Another fine article, but it seems like you're reaching for something that isn't there. Obviously there is money to be made, as there is with anything. The reason a lot of people have psychedelic drug use in common is that...most people use drugs, but not everyone talks about it. It's a minority of people like Ben Shapiro, or, presumably, the author of this article, who have not. And at the end of the day, consciousness is a material phenomenon, if it is anything, and what you have had for breakfast influences your mental "set" to use Leary's terminology. Your "setting" also influences it, that is, the people you're around, and the environment you're in.
I like all of the dots you're connecting, but you keep using this word "pushing" as though people are robots who don't make choices. Most everyone I know who has chosen to use psychedelic drugs has done so because they've read about them (either online, or, in the olden days, through underground newspapers, etc.) or heard about them in the post 1960s media and said "why not?" The evidence is that for the vast majority of users, they either have a good time that they find personally meaningful, or more or less nothing important happens. A small minority of users have bad trips that are uncomfortable for the drug's duration, and a much smaller minority (about in line with the general frequency of psychotic disorders in the general population) have bad trips that last longer---but a lot of this has to do with the environment in which the bad trip is dealt with, e.g. a hospital, a psych ward, or just chilling out with friends for a few days in a supportive environment.
You also seem a bit fixated on the idea that this is something Peter Thiel is doing, rather than that Thiel is one of the many people (right and left...) who enjoy the Psychedelic Folk Culture. In a lot of ways, it transcends politics. Take the Grateful Dead. Whatever your politics, if you like dosing and going to a Dead show, and you think that's something worth enabling, then there are a bunch of other commitments you're going to have, politically speaking, like freedom of movement (to travel to different shows), freedom of trade (to buy stuff in the lot), freedom to get high (to get high...). So there is an implied agenda that is not really political, in the sense of a platform, so much as a set of freedoms that are necessary to allow the Psychedelic Folk Culture to...happen...and if you want to keep it rolling, you're sort of committed to a certain set of values, but they're not necessarily political, in fact, most of them are what Leary called exopolitical, in that this folk culture is, in some sense, about a temporary, ecstatic liberation from the drudgery of the political culture of industrial society.
What I can't figure out is why you think this is such a bad thing, or a dangerous thing. Like, if Thiel is interested in psychedelics...it's because they're fun and, like millions of us, he has the good taste/good sense to enjoy them. It's very rare to have, for example, someone synthesizing LSD and selling it who doesn't also use it, it's not like fentanyl---that's what someone who just wanted to turn a profit would make.
I look forward to the other parts of this series, though, it's a fun topic!
Another fine article, but it seems like you're reaching for something that isn't there. Obviously there is money to be made, as there is with anything. The reason a lot of people have psychedelic drug use in common is that...most people use drugs, but not everyone talks about it. It's a minority of people like Ben Shapiro, or, presumably, the author of this article, who have not. And at the end of the day, consciousness is a material phenomenon, if it is anything, and what you have had for breakfast influences your mental "set" to use Leary's terminology. Your "setting" also influences it, that is, the people you're around, and the environment you're in.
I like all of the dots you're connecting, but you keep using this word "pushing" as though people are robots who don't make choices. Most everyone I know who has chosen to use psychedelic drugs has done so because they've read about them (either online, or, in the olden days, through underground newspapers, etc.) or heard about them in the post 1960s media and said "why not?" The evidence is that for the vast majority of users, they either have a good time that they find personally meaningful, or more or less nothing important happens. A small minority of users have bad trips that are uncomfortable for the drug's duration, and a much smaller minority (about in line with the general frequency of psychotic disorders in the general population) have bad trips that last longer---but a lot of this has to do with the environment in which the bad trip is dealt with, e.g. a hospital, a psych ward, or just chilling out with friends for a few days in a supportive environment.
You also seem a bit fixated on the idea that this is something Peter Thiel is doing, rather than that Thiel is one of the many people (right and left...) who enjoy the Psychedelic Folk Culture. In a lot of ways, it transcends politics. Take the Grateful Dead. Whatever your politics, if you like dosing and going to a Dead show, and you think that's something worth enabling, then there are a bunch of other commitments you're going to have, politically speaking, like freedom of movement (to travel to different shows), freedom of trade (to buy stuff in the lot), freedom to get high (to get high...). So there is an implied agenda that is not really political, in the sense of a platform, so much as a set of freedoms that are necessary to allow the Psychedelic Folk Culture to...happen...and if you want to keep it rolling, you're sort of committed to a certain set of values, but they're not necessarily political, in fact, most of them are what Leary called exopolitical, in that this folk culture is, in some sense, about a temporary, ecstatic liberation from the drudgery of the political culture of industrial society.
What I can't figure out is why you think this is such a bad thing, or a dangerous thing. Like, if Thiel is interested in psychedelics...it's because they're fun and, like millions of us, he has the good taste/good sense to enjoy them. It's very rare to have, for example, someone synthesizing LSD and selling it who doesn't also use it, it's not like fentanyl---that's what someone who just wanted to turn a profit would make.
I look forward to the other parts of this series, though, it's a fun topic!