I don’t know what is the previous level of knowledge on this topic of you and other readers of this forum, and which parts of my knowledge would be obvious to you and which not;
I think it’s generally best to assume the level of common knowledge you’d expect from a graduate student in an unrelated field.
what would be, from the perspective of a cause, the benefit of being a “cause X” in the EA community
Right now I think the main effect would be more intellectual talent directed towards researching the various strategies that might further the cause. In particular: figuring out the bottlenecks to improving that area, attempting to measure how much those improvements cost (especially if the key bottleneck is “lack of funding”, but even otherwise), and attempting to measure the scope of how much we expect they improve quality of life.
If the outcomes of those analyses suggest that it’s promising, then some potential results would include: funding directed towards those strategies, advising of more people to acquire skills and take careers that directly contribute to those strategies, and more intellectual talent devoted to improving those strategies on a meta level.
Quick Summary: Despite presumed benefits, legalization would likely not increase psychedelic use in low/middle income countries, while legalization in high income countries is way too expensive to be worth funging against conventional global poverty interventions, even with extreme optimism about the necessary budget to cause legalizing and the resulting increase in usage.
Long Summary: For the purposes of this, I’m going to boldly just assume that psychedelics are a very good thing, and treat “giving people who want psychedelics access to psychedelics” as an endpoint. I don’t have any strong opinions about whether they actually are good or not, but I see that plenty of other people are trying to answer that question.
Hypothesis 1 (high confidence): For most of the world, the bottlenecks to accessing psychedelics have nothing to do with the law, so fighting to “decriminalize” them is premature. Populations whose bottlenecks are primarily legal live in high income countries, so everything to do with helping them is rather more expensive than other interventions. It’s therefore highly unlikely that legalizing psychedelics would effectively impact global health. Considering the scale of lack of access to mental health resources, I don’t even think that it’s a particularly effective way to improve mental health specifically.
Hypothesis 2: If you do work on this, consider focusing on lobbying, which may be surprisingly cheap compared to research and clinical trials (low confidence, worth further research). Even if lobbying for legalization succeeds, for this to work there are possibly additional, possibly more expensive barriers that you have to sort of hope the market sorts out on its own for it to become like an ordinary drug.
...all of which hinges on psychedelics themselves being at all good or effective medically, which seems to be something which isn’t particularly certain. So, as far as being an “EA cause area”...well, I don’t think this is something we should be diverting fungible funds to, at least. If you had activities in mind that don’t divert significant funds, or don’t boil down to changing laws, this analysis may not apply.
Evidence
Part 1: Exactly how illegal are psychedelics, really?
Please review these maps summarizing the legality of shrooms, mdma, and ibogaine
Note that most of the world is GREY (no data) in all these maps. What does that mean?
To quote Wikipedia’s page on India, which I picked because it is a country with high population: “Psilocybin mushrooms are officially illegal but the police is largely unaware of their prohibition and are poorly enforced in India.”
Okay, so… based on all this, I’m going to tentatively conclude that psychedelics are basically an unenforced non-issue for the major population centers of the world, to the point where it takes a lot of work to even figure out their obscure legal status. Maybe if you actually started distributing psychedelics it would become an issue, but as of now it’s not even on the map.
Part 2: But what if it was available by prescription?
You know what else is available by prescription and probably helps mental health? Antidepressants! This are two articles about the global picture for antidepressant use. 1) Business Insider 2) The Guardian
Eyeballing these charts, it seems pretty clear that prescription antidepressant use would drop off pretty sharply outside high income countries. It ranges from 1.1% to 0.1% for the relatively well off countries on this chart and looking at the trend of this chart, i think it would be even lower than 0.1% in low income countries. I doubt that this is because the population of countries just don’t need anti-depressants—it’s probably an issue of access to medicine. So I’m pretty sure legalizing psychedelics is not actually going to help most people acquire psychedelics.
Part 3: Okay, but what about people for whom laws ARE a limiting factor? They matter equally!
Okay, lets just consider the United States as the case study, since it’s easy to get data about the USA.
Americans may be the best case scenario in terms of post-legalization uptake, because, as per the previous articles, they use the most drugs. 1 in 6 Americans use prescriptive psychoactives of any kind.
This is promising! Maybe Americans would benefit from using more psychedelics, and they would do so if it was legal. Marijuana legalization did increase marijuana use...although ehhhh I suggest clicking on that link and eyeballing that chart, or going into the original paper and looking at the stats if you want to quantify this. Colorado is the most dramatic increase at ~11% to ~16% (eyeballing the chart) but e.g. Washington didn’t really see huge increases. The grayed-out lines are states that didn’t get legalized, and some of them saw increases to. Still, there are probably important differences between marijuana and various psychedelics in terms of ease of producing them and acquiring them.
Anyway, how much would it cost to do make it legal and available?
For the USA, full R&D to “marketing approval” of a random compound is estimated to cost 1.4b and increasing to 2.9b USD (2013 dollars) post-R&D cost. “Marketing approval” is a high standard. This means that you can openly advertise for it. For the USA, FDA approval for things (that have not been made illegal) costs 19m USD (2013 dollars.
But maybe the market would take care of that itself. What would be the lobbying costs?
Here’s a linkdump preliminary research on the landscape of current lobbying spending to legalize marijuana and end the War on Drugs in general. The numbers I’m seeing in these articles are inconsistent with each other (e.g some of Opensecret’s figures are lower than 1 million/year nationwide, yet this random article which is just about New Jersey is higher than 1 million?) but I admit I have not read this super carefully. I’m not going to summarize these further because I’ve set aside 1.5 hours to write this post, and that time is now up, but I will leave these sources for anyone who wishes to carry this forward. It’s possible that lobbying might actually be sort of affordable?
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=N09 https://www.opensecrets.org/news/issues/marijuana/
https://www.mcall.com/news/nation-world/mc-nws-new-jersey-marijuana-offshore-wind-lobby-20190304-story.html
We’ve taken USA as a case study, but it is probably cheaper to lobby other countries. (But, most of the countries for which legalization is a likely barrier are also high income countries...with smaller populations...and less prescription drug use)
But even if you succeeded at all of this in the United States...how many people would you really help? The US population is 327.2 million, and even if we really optimistically assume that the number of psychedelic users will grow to match the number of antidepressant users, that’s only 1.1% of them, so… around 3.6 million people, and let’s forget about those who would use psychedelics anyway. How much are you really willing to spend on accomplishing that? I mean, pick a realistic budget, and put it into here to compare it to some other stuff https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/impact-calculator
Let’s suppose you happen to spend a probably unrealistically low 5 million dollars on this problem, and you have an unrealistic high 100% chance of success, and as a result an unrealistically high 3.6 million people who weren’t motivated enough to buy illegal psychedelics are now free to use psychedelics a decade earlier than it otherwise would have been legalized without your intervention...you could have given 3.9 million people access to a year of clean water. Sort of—i don’t think this impact calculator takes room for more funding and scaling into account. But, just to be in the ballpark—Does that really seem at all equivalent? To me, it feels extremely not equivalent, by orders of magnitude. (Not to put too sharp a point on it, but I bet having access to clean running water also boosts creativity, problem solving, reduces stress, aids in healing from trauma, and all the other benefits listed.)
Epistemic status: all my knowledge on this topic was acquired during the 1.5 hours it took to research and write this post, and I admit that the research is extremely haphazard—aimed at establishing very rough “order of magnitude” type estimates. I have no prior stake or knowledge about this, I just quickly wrote it up because I felt like taking a shot at the prize. Nevertheless, I do feel fairly confident in the opinions expressed here.
>My current view is that psychedelics are an extremely promising altruistic cause area (on par with global health & x-risk reduction) – I’d like to learn more about how this might be mistaken.
A point of clarification: Your “on par with” phrasing perhaps inadvertently suggests that psychedelics are not a global health intervention. My analysis views psychedelics legalizations AS a global health intervention, and therefore subject to the same metrics. E.g. the way Givewell considers laws restricting and taxing tobacco a global health intervention).