"Rights without duties, claims without responsibilities and pleasure without cost".

Roger Scruton is a man of many (often questionable) faces, but in this case, but I'm partially sympathetic to the way he summarises the total absence of critical reason in the psychedelic worldview which arose in the 60's - an aberration which for me devalues the potential generative possibilities of psychedelic research (e.g. MAPS).  Given the last couple of posts, you can't half tell how I'm wearing away at these questions for myself at the moment...

"If the value of LSD is that it expresses and brings to fruition what was going on in the 60's, then I think that's a strong argument against LSD - becasue what was going on the 60's is something that I believe we now have to recover from. It is very difficult to summarise the 60's worldview, but I think one could say very briefly in a nutshell it was the attempt to have rights without duties, claims without responsibilities and pleasure without cost.  The real cost of having any peaceful enjoyment of the world is that one maintains institutions - one makes a sacrifice to preserve one's inheritance.  This was something that the young people of the 60's were reluctant to do, and LSD ministered to that reluctance.  It told them that even the most sublime experiences, the ones of religion - which people had thought in the past came through considerable sacrifice, worship and surrender - that even that experience could be had on the cheap...

... whatever the actual intensity of the experience, to call it religious has nothing to do with it's intensity, it's to interpret it as having a certain meaning.  When you administer to yourself a drug which you know is affecting you by producing a chemical transformation in the brain, and you're deliberately engineering that, it's very difficult to sincerely interpret this as a visitation of the divine spirit or the revelation of a transcendental world.  It's simply an act of self-deception to put that kind of religious kind of interpretation on it, I'd have thought".

- Roger Scruton

I think it's important to note that Scruton doesn't deny the existence of a transcendental perspective.  This from Wikipedia:

"Scruton is indebted to the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom he credits with providing the definitive philosophical response to Descartes' view of consciousness. Mark Dooley compares his Wittgenstein-influenced philosophy of language to that of Richard Rorty. Scruton contends, following Immanuel Kant, that human beings have a transcendental dimension, a sacred core exhibited in their capacity for self-reflection".