MEDICINAL BENEFITS OF ILLEGAL DRUGS

Re: Know Thy Poison, Robert Gable, May 30.

Thank you for publishing Mr. Gable's sound analysis of the relative
harms of different psychoactive substances, information that is often
absent from the heated public discourse about drug use. However, Mr.
Gable fails to mention that not only do drugs such as LSD, mescaline,
psilocybin mushrooms and ayahuasca "have little or no potential for
creating dependence," they actually have the potential to treat dependence.

Canada was a world leader in the study of such therapeutic uses of
psychedelics in the 1950s and 1960s. Unfortunately, growing street
drug use among youth made this line of inquiry a political liability,
so research was discontinued despite promising results. The need for
more and better interventions to treat dependence on highly toxic
drugs such as alcohol and methamphetamine warrants revisiting the
project of affirming medical and spiritual uses for psychedelics or
entheogens, a term whose etymology more accurately reflects many
aboriginal drug use traditions.

Kenneth Tupper, PhD student

University of British Columbia

Vancouver.