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context. doctrine.' 332 * WHAT COULD AND MIGHT BE If you want to have fun, take them alone or with friends and spend the day in a beautiful setting. If you want to learn something about yourself and your relationships, take them with a therapist. If you want to feel part of humanity, take them at a concert, rave, or other large gathering. If you want to experience a deeper relationship with the divine and its creations, take them with a religious teacher, community, or in Nature. If you want to contribute to the research endeavor, volunteer for a scientific study. These categories are somewhat arbitrary, and all sorts of effects might occur in any one of these possible settings; spiritual experiences may occur in a research study, for example, and psychotherapeutic ones in a religious However, trouble and conflict emerge when trying to blend different models because of confusion regarding authority and permissible behav- ior. This was the most obvious to me when dealing with the friction between the wide-open, rough-and-tumble, trial-and-error methods of science and my Buddhist community's competing priorities of faith, discipleship, and We need an open dialogue about how best to employ these drugs in our lives and society. Because legitimate research is significantly more likely to provide a context for that level of discussion than any other type of use, I will limit this discussion to a research viewpoint. At the research level, we can divide projects into those that could be done as opposed to ones that should take place. That is, while there are numerous possible questions we can ask and study, doing so may be mis- leading or dangerous. Those dangers may affect us directly or indirectly. They also may be dangerous to other living things. The overarching concern I have about the use of psychedelic drugs has to do with applying them in the service of being helpful, rather than in being smart. Knowing how enlightenment "works," near-death states oc- cur, or alien abductions take place is not as useful as learning to be more kind, wise, and compassionate. That is, the biomedical model, "taking it apart and seeing how it works," may be antithetical to the most fruitful applications of the psychedelic drugs. I come to this conclusion with a certain amount of irony, as many of