Charlotte Walsh - On Cognitive Liberty - World Ayahuasca Conference - Ibiza, Spain - Sept 2014

There’s a tendency for drug users to claim the labels of either religious or therapeutic use when trying to exempt themselves from prohibitive frameworks, both because this is a genuine description of their motivations, and because there is believed to be protective power attached to such categorizations.

I think we should take these arguments further, that such absolution should also apply to those who have more loosely spiritual experiences on psychedelics, unbounded by any established framework, especially given the lack of clear division between religion and spirituality. And, going further still, that there should be a right to ingest psychedelics in the broad interests of freedom of thought, also known as cognitive liberty.