The section on conspiracy thinking was interesting to me. I've been trying to understand the ever increasing amount of it in our society, and my thoughts keep going back to the rise in marijuana legalization. I can't help but feel that there is a link.
Like ketamine, other psychedelics can trigger mild psychosis and with it conspiratorial thinking, grandiosity, and all of the other symptoms described here.
The rise in legalization seems, anecdotally, to match the "normalization" of tin-foil hat thinking in society. Years ago Dan Quayle was essentially disqualified from office for misspelling potato, now Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly decries the Jewish Space Lasers and nobody blinks. I feel like there has to be more to societies changes over the last ~25 years than "the internet".
> The section on conspiracy thinking was interesting to me. I've been trying to understand the ever increasing amount of it in our society, and my thoughts keep going back to the rise in marijuana legalization.
Are we switching the horse and cart places here? It's highly likely that people resort to drugs in order to cope with the distress caused by conspiracy talk. Musk is using drugs as stimulants to increase his "productivity" which is the other common reason for taking drugs. BTW, his "productivity" isn't the source of his success, but that's tangential here.
In both cases, conspiracies aren't the root cause and fighting them ends up fighting free speech without reducing either conspiracies or drug use.
The same is true for the normalization of wild conspiracies - MTG followers aren't engaging in them because of drugs, they are doing it because MTG is promoting them from a place of authority and bot-love. If you think she's not playing by a script but simply spilling out the contents of her concerned heart... you know very little about propaganda.
