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"The ideological assault on drugs has conflated them all, making for a predictable irony: psychedelics and the idealism surrounding them have gone underground, while the hard drugs, which no one, including their users, ever defended in the first place, become more and more entrenched. In the ‘80s drugs are merely a vice, which is to say a covert and private rebellion that affirms the system, an expression of and hedge against boredom, impotence, and despair."
—
Ellen Willis “The Drug War: from vision to vice” No More Nice Girls
There are a lot of things about this quote that bother me. The privileging of the psychedelics experiences of the 60s as completely different from any other drug use seems so narcissistic. By the 90s, psychedelics were just one more kind of drug, with their own pros and cons, and while they were less stigmatized than crack and heroin (and later meth) they were on the same spectrum. And I think that attitudes like those expressed in this quote fueled drug stigma, even within the counterculture, and reinforced the idea that hard drug use was indefensible.