France has a long standing program for artists and entertainment technicians and while the niceties can get complex the big idea is that the State guarantees a minimum level of income if you work a minimum amount of hours per year for artistic purposes (507 I think), including teaching and rehearsals.
Psychedelics aren't physiologically addictive and don't induce the same economics as what you'd generally think as "recreational drugs". There are no LSD or DMT cartels.
It's a reflection of the lack of money. Those substances are comparatively cheap, not habit forming and don't build up long term tolerance. A lot of them are pretty easy to DIY (though not LSD-25).
The typical LSD user will buy a $10 blotter once in a while. The money flow is not worth mentioning in the broader scope of illegal substances trafficking.
> The lack of cartels are perhaps a reflection of the lack of the international supply chains etc.
No. Most of Europe (apart from Scandinavian states, Belarus and Russian Federation, I believe) has access to legal LSD prodrugs. Not analogs but a LSD-25 molecule with attached [it changes] something group which is detached after ingestion, making the ingested substance "the real thing". These do not pass the LSD/DMT Ehrlich test[0]. AFAIK citizens of at least a few US states can as well fully legally obtain such compounds from up north.
So no - lack of LSD cartels is not a result of the lack of international supply chains. As GP stated - it's because these substances have a very low addiction potential.
It doesn't come from nowhere, though. It results in having had to tolerate the French bureaucracy, French lies, empty promises, and French way of (not) doing things for decades.
That's just governments being governments. I've spent 50% of my life in Sweden and 50% of my life in Spain, and everywhere it's the same. "had to tolerate the $NATION bureaucracy, $NATION lies, empty promises, and $NATION way of (not) doing things for decades" probably applies to most countries in the world, I know it applies for the countries I've lived in at least, and seemingly France too. Heard the same about every home country of my friends also.
Governments just move really slowly. Best we can do is cheer for the efforts we think will improve things, even if it'll take years, and protest about efforts we think are harmful.
Parisian French isn't the same as Standard (Court) French, and it sound different in the South because It's only been the majority language for a century. It's super-imposed on top of another language's phonology. It's not a dialectal continuum thing.
My fairly rich French city operates minibuses, mostly aimed at old people, which run through the otherwise non-drivable city center. Of course these are short, low-throughput routes.
There’s a regional transit system with smaller buses out where I live about 50 miles west of Boston. My empirical observation is it’s pretty just elderly who take them.
That's just your personal preference. There's no "right" way of tripping balls, just ways that fit more people.
I love very digital environments, with neon lights and 70s prog synth music or 90s techno. At a certain point it becomes organic.
My personal experience is that anything that forces you to focus on details and anchors you runs counter to what you're getting out of psychedelics. Not just precise logical thinking but even things like focusing on letters. Writing becomes challenging when the letters are fractals flying everywhere.
> You might argue that the EU is a sprawling, wasteful bureaucracy and you would not be wrong, per se, but they made a lot of useful laws that just simply make the world a better place.
The EU bureaucracy itself is significantly lighter and more purposeful than any of the underlying individual states' bureaucracy, though that might simply be a function of youth and restricted scope.
> The EU bureaucracy itself is significantly lighter and more purposeful than any of the underlying individual states' bureaucracy
The EU ""states rights"" (subsidiarity) is a lot stronger and more real than the corresponding structures in the US. It also doesn't really do direct enforcement - there's no EU federal police checking tablets, it's all done through national level enforcement.
