Psychedelic therapy shows great promise. More states should legalise it

PICTURE YOURSELF in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees, marmalade skies—and licensed professionals who may finally be able to help you overcome your treatment-resistant depression. The first half of that sentence reflects the Beatles-era view of psychedelic drugs. The second is a new policy being pioneered in Oregon, which could herald a welcome shift in America more broadly.

The view in the 1960s was that psychedelic drugs put users into an indolent, blissed-out state that encouraged them, in the words of an early booster, the one-time Harvard psychologist, Timothy Leary, to “turn on, tune in, drop out”. Unfortunately, the moral panic that this stirred up in the United States shut down research into the therapeutic possibilities of psychedelics and led the federal government to declare that they have “a high potential for abuse and serve no legitimate medical purpose”.