I don't see why it couldn't happen if an empathy-giving psychedelic become popular on the party circuit. I presume that's what happened with LSD in the 60s. People took it to have fun, and enough people ended up having their eyes opened in the process.
Ketamine is awful, yet people take it at parties. I'm sure these types would lap mescaline up. Perhaps in an anti-nausea combo. If mescaline use exploded, would it bring change? Does it promote empathy and awareness as much as LSD? Perhaps mescaline would then open people's minds to ayawaska/DMT, and if that happened then I'm sure we'd see positive effects.
People are wary of LSD because of bad trips, but seem to warm to mescaline because it has similarities with MDMA. I'm not sure if LSD would ever become popular again given its reputation outside of hippydom. Is there another psychedelic, maybe an RC, capable of capturing the imagination of the masses and catalysing change at the same time?
I think the problems with ecstacy were the comedown and it didn't really make people think like a psychedelic does. So the 'second summer of love' changed little compared to the first. A third summer of love, with mescaline... would that be more positive?
The biggest problem with LSD is that RCs get sold as it. Would this happen if mescaline took off too? Would dealers just sell RCs as mescaline? Is a mescaline boom economically unfeasible? Perhaps it would be a good thing in some way if a law blanket-banned all RCs, because maybe inferior RCs would no longer be passed off as entheogens.
Or perhaps real LSD and mescaline could be distributed by a new Brotherhood of Eternal Love to usher in this new wave? These people would have to get their stuff onto all party scenes, not just the hippy scene where everyone already knows about entheogens anyway. Incidentally, the retro/creative scene seems to be turning to the 60s at the moment... moccasins etc are appearing.
I'm just interested in this hypothetically, I'm not on a mission, though I do wish for something like this to happen and break through the cynical apathy. The world lacks optimism at the moment. Climate change has much to do with it I think... perhaps there is an underlying crippling concern that civilisation as we know it is going to crumble within our lifetimes?