this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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The CIA has historically used drugs, and especially psychedelics against anti-imperialist and leftist movements. Not only does it give the state an additional pretext for crack downs and arrests, it also negatively affects the movements themselves, damaging their mental state, getting them addicted or just more focused on individualistic hedonism than collective action, leading to de-radicalization and loss of discipline.
Hippie drug culture came with an entire philosophy that was inward focused and esoterical rather than sober and materialist. The bourgeois state is aware of these effects and has purposely cultivated such cultural movements, including in the domains of academia and the arts. Ultimately this is a form of chemical and psychological warfare no less subversive and dangerous than what the British imperialists did when they pushed Opium on the Chinese people.
Yes, as with any drugs they can have legitimate medical and therapeutic uses and the potential to help people with certain conditions, but their use should be controlled and regulated by medical professionals. They should not be criminalized (because criminalization is also a tool of the bourgeois state used to eliminate dissidents and perpetuate legalized slavery through incarceration), but communists should not encourage or trivialize their recreational use.
A serious revolutionary should endeavor to remain sober.
If this was completely true, psychedelics would be legalised.
Not necessarily. Keeping them illegal allows the state to eat their cake and have it too. It gives them leverage over those using it illegally, access to black markets, and the ability to use it as justification to arrest and commit violence.
Demonize it enough, like the US has, and your stormtroopers have carte blanche to crack skulls and step on necks of whomever is needed to solve the “drug problem”. That demonization is waning from its 90s highs, but it’s still a very useful tool for the state.
With drugs illegal and popular in counter-culture movements you can use it to weed out the population. White kid with an ounce of weed? Slap on the wrist. Brown kid with an ounce of weed? 5 years of slavery. Just casually reinforcing racism and oppressing minorities.
If they catch someone the state really doesn’t like then they have leverage. Rat out your friends, become an informant, or face prison.
I’m not necessarily against chemical exploration, but the capitalist police state will weaponize it by supplying the black market with cheap drugs, encouraging their use in revolutionary, counter-culture, and minority communities (among others), then scraping up anyone they don’t like. The damage left in its wake is inconsequential.