciousness without permission. It is a minority. But it cares, and it turns up, and it treats every loosening as a battle.

On the other side is a large majority with no active preference. Most Australians do not want their neighbours jailed for taking mushrooms in their own homes. They want children protected, no addiction epidemics, no organised crime. All reasonable. None of it served by criminalising a competent adult's private microdose. Beyond those guardrails they do not care what other adults do. Plenty have done it themselves, on holiday overseas or quietly at home, and go on doing it. This is not a hidden preference. It is widespread.

And the indifferent majority loses. Every time. Because intensity beats numbers whenever the question is kept off the ballot. The motivated minority shows up to the consultation, writes to the member, frames reform as a danger to children. The majority, feeling nothing strongly, stays home. The law ends up representing the people who care most about controlling others, not the people who want to be left alone. Wanting to be left alone does not organise.

That is what capture looks like. Not a conspiracy. An asymmetry of caring, exploited by an absence of measurement.

Cases in point

The cleanest test of all this is what happens when we actually put a question to the country. Australia has two comparable cases, and they cut in opposite directions, which is exactly why together they prove the point.

In 2017 Australia was offered the choice to legalise gay marriage. There was no real legal basis for the change in law because the same rights conferred by marriage applied to homosexual partners who undertook a civil union. The whole point of the exercise was control. The cohorts as I experienced them were the gays who wanted to force acceptance onto the groups who considered their lifestyle immoral. Then there were the religious types who were determined to keep homosexuals as the 'out-group' they had historically stigmatised. Both sides actively attempted to assert their preference as a control. There was also an older cohort who felt that marriage was a tradition involving a man and woman. To them something about the change was felt as a loss, but they were fairly passive in their preference. The final cohort was the rest of Australia who did not feel the need to discriminate against gays, and again they were quite passive. Ultimately 61.6% of Australians voted yes, on a turnout of 79.5%. This is an extraordinary result for a voluntary survey. The tolerant passive majority was real, it was a majority, and the law had been lagging it for years while a motivated opposition held the line. The moment the question was put, the law moved within weeks. An active yes. The system worked. Compare this to a similar case with an active no.

In 2023 the Voice referendum offered the choice to determine if privileged access to parliament for First Nations people was a way to counter their continuing disadvantage. Same machine. My read of the cohorts was an active and aggressive pro indigenous lobby, and a somewhat racist cohort led by Pauline Hanson that skewed to rural conservatives. Outside of these active groups, the larger passive cohorts were much harder to read. Many people openly talked about wanting to support the First Nations agenda, especially the chattering class university academics. Australia had previously said Sorry and it was socially appropriate to be verbally anti-racist in many circles. Despite the verbalised zeitgeist, the referendum result went the other way. About 60% voted no in every state (and the NT). Only the ACT with its over representation of public servants voted in favour. Across the board Australians were not shrugging. They voted actively against a separate, race-based channel of access to parliament for First Nations people. They might have been happy to let gay people marry. But they were not willing to give one group a constitutional line into government that no other group has. An active no.

This shows that the system can work. The democracy responds when it is allowed to answer. The failure is the active minority that works to keep the question off the ballot, or refuses the answer when the ballot goes against it.

This seems to be case with the Voice where the active minority has not accepted the result: The Welcome to Country that now opens every official event. The acknowledgement Virgin Australia reads out every time a plane lands. The insistence that we educate endlessly about the Stolen Generation. None of that was put to anyone. It is the same active cohort routing around the ballot it lost — installing the answer the electorate explicitly rejected, in the channels where no one gets to vote. The official script. The airline PA. The school curriculum.

Recreational drugs

Now put the drugs case next to those two and the gap is obvious.

Marriage got measured because a cohort with a legitimate, visible identity forced the question onto the agenda. Gay people could organise as gay people. There was a yes to be proud of and a face to put to it. The Voice got measured because the government of the day chose to put it. In both cases, for better or worse, the country was asked.

Drugs have never been asked. There is no drug user pride, no identity to march under, no flag. The preference is private and perhaps faintly shameful, which is exactly what the stigma was built to do. A preference that cannot be expressed in public cannot be counted. A preference that cannot be counted never gets its plebiscite. The very mechanism that forced marriage and the Voice onto the ballot — visible organisation — is structurally unavailable here, because the whole function of the stigma is to keep the majority invisible to itself. People who would happily vote to let adults take mushrooms privately in peace have no idea how many others there are out there, because none of them will say so out loud.

The same structure sits under voluntary assisted dying. The victimless so-called crime in which someone does die, by their own settled choice. Polling showed majority support for years while the law crawled state by state against a small intense cohort certain it should decide how other people end their own lives. Different subject, identical machine. An active minority that wants to compel. A majority that wants to be left alone. A measurement failure the minority works to keep gapped.

Experiential learning

I did not change my mind about so-called illegal drugs by reasoning. I changed it by taking one, gently, and noticing the sky did not fall. A week ago I was a card-carrying member of the indifferent majority. I used pretty much nothing. I judged no one. That made me, in my own social circles, the odd one. I am now the late starter who finally tried what half the people I know have done for years, and came away not with a high but with a political education.

What I learned is that I had been a member of an unrepresented majority for much of my life without noticing. The not-noticing was the point. The system is built so the people it fails to represent cannot see their own number. A non-democratic cheat forged in Washington to break a political movement was handed to a follower nation too eager to conform to ask why. It is maintained today not by any reasoned authority but by a small cohort that fears disorder and an indifferent mass that has never been asked and cannot easily ask itself.

That is a democracy failing at the one thing it claims to do. Not dramatically. Quietly, structurally, with a faint two-dimensional flatness to it. Depth and flatness at once. The contradiction sitting there, untroubled, waiting for someone to notice it has been there all along.

Can you imagine what the answer might be if Australians were asked if they would like substantively lower income taxes? Or if they wanted a carbon tax? Or if they wanted to switch to renewable energy at twice the price of coal? Or if they wanted a more efficient public service? Or if they wanted to permit more immigration? Or if they wanted local government to release more land for cheaper housing? Or if they wanted religious education in schools? I don't know what the outcome of these votes might be, but I suspect it might be very different to what we have now.

The drugs, it turns out, do work. Just not the way the label says.