Why Are Psychedelics Illegal?

On March 1, 2016, in the morning, I rode an elevator to the eleventh floor of a building in Chinatown and sat in a surprisingly high-ceilinged — for being so far up in the sky — courtroom with sixty to eighty people. Two grand juries, we learned, would be selected that day. Those not chosen could go home; the rest would begin their service. The 60 to 70 percent of us, it seemed by a show of hands, who’d deferred thrice could not, it was explained, get out of jury duty again; if our name was called, we had to say “serve” and go sit with the other chosen ones. Using a hand-operated, lottery-seeming, plastic ball filled with folded paper, a man called out forty-six names in an impressively subtle, game-show-like voice that amused me and others in, I felt, a calming manner. With twenty-two other people who lived in Manhattan, I was selected for a “special narcotics” grand jury, which meant we’d hear mostly only drug cases. <a href="https://taolin2.medium.com/why-are-psychedelics-illegal-efcff645141c">Read More</a>