I believed so as well for the first 5-10 years. Later, as I got older I realised it's in most cases just a mixture of ignorance, fear and uncertenty. Give you an example: when I first started experimenting I was still living in communist Jugoslavia and the attitude towards drugs was extremly negative because nobody and I mean nobody in authority had *any* idea that they actually functions very differently. They though heroin is the same as grass. It was complete ignorance and fear. Later when we transitioned to a half decent capitalist country and the politicians werem't just all drunk old Partizans from WW2 anymore the laws changed for the better and sentencings became much lighter and more sane. They started differentiationg between hard drugs and soft drugs like grass. Also the atitude of population changed dramatically over the last 15 years. Think about the fact tthat just 15 years ago there was zero legalisation progression in places like USA and that after 2 generations fighting for it for like 50 years prior. The reason wasn't 'racism' or even 'oil companies' as I was told repeatedly for years, but simply ignorance and fear. When you have just one word ( 'drug' ) for the whole set of completely different chemicals it's no wonder that people who don't experiment witht them to just imagine them all as 'bad' on the level of heroin or meth. What they see is a junkie on the street bothering them or worse. And they hear horrible stories which are also mostly true. When drugs come to town, the town usually goes to shits because 'drugs' in reality doesn't mean MDMA or LSD or psylocybine (I could go on ;) ) but 'meth' or 'heroin'. It's what people can see with their eyes.
What we should actually do if we want to make this right is to use different words for different types of substances. In the 60's 'psychadelics' was used and then mostly forgotten in the 80's. But in the 90's a better, more precise, word became popular: 'entheogens'. It's a perfect word for the type we're discussing here. If we used such clasifications regularly people outside of experimental circles would start to differentiate between them as well and from there it's an easy step to sane legalisation laws.
