Some news

Here’s dome news to chew on. Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, may be useful in treating severely depressed patients, but it is a Class A drug (I did not know that) and red-tape and costs make it prohibitive to develop.

This is of course a living critique of moralistic laws, legislating what adults of sound mind can put into their body and the unintended knock on effects such laws have. It also shows up the absurd contortions law based on private property can get into. Psilocybin is made in nature, proscribing it does not stop it from being made. You may as well outlaw the tide.

There is no free market in nature. While directly capitalist relations appear to be egalitarian and free (of course in reality they’re not), capitalism applied to nature is naked appropriation. Rent was created out of the violent appropriation of land. When pharmaceutical companies appropriate naturally produced chemicals it is no less of a violent act.

Once more on bourgeois culture...

The role of any socialist approaching modern culture is as a critic. There is no such thing as socialist culture and trying to create such a thing is at best misguided.

Just because something is said in the bourgeois press does not make it untrue let alone something that can simply be written off. Modern mainstream culture is bourgeois. The prevailing ideas in any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class; this includes ideas about law, justice and so on. Most people we want to reach are, to this extent, 'bourgeois'. If mainstream press attacks a part of the socialist you deal with it head on, you don’t dismiss the attack and you don’t hide, because you can’t.