My interpretation of the Cactus Person post is that it was a fictionalized account of personal experiences and and an expression of frustration about not being able to gather any real knowledge out of them, which is therefore entertained as a reasonable hypothesis to have in the first place. If I’m mistaken then I apologize to Scott, however the post is ambigious enough that I’m likely not the only person to have interpreted this way.
He also wrote one post about the early psychedelicists that ends with “There seems to me at least a moderate chance that [ psychedelics ] will make you more interesting without your consent – whether that is a good or a bad thing depends on exactly how interesting you want to be.”, and he linked to Aella describing her massive LSD use, which he commented as “what happens when you take LSD once a week for a year?” (it should have been “what happens when this person takes LSD once a week for a year, don’t try this at home, or you might end up in a padded cell or a coffin”).
I’ve never interacted with the rationalist community IRL, and in fact for the last 5 or so years my exposure to them was mostly through SSC/ACX + the occasional tweet from rat-adjacent accounts that I follow, but my impression is that psychedelic drug use was rampant in the community, with leading figures, including Scott, either partaking themselves or at least knowing about it and condoning it as nothing more than an interesting quirk. Therefore, blaming it all on a single person sounds like scapegoating, which I found something interesting to note in a funny way.
As you say, psychedelics might be just a Bay Area thing, and maybe Vassar and his Vassarites were taking it to a different level compared to the rat/Bay Aryan baseline, I don’t know them so it could be possible, in which case the finger pointing would make more sense. Still, whenever you have a formal or informal norm, you’re going to have excesses at the tails of the distribution. If your norm is “no illegal drugs, only alcohol in moderation”, the excesses will be some people who binge drink or smoke joints, if your norm is “psychedelics in moderation”, the excesses will be people who fry their brains with LSD.
As for the cultish aspects, I get the impression that while not overall a cult, the IRL rat community tends to naturally coalesce into very tightly-knit subcommunities of highly non-neurotypical (and possibly “mentally fragile”) people who hang together with little boundaries between workplace, cohabitation, friendship, dating, “spiritual” mentorship, with prevalence of questionable therapy/bonding practices (“debugging”, “circling”) and isolation from outsiders (“normies”). These subcommunites gravitate around charismatic individuals (e.g. Eliezer, Anna, Geoff, Vassar, Ziz) with very strong opinions that they argue forcefully, and are regarded as infallible leaders by their followers. I don’t know to what extend these leaders encourage this idolatry delibrately and to what extent they just find themselves in the eye of the storm, so to speak, but in any case, looking from outside, whether you call it cultish or not, it doesn’t appear like a healthy social dynamics.
No offense, but the article you linked is quite terrible because it compares total deaths while completely disregarding the base rates of use. By the same logic, cycling is more dangerous than base jumping.
This said, yes, some drugs are more dangerous than others, but good policies need to be simple, unambiguous and easy to enforce. A policy of “no illegal drugs” satisfies these criteria, while a policy of “do your own research and use your own judgment” in practice means “junkies welcome”.