A series of philosophical essays constituting one long argument against America's devastatingly misguided Drug War

Top 21 reasons to abolish the DEA (and then put its leadership on trial for crimes against humanity):

"If the present generation or any other are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free. Wrongs cannot have a legal descent." -- Thomas Paine

July 2, 2020

Open Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEA

Please tell the DEA to stop criminalizing research into godsend medicines. My mother has symptoms of dementia, and so many psychoactive plants show great promise in treating and even reversing it. Yet the CRIMINAL DEA criminalizes research on almost all such psychoactive substances. This is the same agency that poisoned Americans in the 1980s with Paraquat sprayed on marijuana. Paraquat has since been shown to cause Parkinson's Disease. So the DEA not only lies about substances that could possibly cure Alzheimer's disease, but they purposefully poison their own people (Americans) with CHEMICAL WEAPONS. ABOLISH the hateful DEA -- the anti-minority DEA -- the anti-nature DEA -- the anti-RESEARCH DEA -- and let my mother have peace in her final years. AND PUT FORMER DEA CHIEF JOHN C LAWN ON TRIAL for crimes against humanity for using chemical weapons against his own people.

June 30, 2020

Why the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia

One of my many shortcomings as a writer is that I assume that my readers know what the hell I'm talking about when they actually do not. I thus have a tendency to write tersely in cases where a little prolixity "would go a long way," so to speak. With this in mind, I would like to devote this entire post to the task of "fleshing out" what I mean when I say that America's Drug War represents a kind of Christian Science Sharia, a claim that I have made "in passing" in at least 10 of my essays over the last year, assuming that I was merely stating a commonplace, until a friend of mine politely pointed out to me that some of my readers might not be familiar with the theology of Christian Science, or even with the politically charged connotations of the word "sharia" as used in the 21st century by a westerner. This task of clarification is crucial because once one understands the statement that "the drug war is Christian Science Sharia," the evil of that quixotic project becomes apparent and we develop an immunity to the drug war propaganda that pervades western society (not least in the form of cop shows and drug war movies, both of which promote the once uniquely western view that mother nature's psychoactive plant medicines can bring about nothing but madness and despair).

Briefly then (though hopefully not TERSELY): Christian Science is a religion founded in late 19-century America by Mary Baker (aka Mary Baker Eddy), after she discovered what she took to be the overlooked healing power of spirituality as demonstrated by Jesus in the New Testament. She came to believe that physical suffering was an illusion, that it had no objective reality, and that it could be overcome by faith alone. Given this theological understanding, many modern-day Christian Scientists, like Baker herself before them, feel no need for modern medical intervention and seek to do without its various ministrations (including prescriptions and surgery), sometimes with tragic results, as was demonstrated by a number of sensational cases in the media in the 1980s in which Christian Scientists were charged with child abuse for allowing their children to die of treatable diseases due to the parents' religious conviction that healing could come about through spiritual intervention alone.

Having thus briefly explained the Christian Science outlook on suffering, I trust that it is apparent why the drug war represents the enforcement of Christian Science precepts. The drug war says, in effect, that human beings should not -- and indeed must not - use mother nature's medicines in an attempt to improve their psychological well-being. And this is simply the doctrine of Mary Baker herself with respect to illness. It is a religious belief, especially as many drug warriors suggest that the proper alternative to so-called drug use is to believe in the Christian God. Yet there is no scientific reason why we should not use the plants and fungi of our choice to improve and expand our cognition - there is only the conviction of the drug warrior that it is somehow wrong to do so. Of course drug warriors who hold this faith have to work constantly to censor history in order to delete counterfactual examples from the past. Thus we read of Benjamin Franklin's creativity, without being told how he used opium to stimulate that creativity. Thus we read of Sigmund Freud's highly prolific work output, without being told how cocaine helped drive him to produce that output. Thus we learn of Francis Crick's great insight in discovering the DNA helix, without being told how he used psychedelics to help achieve that insight.

Having thus established that the drug war represents the enforcement of Christian Science precepts, I will end my efforts at clarification by defining the word "sharia," both in its original sense and in its generally pejorative modern connotation in the west. We read in Webster's, that "sharia" is:

"the body of formally established sacred law... governing in theory not only religious matters but regulating as well political, economic, civil, criminal, ethical, social, and domestic affairs in Muslim countries."

More to our purpose here is the modern connotation of the word "sharia" in the west, where it conjures images of a police state run by a theocratic government that will brook no dissent and whose laws are emphatically harsh. By thus describing the drug war as "sharia" in this pejorative sense, I hope to highlight the highly ironic fact that Americans (and westerners in general) are living under the very form of government that they purport to detest, a kind of western "sharia," that subjects them to a set of ultra harsh drug laws (which may soon include the death penalty in America) should they choose to violate the Christian Science doctrine of renouncing Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines when it comes to treating "what ails them," psychologically speaking.

QED, the drug war is really the enforcement of Christian Science Sharia.

If enough freedom-loving westerners can "get their head around this fact," then we can stop impotently shouting "End the drug war!" to deaf politicians around the globe and start shouting "End Christian Science Sharia!" instead, thereby revealing to the drug warriors that we're "onto" their game and that we know all about their stealth efforts to make us conform with the anti-scientific moral philosophy of the religious reformer popularly known as Mary Baker Eddy.

June 25, 2020

What Liberals ALWAYS get wrong about the drug war

as exemplified by Karolina Zieba's 2018 article entitled 'In case you choose not to say no to drugs'

I have nothing against liberals. I consider myself to be one. But they never seem to really understand the full problem with the drug war. If you want to read a typical liberal article on this subject, check out Karolina Zieba's article entitled "In case you choose not to say no to drugs, kids," published September 10, 2018, in The Student Newspaper.

She seems to mean well and she argues against harsh penalties for drug possession, etc., but like almost every other liberal on the planet, she fails to grasp the full evil of the drug war, writing instead as if the drug war was a good idea which cannot work or which needs to be tweaked significantly in order to be fair. To which I say, no: the drug war needs to be eliminated root and branch. It has no right to succeed. Points that I attempt to make in the comment that I have posted below.

Karolina appears to say the following: yes, drugs are bad, but people are going to use them anyway. But what are drugs? They are often just "plant medicines," albeit ones that politicians dislike and have criminalized in order to punish their opponents and remove them from the voting rolls (as was the case with the fiercest drug warrior of all time, former President Richard Nixon).

And why is it morally good for me to avoid plant medicines? Those who think that I should do so are just asserting their Christian Science prejudice on this topic. There is nothing moral about avoiding mother nature's godsends, no matter how hard government tries to demonize them - especially when that same government wilfully overlooks the fact that 1 in 4 American women are addicted to Big Pharma antidepressants, many of which are harder to "kick" than heroin (source: Julie Holland).

Moreover, Karolina seems to assume that the only possible use of mother nature's psychoactive plant medicines is to get a cheap high, but that is just drug warrior propaganda. Freud used plenty of cocaine to keep alert. Benjamin Franklin used opium to increase productivity. Francis Crick used plenty of psychedelics to help him figure out the DNA helix. And the age-old Vedic religion was founded to worship the psychedelic insights provided by a plant-based medicine known as soma.

Liberals don't realize that 'drugs' is a pejorative term for 'mother nature's plant medicine' and that the drug war is therefore Christian Science Sharia

It is therefore simply Christian Science indoctrination for adults to tell kids that plant medicines have nothing to offer them as adults. The government can force us to say that to kids, but that's not science at work, it's politics - politics inspired by a Christian Science contempt for the value of mother nature's plant medicines. If we're going to warn kids about psychoactive snares, we should be telling them about the great antidepressant addiction of our time - but we are hypocritically silent about that, and ignore it completely, while yet criminalizing mother nature's bounty.

I appreciate that Karolina dislikes harsh drug laws, but I think she could do more to attack them if she realized that the word "drugs" is often just a pejorative political term for "mother nature's plants."

Why should we recognize that? Because Donald Trump is getting ready to start executing folks for selling "drugs." The best way to stop him is to point out that they're not selling drugs: in many cases they're simply selling "mother nature's plant medicines" - albeit the ones that politicians have decided to criminalize, usually for cynical political motives.

June 24, 2020

'Good Chemistry' is a good Covid read

Though the author is showing symptoms of the Drug War Virus

The lies of the drug war have biased almost every author who writes on the subject. I have yet to read one single pundit on this topic (with the notable exception of the much maligned Thomas Szasz) who, in my view, has not been duped into believing at least one major drug warrior lie, no matter how reasonable the rest of their argumentation may seem when it comes to castigating the many sins of the so-called drug war. One drug war lie that the leftists always seem to "swallow whole" is the idea that there is this bad thing out there called "drugs" which must be stopped, since these substances are only used by psychologically flawed people as crutches. This is certainly the tone that Julie Holland strikes in the opening to her new book entitled "Good Chemistry: the science of connection from soul to psychedelics," though she obviously does not class psychedelics as drugs in this strictly negative sense.


Holland points out, correctly enough, that human beings are obliged to be gregarious by their very nature. But she then proceeds to imply that people who use these, quote unquote, "drugs" are simply trying to get the "high" that comes from social interaction without actually interacting, thereby avoiding real life and the full emotions that it can bring.


Now, don't get me wrong: there are many people who commit the mistake highlighted by Holland, especially when we class excessive cell phone use as a kind of "drug abuse," as the author does.


Holland's mistake is to suggest that this is the only possible use of these substances that we call "drugs." The author would certainly agree that cell phones can be used responsibly, but she implies that there is a class of drugs whose use is prima facie evidence of pathology. This is plain wrong. Gabor Mate makes the same mistake. In this way, both of these authors turn one particular problem into "the" problem par excellence, thereby confirming the drug warrior's superstitious creation of a bugaboo known as "drugs" that is all-powerful in creating suffering and mischief - meanwhile jettisoning the previous scientific understanding that good and bad must be attributed to people, not to substances.


Sigmund Freud relied heavily on cocaine to help him achieve self-actualization, both by publishing prolifically and interacting regularly with the folks around him. To imply therefore that cocaine use and responsible living are somehow mutually exclusive is just a drug warrior lie, one to which leftists frequently succumb in their unthinking desire to pathologize all human behavior and thus render it amenable to their professional medical ministrations.


Benjamin Franklin was a regular user of opium, but no one ever suspected that socialite par excellence of attempting to avoid social encounters. Franklin's use of opium seems particularly odd to drug war Americans, who diligently censor that use from Franklin's bio, because they have forgotten that there was a time when Americans still judged people by how they actually behaved, rather than by the substances that they may or may not have had in their bloodstream.


It is really just a kind of Christian Science slander to say that certain of mother nature's substances can be evil without regard for the way that they are used, or else to imply that such substances can only be used in one way, and that is irresponsibly. This lying drug warrior mentality reached its apotheosis in the 1980s with the highly mendacious ad claiming that "drugs" fry your brain, an anti-nature piece of propaganda that is actually the opposite of the truth in the case of most so-called "drugs." Cocaine sharpened Freud's brain, it did not fry it. Opium increased Benjamin Franklin's creativity, it did not dull it. Richard Feynman kept alert with what the drug warrior might today deride as "speed," but today he is considered the very type of genius, not some druggie who "wasted his talents," as the drug warrior likes to say in moralizing about those Americans who dare to use substances of which politicians do not approve.


Both the left and the right have fallen for the drug war lie that certain plant medicines can only be regarded as "crutches." This idea can be maintained only by purposefully ignoring the facts. I'm not just talking about the fact that great people in history "used drugs," but that whole religions were founded based on the worship of psychoactive plants and the insights that they provided. The Vedic religion was founded in order to worship the highly psychoactive natural medicine known as soma. The Eleusinian mysteries involved the use of psychoactive medicine and inspired such Western luminaries as Plato and Aristotle. The MesoAmericans claimed great insights from the ritual use of plant medicines prior to the devastating arrival of the Conquistadors (who, unlike today's disingenuous drug warrior, made no secret of their contempt for what they considered quite literally to be devil plants and fungi). The idea, therefore, that most psychoactive substances are "crutches" is merely a provincial bias of American authors, authors who have been duped into thinking that America's peculiar and socially determined attitudes toward drugs tells us something about the drugs themselves, when all they tell us about is American society in the time that it is under observation.


That's the problem with the drug war, in general: it leads us to ignore pathological social arrangements when diagnosing problems and to focus instead on the one-size-fits-all cause known as "drugs". Thus social arrangements never get fixed - cities lie forever in disrepair and children fail to get properly educated -- much to the glee of conservatives and to the consternation of liberals.



The fact is that there is no such thing as "drugs," as defined by the drug warrior, just as there were never any "devil plants" in MesoAmerica, despite the Conquistadors religious belief to the contrary. There are no plant medicines that are bad in and of themselves, without regard for the way that they are used: by whom, and when, under what circumstances, for what reasons, etc.

When authors imply otherwise, they pave the way for despots and officious do-gooders to punish Americans, not based on how they actually behave, but on what plant medicines they choose to use, thereby violating the natural law upon which America was founded and simultaneously establishing Christian Science as the state religion, insomuch as the theology of that sect insists that its votaries use prayer rather than "drugs" to combat whatever ails them.


Unfortunately, Julie Holland ignores this despotism in the opening of her new book by falsely claiming that a whole raft of psychoactive drugs were criminalized in the early 1970s because they were being misused by young people. That's just plain wrong. Richard Nixon criminalized those drugs in order to destroy his enemies, period, full stop. That's why the drug war did not simply educate or remonstrate with substance abusers, as it would surely have done if it was interested in public health: it removed those "abusers" from the voting rolls by charging them with a felony. The antics of the anti-war Flower Children were just an excuse for this vicious and anti-scientific crackdown on so many therapeutic godsends of mother nature. Had Nixon cared about the country's health, he would have launched a war on tobacco and alcohol, two drugs which kill thousands every year-- unlike the so-called epidemic of drug abuse in the late 1960s and early 70s, which injured very few but committed the much greater sin of unnerving the political establishment.


The evidence is clear: the term "drugs" is a political term, designed to cast infamy on plant medicines of which politicians disapprove, often for sinister strategic reasons, as in the case of Richard Nixon. So we're bound to go wrong when we write books in which we imply that these evil "drug" substances really exist, just waiting to snare the unwary American -- especially when we claim that these thoroughly evil bugaboos exist as an evil category in contradistinction to a group of emphatically blessed substances known as "medicines," meaning drugs from big pharma that we're obliged to take daily for a lifetime if we're good Americans and obedient patients: substances which are somehow immune from the moral censure of the drug warrior. It's this make-believe distinction between evil drugs and blessed medicines that dupes today's drug warrior (and indeed the vast majority of the American population) into totally ignoring the great American addiction crisis of our time: the fact that 1 in 8 American men and 1 in 4 American women are addicted to Big Pharma antidepressants.


To do her credit, this is one drug war injustice of which Julie Holland is clearly aware, as revealed by her discussion on this topic with Dr. Richard Louis Miller in the book "Psychedelic Medicine." That's why I purchased "Good Chemistry" in the first place, because the former book had revealed Julie Holland to be one of the rare psychiatrists who had both acknowledged and denounced the addictive status quo of her profession. I'm still hoping that the author's new book will provide useful insights on how the psychiatric pill-mill can be shut down and replaced with psychedelic therapy, even though her opening pages, in my opinion, doffed one too many hats in the direction of drug warrior sensibilities and presumptions. Still, as Julie herself acknowledges, psychedelic therapy seems to be on the way in America now, even sooner than later, which is not only fantastic, but amazing considering the extent to which the drug warrior virus has spread across America, causing muddled thinking everywhere it goes.

June 23, 2020

There are no such things as drugs

the post that got me banned for life from the DRUGS subReddit

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This post got me banished for life from the Drugs Sub Reddit. Apparently even those who oppose the drug war have been snookered into believing in "drugs" as an objective term, when it's really just a political pejorative for substances that politicians have chosen to demonize, often for strategic political reasons. This is unfortunate, because by calling substances "drugs," demagogues like Donald Trump can call for the execution of those who sell them -- whereas if we referred to "drugs" more honestly as "plant medicines from Mother Nature," the callousness of Trump's proposal would be obvious to us all. (I've actually received feedback from this post claiming that "drugs" is "already a neutral term." Well, yes, it should be, but it certainly is not in drug war USA.)


There are no such things as "drugs," the way that the drug warrior defines that term. There are no substances that are bad in and of themselves. There are only morally neutral substances: substances that can be used for good or bad purposes, at good or bad times, in good or bad doses, by good or bad people. That's why the whole crackdown on "drugs" is madness. It's not just that the drug war is wrong, but that it represents a whole wrong way of looking at the world, where we see evil in a substance by itself without regard for the way that the substance is actually used by any given human being. It's a way of thinking that Thomas Jefferson would not have even understood. If someone were to have told him that some of his garden plants were somehow criminal by nature, he would have considered that person to be a fool. And the idea that you could stomp onto his property in jackboots and confiscate such plants (as the DEA did in 1987) would have struck him as common law tyranny, blatantly at odds with the natural law upon which Jefferson himself had founded the American republic.

The word "drugs" as used today is a linguistic red herring invented by bigots and politicians so that they can crack down on their enemies without appearing to be bigoted when doing so. Under the banner of fighting this custom-made bugaboo of evil "drugs," politicians can throw their opponents in jail for mere possession of plant medicines while claiming to be fighting for public health and safety while they do so. That's nonsense, of course, because most full-time drug warriors are vehemently opposed to a so-called nanny state and vote down any efforts on the part of government to enforce public health through laws. Their interest in public health only arises when there are political opponents who require silencing. Then public health suddenly becomes priority number one for them (the government can never spend enough money on it, buying guns and building prisons) since a healthy populace, in the drug warrior's mind, is one in which their political enemies are no longer free to walk the streets. The answer: criminalize the plant medicines that are popular among the despised populations that you wish to disempower and (if possible) remove that population from the voting rolls entirely (by charging them with felonies under your new seemingly disinterested law against "drug abuse").

Thus the war on opium originally targeted the Chinese, the war on cocaine originally targeted Blacks, and the war on marijuana originally targeted Hispanics.

Of course, if this superstitious belief in the existence of evil substances known as "drugs" was held only by the right, there would probably be no drug war. But the left also finds the pejorative "drugs" label useful as well, not because they want to punish drug users but because they want to treat them, chiefly by bringing the whole vast medical establishment into the picture and giving them a cut of the "drugs" pie. But both the left and right are coming from the same place, philosophically speaking: they both assume that there must be something wrong with a person who uses plant medicines of which the government disapproves. The left wants to "help" those people, the right wants to "punish" them. But it never occurred to either side that there was no problem in the first place: or rather that there are many "drug-related" problems, but they are all actually caused either by the drug war itself, or by a combination of that drug war and bad social policies.

Why is the drug user's drug supply uncertain both as to quality and quantity?

Because of the drug war: it works tirelessly to disrupt such merchandise both as to quality and quantity.

Why is the drug user limited to purchasing only a small fraction of the vast psychoactive pharmacopoeia of mother nature's godsends, often including synthesized substances that are far more addictive than what nature has to offer?

Because of the drug war: its prohibitions create a profit motive that incentivizes the sale of highly addictive substances.

Why does the user lack statistical information about the actual observed results of psychoactive substance use, knowledge whereby he or she could choose wisely?

Because of the drug war: it produces lying propaganda stating falsely that all drugs fry the brain. Such whole-sale demonization of nature's plant medicines leaves the user with no objective information with which to choose the substance of their choice, thereby increasing the likelihood that they'll choose unwisely.

Why do some folks get addicted?

Because of the drug war: the profit motive that it creates ensures that dealers will be selling highly addictive synthesized versions of mother nature's psychoactive plant medicines. Meanwhile, many less addictive (and totally non-addictive) plant medicines are unavailable because the research-quashing drug war ensures that most people will never even hear of them, let alone get a chance to use them to improve their life, spiritually and emotionally.

Why is addiction treatment in America barbaric, consisting of three days of cold turkey on a cot, followed by monthly doses of Naltrexone, all for a price tag of around $3,000?

Because of the drug war: it outlaws all psychoactive drugs (especially psychedelics) that can be used to change attitudes and thus make withdrawal easier.

Why is the great addiction of our time completely ignored by the drug warrior (i.e., the fact that 1 in 8 American men are addicted to antidepressants and 1 in 4 American women)?

Because of the drug war: In addition to demonizing illegal "drugs," the drug war also canonizes legal "medicines," so much so that those latter substances can do all the damage in the world yet we're completely blind to it.


Why are there vast empires selling drugs and fomenting violence in countries around the world? Why have America's inner cities been turned into shooting galleries?

Because of the drug war: prohibition causes violence from the dueling profit-seekers that it empowers. It's a lesson that we should have learned from liquor prohibition but that politicians decided to ignore when they realized how they could turn the drug war to their political advantage by using it to disempower their enemies.

Why do formerly freedom loving Americans now believe that extrajudicial murder and torture is good public policy, at least when it comes to fighting "drugs"?

Because of the drug war and the drug war propaganda films put out by Hollywood, which turn torturers and murderers into American Heroes. Example: the movie "Running with the DEA" from 2019, in which Natalie Reyes plays a DEA agent who tortures one drug suspect and shoots another at point-blank range. Why? Because they had the nerve to sell mother nature's plant medicine, the coca leaf, which had been used responsibly by non-western cultures for millennia. As if to rub our freedom-loving noses in the injustice, Natalie Reyes is hypocritically smoking tobacco while she shoots the movie's plant-selling "bad guy." In fact, she does all but hold up a banner saying: "This has nothing to do with health and safety: this is all about raw power."



But what can we expect when America launches a drug war based on the false and superstitious notion that there are such things as "bad substances," i.e. "drugs"?

For psychoactive substances are just as morally neutral as any rock or tree. If we are looking for good and evil, we have to start talking about human behavior, and that includes the human-guided social policies that lead to bad outcomes. But this is exactly why the drug war hangs on like an unwelcome guest: because politicians know that once the whipping boy of "drug abuse" is taken from them, they will have to actually address the vast inequities in American society that lead to misbehavior. They'll have to stop punishing the pre-crime of drug use and start dealing with bad behavior only. Bigots and overzealous do-gooders both prefer to believe in "evil drugs" because it gives them a mission: one to punish and one to rescue. But if they really wanted to help Americans and advance the cause of freedom, they would give up on their superstitious belief in evil substances and stop demonizing this thing they call "drugs."

Of course what politicians really mean when they use the word "drugs" is: "psychoactive plant medicines of which politicians disapprove." But they'll never use that language, because to do so would reveal the hidden Christian Science assumptions of America's drug war, according to which there's something metaphysically wrong about using plant medicine to alter, adjust and improve cognition. That, however, is a religious point of view, not a scientific one, and should not inform public policy, let alone become the law of the land, as it has ever since the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, when the US government first took the fateful step of criminalizing a mere plant. Since then, the drug war has stood in stark contravention of at least two of the basic tenets upon which America was founded: the supremacy of natural law over common law and the separation of church and state as called for in our Bill of Rights.

June 21, 2020

Don't abolish the police, abolish the DEA

in response to a black DEA agent's complaints about agency bias

Why are black agents in the DEA in the first place? The DEA was founded by a racist politician in the early '70s, at which time it popularized the notion of treating drug suspects like dirt. Suddenly suspects were openly referred to by the police as "scumbags," as any fans of old-school cop shows can attest. And why? Because they were simply selling the natural plants that politicians had criminalized in order to punish members of their political opposition. In fact the entire drug war began as a racist attempt to punish the Chinese, with whom American bigots associated the use of opium.

Although Floyd was not detained for a drug violation, his assailants actually joked about the drug war during the murder, taunting the onlookers with the hackneyed phrase: "Just say no to drugs." In other words, the officers were taking full advantage of the drug warrior tendency to dehumanize and mock minorities, even in cases that had nothing to do with illegal substances. The officers knew that, from their own point of view, the drug war was nothing but a good excuse to beat up on non-whites, especially those who did not reverence and fear the police in the way that a slave feared a harsh task master in slavery days.

The solution to this systemic disregard for human life is not to abolish the police, we need to abolish the DEA and everything that it stands for: like bullying and incarcerating minorities, blocking drug research, lying about psychoactive plants, and outlawing mother nature's medicines that are the birth right of all human beings. We should then hold the DEA responsible for past outrages as well. How many Americans know that DEA Chief John C Lawn poisoned Americans in the 1980s by spraying marijuana plants with Paraquat, a weed killer that has since been found to cause Parkinson's Disease? If we're in a war on drugs, then Lawn is a war criminal -- one who used chemical weapons on his own people. Yet he's still feted today by that corrupt agency.

It's a mystery to me, therefore, why blacks - or freedom-loving members of any other racial group - would want to work for this thoroughly corrupt agency, one that is responsible for turning inner cities into shooting galleries, thanks to the violence that naturally arises when one criminalizes mother nature's plant medicine.

For the drug war is merely Christian Science Sharia, a religious war against those who dare attempt to heal or improve themselves, psychologically speaking, with the help of mother nature's medicines. It is thus doubly unconstitutional, first because it represents the de facto establishment of a religion, and second because it was a violation of natural law to criminalize mother nature's bounty in the first place, since John Locke himself declared that the citizen of a free republic has "the right to the use of the land and all that lies therein." There's no doubt therefore that the garden-loving Thomas Jefferson flipped in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello in jackboots in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants.

Meanwhile millions go without psychoactive godsends because the DEA blatantly LIES about mother nature's plants. saying (in the teeth of reams of evidence to the contrary) that they have no potential therapeutic uses whatsoever. Blatant lies -- that no one in Congress has yet had the guts to "call them" on. Of course, the drug war does have its fans, however: starting with Russian President Putin, whose own drug czar is a former dealer who is currently in charge of making sure that drug dealers in Russia keep paying off the right people in order to keep the government looking the other way. Donald Trump himself is now eager to use the drug war as an excuse to murder minorities - for the "dastardly" crime of selling plant medicine, that is - plant medicine that the government had no right to outlaw in the first place.

All this while America is the MOST ADDICTED COUNTRY IN THE WORLD -- not because of opium, not because of cocaine, not because of psychedelics -- but because of Big Pharma antidepressants. ONE IN FOUR AMERICAN WOMEN are addicted to SSRIs, some of which are harder to quit than heroin because they screw around with the brain chemistry that they falsely purport to "fix."

Why this addiction? Because the DEA lies about all psychoactive plant medicines and makes it almost impossible to study them, let alone to use them - forcing the suffering to rely instead on a handful of highly addictive and expensive pharmaceuticals, which sent Big Pharma profits soaring from $80 million a year to over $40 billion a year in just a few decades.

Again, I ask, why would any freedom-loving American want to work for this corrupt organization known as the DEA - as opposed to doing everything they can to abolish it, root and branch?

Look at "Running with the Devil" - the 2019 drug-war propaganda movie in which DEA agent Natalie Reyes TORTURES her suspects -- and she's the HERO of the film, as far as the script writers were concerned. And she SHOOTS the bad guy (Nicolas Cage) in cold blood and why?... for selling the coca plant - a rainforest medicine which has been used responsibly by non-Western cultures for millennia. AND SHE'S SMOKING A CIGARETTE while she shoots him. WHAT HYPOCRISY - proving once again that America's drug war has nothing whatsoever to do with the nation's health; it's all about enforcing a Christian Science Sharia in which alcohol and Big Pharma antidepressants are given undeserved monopolies when it comes to "curing what ails ya."

You may say "It's only a movie," but I've never heard the DEA denounce it. If Donald Trump watched the flick, he was certainly cheering on Natalie when she got on her hypocritical high horse and shot her suspect point-blank through the foggy mist of toxic tobacco smoke that she was continually exhaling.

Is this really an agency that blacks -- or anybody who values American freedom -- should work for?

Not to mention the DEA's colonialist outrage of going overseas to supposedly sovereign countries in order to burn the poppy plant -- another plant that has been used responsibly for millennia by other cultures. They say we're going overseas to stop addiction at home. But under that logic, Muslims should be allowed to enter the States for the purpose of burning grape vines. (Make no mistake: the drug warrior is going overseas to extend Big Liquor's monopoly throughout the world, thus making alcohol the Christian Science go-to drug for the entire globe. Besides, it gives the US military a foothold in countries that we may need to overthrow if they start displaying symptoms of Socialism Praecox, or threaten to impede access to oil supplies.)

The DEA doesn't really mind being called "biased." That's something that they can at least pretend to fix without losing their central mission of enforcing Drug War Sharia. So if the DEA's black agents really want to bring about change, they will denounce the DEA root and branch, first and foremost by pointing out, loudly and clearly, that the DEA's drug war actually causes all of the violence that it purports to be fighting! In short, the DEA's drug war is simply a make-work program for law enforcement.

The answer therefore is to abolish the DEA, not the police.

There is precedent for this. The Israelis recently abolished their own drug agency. It's time for America to do the same.

June 18, 2020

Cannabis Causes Birth Defects?

Hold on a minute

The following comment was posted in response to the Reddit Post entitled Cannabis use in pregnancy: Researchers discover that continued use of cannabis at 15 weeks of pregnancy was associated with significantly lower birthweight, head circumference, birth length, and gestational age at birth, as well as with more frequent severe neonatal morbidity or death

The problem with these findings is that Drug War America cannot be trusted to provide unbiased facts about psychoactive substances. The DEA ignored reams of positive evidence about MDMA when it criminalized it in 1985 as a therapy for PTSD in soldiers. Instead they relied on the research of one dissenting scientist who made a specialty out of providing the sorts of negative results that the DEA wanted to hear, even when no one else could duplicate those negative results. Meanwhile, drug war propagandists have lied for decades about Mother Nature's plant medicines, telling us that they "fry the brain," when the exact opposite is the case. Sigmund Freud used cocaine to sharpen his mind. Benjamin Franklin used opium to increase his creativity. Francis Crick used psychedelics to "think outside the box," a strategy that led him to the discovery of the DNA helix. One scientist falsely claimed a half century ago that LSD caused genetic defects, and that one lie has hung on in the popular imagination to this present day, despite having been conclusively discredited decades ago.

Meanwhile, drug war America gives antidepressants a free pass to cause as many problems as they can: sexual dysfunction, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, emotional flat-lining, weight gain. When SSRIs cause such problems, no one's outraged: instead we see a proliferation of new prescription "adjuncts" come into the market: pills that claim to alleviate these negative symptoms so that "you can keep taking your important meds." If marijuana caused all these problems, drug warriors would have a field day on Reddit deriding the substance, but when the same problems are caused by a Fortune 500 profit maker, we are all too hypnotized by the full-court press of Big Pharma propaganda to speak up. We may at first be leery, but not to worry: Big Pharma has suborned many talking heads in the psychiatric industry to come on shows like Oprah and remind us of our duty to "keep taking our meds." Oh, and did I mention that 1 in 4 American women are addicted to those anti-depressants (source: Julie Holland): but not to worry, right? Big Pharma antidepressants are medicine, after all, not "drugs."

In a drug warrior society such as ours, a rational person has to be leery of any reports claiming that psychoactive plant medicines cause problems, not just because Americans have freely lied about such plants in the past, but because psychoactive plant medicines pose a threat to the major drug-war stakeholders (Big Pharma, Psychiatry, Big Liquor, Law Enforcement, the Corrections Industry, etc.). The lucrative business model of these stakeholders is put in jeopardy when Americans are given free access to Mother Nature, so such industries will be quick to highlight any study that casts doubt on plant efficacy. Meanwhile, we have to wonder how many similarly negative scientific studies about SSRIs and SNRIs have been quashed, downplayed, or not even undertaken thanks to Big Pharma pressure on drug researchers to "stick with the script," according to which pharmaceuticals are blessed medicines while psychoactive plants are cursed drugs.

Even if the study findings are true, a drug-war society is sure to draw the wrong conclusions from them, taking them as yet another reason to do what drug warriors do best: demonize marijuana and psychoactive plant medicines in general. But this would be hypocritical, to put it mildly, since even Big Pharma antidepressants are contraindicated during pregnancy. In fact, aspirin itself comes with the same warning, yet no one's demonizing that drug and suggesting that it should be criminalized.

This illustrates the whole problem with the drug war: it has "cried wolf" so often in its attempts to slander plant medicines that studies like this, if true, are likely to be ignored. Americans have heard so many lies before, both from drug warriors and their paid proxies, that the question naturally arises: why should we trust them now to be giving us the full and unvarnished truth?

June 10, 2020

Why the Drug War is a Godsend for Conservatives

The Drug War is a godsend for conservatives. Whenever social policy results in disenfranchisement and anger in leftist and liberal quarters, conservatives can completely ignore a frank discussion of the policies that caused it by focusing instead on the illicit substance use to which the despair in question naturally gave rise. Does a failure to focus on childhood education result in semi-literate adult populations with no respect for human life? No problem. Conservatives merely focus their attention on the problematic substance use that resulted from that same abnegation of government responsibility. By thus framing the public debate in terms of substance abuse, conservatives not only avoid having to discuss the topic of equitable social arrangements, but they can blame the downsides of their selfish social policies on the victims of that policy themselves.

June 4, 2020

The Racist Drug War killed George Floyd

One of the cops on the scene for the George Floyd murder actually had the sick sense of humor to tell the onlookers to "just say no to drugs." That's a very telling comment, because it is the drug war that first made it acceptable in America for the police to treat suspects like dirt. Just watch any cop show or movie about the drug war: the good guys are those who call the bad guys scumbags, rough them up, kick down their front door, stomp through their house like the proverbial bull in a china shop, and do everything that they can to violate their constitutional rights. Why? Because the drug war mentality tells them that it's all right to be as evil as they want to be whenever they're dealing with suspects who dare to sell mother nature's plant medicines to their fellow earthlings.

Of course, the George Floyd killing itself had nothing to do with so-called drugs, but the contempt that the officers showed for human life is precisely the kind of behavior that Americans celebrate every time they watch a cop show or a movie about the drug war. This is because drug warriors have convinced us to forget about human rights when fighting so-called drugs. It's little surprise therefore that racist police officers embrace that sick attitude toward suspects even in cases that have nothing to do with drugs.

LETTER TO Virginia Senator TIM KAINE about the murder of George Floyd by racist police officers.

Politicians need to show the link between the Drug War and George Floyd's murder. One of the accomplices taunted the crowd by saying, "Just say no to drugs." That is no coincidence, Senator. It is the Drug War that first empowered police to treat suspects like scumbags. The Drug War mentality says that all extreme measures are welcome when fighting those who trade in mother nature's plant medicines. Americans actually celebrate and "cheer on" this behavior in cop shows and drug war movies (like "Running with the Devil," in which the DEA agent freely tortures and murders drug suspects -- and yet she is the HEROINE of the film!!!)

Though the murder of George Floyd was not connected with "drugs," it was made possible by the callous attitude that cops have been taught to adopt when dealing with drug suspects. It's no surprise that racist cops would feel free to adopt that same callous attitude, drugs or no drugs, when they're dealing with suspects from racial groups that they have learned to dislike.

---------------

The Drug War taught cops to treat suspects like scumbags. No wonder that one of the accomplices in George Floyd's murder taunted the crowd by saying: 'just say no to drugs'.

May 31, 2020

Drug War Copaganda

How cop shows reinforce drug warrior lies about Mother Nature's plants

EMCEE: Live from the DEA Lounge, let's give it up for comedian Johnny O'Clonnapan, brought to you tonight by Paraquat, the only weed killer recommended by America's DEA.

APPLAUSE

JOHNNY: Before I start to be funny, my lawyer has asked me to read the following FDA warning. Ahem. And I quote.

"The FDA played a randomly chosen comedy routine of mine to 2,000 lab rats and discovered that every 92nd one of them blew a gasket during the funniest parts of my material."

Personally, I think that study was flawed. First of all, how do we know for sure that my audience has the same comedic predilections as the species Rattus rattus? Be that as it may, we have replacement gaskets available at the bar tonight, just in case, for just $2 apiece, with any qualified purchase of a house cocktail worth $9 or more.

So, gaskets in the full upright position, folks. I'm about to unload.

GASP

With my humor that is.

LAUGHTER



You ever stop to wonder what television would have been like over the last 50 years if America hadn't gotten the harebrained idea of criminalizing plants? Cop shows would not exist. I kid you not. All the violence that fuels the cop show plots would be gone. What a bummer for the police. Then they could only arrest people for actual bad behavior instead of for the pre-crime of possessing plants that had been demonized by politicians.

Cops would be like: "Damn, we've just got to sit on the sidelines now and let people go about their lives as they see fit. This is no fun."

How many Drug Warriors do we have in the house? Let me see a show of dunce caps.

DRUM

LAUGHTER

I mean hands. Let me see a show of hands.

You drug warriors are lucky. You've got so much working for you, propaganda-wise. Seriously. Almost every single cop show is free drug war propaganda.

SAY THAT AGAIN!

Almost every single cop show is free drug war propaganda.

Think about it.

Have you finished thinking? Oh, I'm sorry.

There are several drug warriors in the back there who still haven't quite wrapped their brains around it. That's okay. No hurry. Keep thinking about it, guys.

LAUGHTER

Be nice, folks. I'm sure the drug warriors are doing their best.

When have you ever seen a debonair genius like Sigmund Freud, casually employing coke on a cop show to render themselves prolific, and thus achieve self-fulfillment in life?

Never. That's when.

APPLAUSE

That would violate drug war superstition, which says that criminalized plants can cause nothing but evil.

You only ever see coke used by greedy Wall Street prodigies and morally rudderless young people, at stag parties and the like. As for the coke itself, it generally appears in a small white mountain on a card table in a dimly lit room, alongside a pile of bloodstained money, a razor blade, and a recently fired handgun.

And the dimwit viewers are all like:

"Oh, isn't cocaine just terrible? Honestly. The bullets, the blood and the razor blades! Oh my!"

And I'm like: Hello, folks. The bullets, the blood and the razor blades (Oh my!) didn't arrive on the scene until we criminalized cocaine and thereby placed its distribution in the hands of the underworld.

Boy, I'm glad I'm not a mean person, or else I would be seriously tempted to refer to drug warriors as idiots, I mean just utter morons who have about as much philosophy in their brain pans as I have in my little toe... let's say the one on my left foot for the sake of argument.

But I'm better than that, folks. There's nothing to be gained by trashing drug warriors personally, no matter how stupid their arguments might be in favor of criminalizing God-given plants - plants which God himself said were "good," in the Book of Genesis no less.

APPLAUSE

Yes, there's no point in calling such people morons, that's for sure. Is it tempting to do so? Yes, of course it is.

But I wasn't raised that way, folks. I just wasn't raised that way.

APPLAUSE

Speaking of TV cop shows, how many fans do we have of "The Republic of Doyle" here tonight? You know, that show about the family of Irish private detectives up there in Newfoundland of all places.

I just watched an episode in which Jake was getting all self-righteous about his niece Tinny's involvement in selling some marijuana plants. Jake was like,

"I expected more from you Tinny. Tsk tsk tsk."

And of course Tinny bows her head, knowing that she has committed heresy against the Great Western religion of Christian Science when it comes to mood disorders.

[Tinny sobbing]

Of course, in the next scene, Jake is in a bar, hypocritically throwing back a brewski, with which he has no moral problems whatsoever.

[burps] "Jake, please!"

LAUGHTER

Then there's another episode where Jake self-righteously tells a drug researcher that he (Jake) is not "into" drugs.

Would somebody please tell Jake that the word "drugs" is just a code word for "mother nature's plant medicines," and he should therefore stop preening his feathers, insisting that he wants nothing to do with them. That's just plain stupid: God gives us this wonderful pharmacopoeia that's full of psychoactive plants that can help us screw our heads on straight, and the ungrateful Jake says he wants nothing to do with them.

I sincerely hope that 50 years from now, when Jake is in an old people's home and feeling blue, that his Canadian caregivers will be allowed to provide him with psychedelic plants that will help him make his peace with death and rejoice once again in the wonder and the mystery of existence.

APPLAUSE

Hopefully by that time, Jake will no longer be talking about: "I'm not into drugs."

I tell you, if I were God and I heard that, I would take it personally. I can hear God right now.

[gong sounds]

"Here I make all these wonderful medications for you that, when used wisely, can be godsends, and you tell me that you're not 'into' them? I mean, Earth to Jake: that's what some of us would call base ingratitude on your part."

How about that? God has a British accent. Who knew?

LAUGHTER

Before I go, I'd like to remind you all to pick up a bottle of Paraquat Weed Killer, located in the poison aisle of your local lawn and garden center. It's the only weed killer recommended by America's Drug Enforcement Agency. This is the exact same formula that the DEA used in the 1980s to poison pot users in the United States.


BOO


And talk about long-lasting, it's still working to this very day, causing Parkinson's Disease in the scofflaw Americans who unwittingly inhaled it four decades ago, courtesy of DEA Chief and Master Poisoner John C. Lawn.

BOO

Is John C. Lawn in the house? Why doesn't he stand up and take a bow? I'm sure that those pot users forgave him years ago for screwing up their lungs.

[dog snarls]

GASP

Although it would appear that the seeing-eye dog at table 5 still remembers the outrage like it was yesterday. I guess the details got passed down to him by some kind of oral tradition peculiar to the canine tribe.

[dog barks]

Besides, let's face it, the ones who survived are too disabled by Parkinson's Disease to think about vengeance.

BOO

What? They told me to plug Paraquat, and I plugged Paraquat.

DRUM

APPLAUSE

Keep me in your prayers, folks. I'm going to get a proper tongue lashing from my agent the second that I get off this stage.

Oh, no, here she comes now!

[hysterical agent babbling]

I know, I know. Well, you're the one who told me to plug Paraquat.

LAUGHTER

EMCEE: You've been listening to Johnny O'Clonapan, live from the D E A Lounge.

Brought to you tonight by Paraquat, the only weed killer recommended by America's DEA, who reminds you to turn in your loved ones today if you discover them using any plants of which politicians disapprove. Together, we can all just say no to each and every one of Mother Nature's godsend mood medicines.

NARRATOR: For more information about America's bogus drug war, which is a violation of natural law and responsible for thousands of unnecessary deaths around the globe every year, visit AbolishTheDEA.com.

May 30, 2020

So, Your Faith Votes?

Yes, and it also demonizes mother nature's plants and violates the natural law upon which America was founded

I recently received an e-mail from Gov Mike Huckabee, chairman of My Faith Votes, in which he lambasted "the nanny state" and asked me to help end it.

What hypocrisy! A man who is dedicated to a drug war that gives government the right to tell me which plants I can even touch, let alone use or research... and he's going to complain about the nanny state? Know-nothing politicians like Mike have created the most egregious nanny state in human history, one which, since 1914, has put Mother Nature's plants under the control of big government.

So I responded to Mike's request with the argument that follows, which surely would have been longer except for the fact that his website limited me to one full paragraph worth of dumbfounded indignation.


You outlaw mother nature's plants and call it a drug war -- plants that God said were "good" and gave to us in Genesis -- and yet you dislike a nanny state? Wake up, Mike! Since 1914, your government has violated the natural law that America was founded on by telling us what plants we can use and even research. Millions have died because of this war. Millions have gone without godsend plant medicines that can't even be researched. Meanwhile, the DEA has lied for four decades about Mother Nature's plants, thereby depriving the sad, lonely and shell-shocked hundreds of Godsend psychoactive substances that could have improved their lives. Stop complaining about a nanny state when you are responsible for the biggest nanny state in human history: a state that -- for the first time in history -- decides for its citizens which plants it can use and which it must avoid. Meanwhile, study up on your natural law. John Locke himself said that human beings have a right "to the use of the land and all that lies therein." Yet you demonize plant substances as "drugs" and ungratefully turn God into a drug kingpin with your hateful anti-patient and Christian Science demagoguery about mother nature's plants. Freud used cocaine to improve his mind, not to fry it. Benjamin Franklin used opium to increase his creativity. Francis Crick used psychedelics to help him discover the DNA helix. Drugs are neither good nor bad except for how they are used: They are medicines, not devil plants. It's your blatant hypocrisy on this subject that turns me off 100% from "MY FAITH VOTES." Because right now: YOUR FAITH creates a violent black market and blocks vital research on godsend medications.

May 28, 2020

Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism

The post that got me banned for life from the Reddit Psychiatry group

This essay got me banned for life in the Reddit Psychiatry group. Here was my response to the cowardly anonymous moderators:

You guys are great: you addict me to your damn medicines and then ban me for life for complaining about it. Well, enjoy your "feel good" discussions about your profession, since you don't want to hear about the ways you're ruining lives and causing the biggest addiction crisis in world history -- completely off the radar of your pill-mill goldmine, bought and paid for by Big Pharma. Ah, you've got to love freedom of speech in the digital age.*

The decriminalization of drugs (or what I prefer to call the re-legalization of plants) must coincide with the de-medicalization of mood disorders. The current psychiatric system behaves under the patently absurd and scientistic illusion that every human being in the world is precisely the same when it comes to so-called illnesses like depression and anxiety, that there exists a sort of philosopher's stone in the realm of psychiatry, namely a psychiatric drug (or handful of drugs) that can cure every depressed person in the world, from a morose nonagenarian who is afraid of death to a home-coming queen who is upset about not "getting into Harvard."

And so our highly paid psychiatrists of today don three-piece suits and sit down pompously in front of elaborately hand-carved desks, only to perform a job that could be easily performed by any nurse intern. Their job today is simply to write prescription refills, after making a pro-forma check, using an insulting and outdated 10-question personality test, to "ensure" that the would-be recipient of the prescription is not contemplating suicide -- which is important to check, no doubt, since the refill procedure is so disempowering to the patient that they might well consider suicide as a way of protesting the infantilization to which they are being subjected every three to six months of their lives.

This robotic paradigm for treating "patients" has resulted in a catastrophe so great that Big Pharma and their pill-peddling psychiatrists refuse to even acknowledge it: the fact that 1 in 8 American males and 1 in 4 American females are now addicted to modern antidepressants, many of which are harder to quit than heroin. This drugged-up dystopia might be at least partially excused if these medicines were found to truly end depression, but this is not the case. In fact, America is now the most depressed nation in the world in spite of this full-court press by Big Pharma to place the entire nation on their limited pharmacopoeia of highly addictive "meds."

All this in an age that claims to value "empowerment" above every other social goal. Yet what could be more disempowering than turning a depressed person into a patient for life, one who thus becomes a ward of the healthcare state and has to share his or her intimate feelings with a psychiatrist every three to six months of their life, all while paying dearly for doing so, both in time and money?

The alternative is clear: end the drug war and replace psychiatrists with pharmacologically savvy shamans, physicians who thus profit from the best medical practices in both the west and the east. Of course, this idea will seem radical to so-called "free" Americans, who have gotten used over the last 100 years to having politicians and bureaucrats decide which plant medicines can be used by whom, and when.

The drug warrior lie is that he or she is merely interested in protecting Drug Warrior Junior from evil drugs. But the effect of their legislation is to turn the average American into an addict while blocking the therapeutic use of thousands of natural godsend medicines. We all look back in shock at the way the Church impeded scientific activity in Galileo's day; but we have yet to be shocked by the way that the drug war impedes scientific activity in ours.

Why then do we not even THINK about replacing psychiatry with pharmacologically informed shamanism? It's obvious: The pill-peddling paradigm ensures that psychiatrists have high-paying jobs for a lifetime. Why? Because their patients MUST visit them every three to six months in order to get their socially approved "fixes" of Big Pharma medicine.

The frustrating thing from a philosopher's point of view is that America is closing its ears to these obvious truths, and shouting in effect: "I'm not LISTENING!!!" whenever someone raises these concerns (which, to be fair, however, happens rarely enough). American opinion on these subjects has been bought and paid for (like any other commodity) by Big Pharma through the psychiatric talking heads that they have financially suborned to spread cozy-sounding antidepressant mythology on Oprah et al.



And so we continue to treat psychiatric patients AS patients, second-rate and infantilized citizens who are forced to demonstrate their worthiness, every three to six months of their life, to receive yet another expensive prescription from an already expensive doctor.

This won't change for the better until materialists renounce their scientistic project to find a one-size-fits-all cure for depression, a project that would seem absurd on its face to any society not so infatuated with science that they have developed a Spock-like ineptness at recognizing the human side of such an enormously variegated topic. Of course, this change will also require that Drug Warrior Americans stop behaving like the Church of Galileo's time and begin allowing full scientific access to and therapeutic use of the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet, the flora to which we were all once granted access by dint of merely being human, until 1914 that is, when racist Drug Warriors first violated natural law by claiming that the government had the right to tell us which plants we could access and which we must ignore and shun on pain of arrest -- and even death, should we dare to share the plant medicines that our politicians have decided to withhold from us.

The change I'm talking about is the transformation of modern pill-pushing psychiatry into pharmacologically savvy shamanism. This is the way forward in behavioral therapy, at least for a free country that is determined to take the best from both eastern and western medical traditions. Such a transformation would be in the true interest of patients, and would even free them from being called patients in the first place, which is a disempowering designation after all. The therapy in view here would identify its votaries merely as human beings: human beings, who, like all of us, are looking to find their place in the world and gain a better understanding of the strange miraculous thing called life, and how not simply to cope with it but to thrive in it as well.


*My complaint may seem a trifle harsh, but you must remember, I wasn't slapped on any old-fashioned wrist: I was banished for life. Besides, I think that folks have to start being a little more upset about the status quo if they really want to get results in the real world. That certainly seems to be the lesson from the George Floyd murder. We should be blocking roads and occupying buildings over the way that government has usurped our natural-law right to mother nature's plants. Instead, most decriminalization advocates are cautiously mounting statistical challenges with the anemic goal of paring back the drug war here and there in order to "make it more just." Which is nonsense. If the government outlawed the freedom of the press, we wouldn't be seeking ways to make that law more just: we would be demanding that the law be repealed instantly: end of discussion. Neither should we roll over and play dead when the government takes away our right to access mother nature's plants, in clear violation of the natural law upon which America was founded.

May 27, 2020

In Praise of Doctor Feelgood

Why psychiatry must become pharmacologically informed shamanism

What follows is a short sketch showing how truly effective psychiatric treatment could take place once Americans have jettisoned the ignorant mindset of the Drug Warrior.

Okay, everyone take a seat. Glad to see you guys. Now, let me describe how we're going to help you with your alcohol withdrawal. You see, a hundred years ago, back in 2020, psychiatry finally began to realize that the hardest thing about withdrawal is the bad feelings. I know what you're thinking: why did it take them so long to realize it? Well, they had realized this before, but their superstitions about treatment made it impossible for them to see the obvious answer to this. If someone's feeling horrible, you make them feel good. Am I right, or am I right?

Well, a hundred years ago, the Protestant Ethic almost demanded that alcohol withdrawal be difficult, such that the drug warrior actually felt that it was wrong to make a patient feel good. You could talk to your patient until the cows came home in a half-baked effort to cheer them up and give them courage, but if you proposed using a godsend plant medicine from Mother Nature to help them feel good, you were considered a quack or, worse yet, a "Doctor Feelgood," which was the "put-down" par excellence of the Drug Warriors back then. They never stopped to consider the crucial question: "What is actually wrong with being a Doctor Feelgood?"



You might say that it would have been wrong because such a doctor would addict their patients, but that's no argument. First of all, the default psychiatric treatments back in 2020 were as addictive as they could possibly be. Many of them were harder to quit than heroin. Doctors actually told veteran patients not to bother trying to kick SNRIs like Effexor, since the NIH had demonstrated that they had a 95% recidivism rate. Secondly, a Doctor Feelgood can so vary his ministrations to his patients as to ensure that they never become addicted to any one specific substance. So even if we grant that addiction is wrong, a substance-savvy doctor need never addict his patients to anything. Of course, this is all assuming that there is no drug war in place that will severely limit (at least as a practical matter) the pharmacopoeia to which this Doctor Feelgood of ours has access.

Fortunately, America has grown up over the last one hundred years and we now see that it's absurd and ungrateful to criminalize Mother Nature's plants and fungi (not to mention the fact that it's a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, as everyone has a right to what John Locke called "the earth and all that lies therein"). As a result, I as your humble doctor now have access to every psychoactive plant and fungi in the world. That means that I can now use this immense and varied pharmacopoeia strategically and with a view to keeping you strong in your renunciation of alcohol - while also providing you with plant-assisted insight into your relations with your fellow human being and the planet at large.

This program of weekly "altered states," if you will, will have two benefits for you: First the benefit of the insight and calm provided by each substance when it is used under the reverent and safe conditions that I will be putting into effect, with the help of my deep knowledge of the plants in question and the subtleties of their historically identified use.

But there is an important second benefit of the program, a kind of benefit that the psychiatry of the 2020s never even bothered to acknowledge: that is the value of the anticipation that these weekend sessions will generate. The reason for recidivism is not just that the withdrawal subject is feeling poorly, but rather that he or she is feeling poorly AND has no sense that these bad feelings will ever cease. That is the real hell of withdrawal, not the bad feelings themselves, but the lack of any believable prospect that things will ever get better.

You, however, will have the godsend blessing called anticipation, anticipation of an upcoming transcendent state. You will have the knowledge that you need only hold out until the weekend, at which point you will be allowed to escape from yourself. Not only that, but this escape will often help you find valuable insights about yourself and the world, which will, in turn, help you better cope with the problems that you encounter on the weekdays during the withdrawal process.

For you see, we're not going to meet here on the weekend "to get high," as the Drug Warrior would love to call it. We are going to meet here to transcend ourselves and see higher truth and relax... in such a way that we become open to self-criticism and insight about our place in the world. People who are feeling horrible have fogged minds and can get no insight. But we are not Protestant Drug Warriors who insist on you feeling poorly. We want to help you transcend your own limits for a few hours each week, and in a guided fashion that will conduce to greater understanding on your part about where you are at in the world - and where you need to go from here.

There you have it, the kind of therapy that would suggest itself to thoughtful doctors immediately, were they not living under the spell of the drug war, which urges us to self-censor our therapeutic hopes at every turn, dismissing all options that attempt to leverage the incredible latent power of Mother Nature's entheogenic plant medicines - for we "know" that drugs (i.e. plant medicines) are somehow bad while Big Pharma "medicines" are officially good. Only when we renounce that drug warrior dogma (and the anti-patient drug laws that it claims to justify) can we let psychotherapy become the pharmacologically savvy shamanism that it needs to become if we are to place the interests of the patient above those of the money-driven status quo.

May 26, 2020

Drug Warrior Lies on the Internet Movie Database

Drug War propaganda in the movie summary for The Other Side of the Mirror

It's interesting how Drug War propaganda shows up in places you least expect it. Check out this summary of the movie "The Other Side of the Mirror" on the Internet Movie Database:

In 1905, amidst the largest drug epidemic in American history, a teenage Alice has just moved to the Pacific Northwest. She follows a mysterious man down a rabbit hole, leading her into Wonderland; a dark and curious world inhabited by characters from turn-of-the-century America and the Pacific Northwest. - Anonymous

Here's my response to Anonymous, which I sent to IMDB in the hopes that they will expunge the Drug War propaganda from the movie description:

The anonymous reviewer says "In 1905, during America's largest drug epidemic..." That is Drug War propaganda. There wasn't a drug epidemic in 1905, except in the minds of racists, who associated opium use with the Chinese, marijuana use with Mexicans, and cocaine use with blacks. America's largest drug epidemic is RIGHT NOW, when 1 in 8 American males, and 1 in 4 American females, are addicted to Big Pharma antidepressants, many of which are harder to kick than heroin (SOURCE: Psychiatrist-author Julie Holland). Moreover, this addiction was caused by the Drug War itself (which began in 1914 with the Harrison Narcotics Act) and its criminalization of far less addictive therapeutic godsends from Mother Nature.

May 25, 2020

End the Drug War Now

an open letter to American Senators in Washington, D.C.

The following is an open letter to American Senators in the US Congress.


Dear Senator:

I am a 61-year-old depression sufferer from Basye, Virginia, and I have been a victim of America's Drug War my entire life. This is because the Drug War has resulted in the outlawing of thousands of psychoactive plants that could have worked wonders in my life had they been available for me to use, particularly with the help of an empathic counselor with the know-how to use such natural medicines in the safest and most efficacious manner. Instead, thanks to the DEA's anti-scientific and self-serving "scheduling" system, the mere research of these plants has been all but impossible over the last four decades. The result: I have been forced, along with millions of sufferers like myself around the globe, to treat my depression with a handful of Big Pharma meds that have proven highly addictive and are often harder to quit than heroin. Even as I type this, 1 in 8 American males and 1 in 4 American females are addicted to modern antidepressants.

This is a scandal and an outrage that would only be possible in a Drug Warrior country that has anti-scientifically concluded that Mother Nature's plant medicines are to be avoided at all costs, even if it means turning said country into the most addicted nation on Earth.

For reasons such as these, I urge you to abandon America's war on Mother Nature's plants (which we disingenuously refer to as a "drug war") and let freedom ring, so that researchers may freely investigate Mother Nature's bounty and those who are suffering can receive the plant medicine that should be their birthright merely for having been born on planet Earth.

Permit me to highlight just a few of the many reasons why the Drug War (the war on plants) must end, at least if America really considers itself to be a free country, and one that is open to unfettered scientific investigation.

1) The drug war is a violation of natural law. It seeks to deprive human beings of their birthright: namely, the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet. Please recall that the United States was founded on the notion of natural law, according to which human beings have rights upon which the government cannot justifiably encroach, and surely there is no more self-evident right than our right to the flora and fauna that grow unbidden around us. As natural-law advocate John Locke pointed out: We have the right to "the use of the land and to all that lies therein." Certainly, Thomas Jefferson would have been outraged to have the government tell him that there are plants that he cannot grow. We all know that Jefferson was spinning in his grave when the DEA stomped onto his estate in jackboots in the 1980s and confiscated his poppy plants. What a tyrannical and brazen-faced attack on the very notion of natural law, perpetrated against a president who gave those tyrant DEA agents the very rights that they were now trampling into dust, as if determined to show their utter disdain for the core principles upon which America was founded.



2) The Drug War (the war on plants) has introduced so much violence into the world that it is responsible for a whole movie genre worth of bloodshed. At least half of the TV cop shows of the last 50 years would not have been possible were it not for the bloodshed that the Drug War introduced into American life. Where was all this violence before 1914, before American politicians decided to punish minorities by outlawing what they perceived to be their drug of choice? Answer: there was no massive amount of drug-related violence until Americans decided to punish the sort of "pre-crime" of drug possession - rather than punishing the way that people actually behaved. The ever-rising death count of the last 50 years is the result of the drug war, not of drugs.

3) The DEA has an ENORMOUS conflict of interest built into their very charter. They have been charged both with punishing drug crimes and with deciding which drugs should be criminalized and to what extent. As a result, it is in their vested interest to keep as many substances as criminalized as possible. And they freely act on that interest. They have thus lied about psychedelics for the past four decades, insisting they have no therapeutic value, despite reams of evidence to the contrary. (To the extent that scientific evidence is limited on this point, it's only because the DEA has made it almost impossible to study psychedelics, even scientifically.) Thus, while Americans are giving their lives overseas in America's military, the DEA bureaucrats are holding onto their jobs in the States by criminalizing MDMA against the advice of their own counsel, thus denying war-scarred soldiers a highly promising treatment for PTSD.

4) The DEA poisons Americans. DEA Chief John Lawn used chemical weapons against pot-smoking Americans in the 1980s by lacing marijuana crops with paraquat, a weed killer that has subsequently been shown to cause Parkinson's Disease. So if the war on plants really is a "drug war," then John Lawn is a war criminal. For, even if the Americans had been foreign combatants, it would have been a criminal act to poison them with weed killer. But the Drug War is so detached from reality, accountability, and sanity, that War Criminal Lawn could get away with it - and continues to get away with it to this very day, when a free country would put him on trial, or better yet send him to the Hague for punishment.

5) Drug warriors are liars. Remember that ad that says: "This is your brain on drugs." That is not just a lie, but it is the exact opposite of the truth. Cocaine sharpened the mind of Sigmund Freud. Opium gave Benjamin Franklin new ideas. Liberal doses of LSD helped Francis Crick identify the DNA helix. If any drugs actually "fry the brain," they are modern antidepressants, whose long-term use has been found to conduce to emotional-flatlining (aka anhedonia).

I could go on with this list, but in my view, the above arguments testify so powerfully against the Drug War and against the folly of criminalizing Mother Nature's plants, that I feel it's pointless to continue. I can't help but feel that anyone who is not already convinced must be championing the drug war for selfish reasons that they do not have the guts to share openly. After all, there are many parts of society that benefit handsomely from the Drug War, some of which include:

BIG PHARMA: Pharmaceutical companies have seen their profits skyrocket since the drug war began, since that war has given them a monopoly on creating medicines for depression and anxiety. Of course, the drugs in question are extremely addicting, but the beneficiaries of this monopoly just call their pills "medicines" instead of "drugs" and so the great addiction of the American people is hidden from view by a verbal trick.

PSYCHIATRY: Psychiatry has benefited handsomely from the drug war, because they have the monopoly on dispensing the Big Pharma meds. Accordingly, they have changed their business model so that modern psychiatry is little more than a pill-pushing scheme, with many psychiatrists still conveniently glossing over the fact that Big Pharma meds are often more addictive than heroin. (Heroin can be kicked in one arduous week. Antidepressants may take months or longer, because they alter brain chemistry in unpredictable ways.)

LAW ENFORCEMENT: Law enforcement also has a vested financial interest in the continuation of the drug war. They thrive on so-called drug forfeitures by means of which they inherit the property of drug offenders. Like the DEA itself, they profit precisely to the extent that mother nature's medicines are illegal, and so many sheriffs and corrections officials are all too happy to have the drug war carry on unchecked, despite its effects on the average citizen, whose choice of mood medicines is thereby enormously restricted to a handful of addictive drugs. And, of course, anyone who rejects this tyranny and seeks to access Mother Nature's plants in spite of it is branded a "drug user" by law enforcement (and a "self-medicator" by psychiatry) and promptly thrown in jail.

BIG LIQUOR: The drug war provides a lot of monopolies, as noted above. One of the biggest is the monopoly that it supplies to Big Liquor, since all drugs that provide a temporary "escape from oneself" are vigorously outlawed by the drug war - with the glaring exception of liquor, despite the fact that it provides one of the shabbiest such escapes possible, an escape which (unlike that of most other plant medicines) conduces to vomiting and headache and gives the user no insights into their own nature and identity, but to the contrary, serves to render the user's mind more egotistically clouded than ever.

I maintain for these reasons that a sane freedom-loving country must reject the drug war and let unbiased substance education and informed choice win the day at long last. To this end, we should exchange the Drug Enforcement Agency with the Drug Education Agency, whose job will be simply to report the statistics regarding both the risks and (yes) the perceived benefits of employing various plant medicines in order to alter mood, improve concentration, increase creativity, achieve insight, and so forth. After so doing, things can't be any worse than in the days prior to 1914, when all plants were still legal, at which time there was far less addiction than exists in the present day thanks to Big Pharma antidepressants. Of course, back then, they still referred to addiction with the nonjudgmental term of "habituation," because that was a time when they still judged people by how they actually behaved, not by what substances they may have, whether in their house or in their digestive system.

Yours Truly,

Ballard Quass
Basye, Virginia

PS The most monstrous thing about the Drug War is the fact that America has exported it overseas, often using financial blackmail to make its allies "play ball," although dictatorial countries have followed suit of their own accord, realizing that a "drug war" gives them a new and powerful means of keeping their own populations in check. And so it's not enough for drug warriors to deprive me of valuable mood medicine here in the States, but they have made sure that I cannot find such relief anywhere on the globe. In fact, America still travels to foreign countries to burn plants that have been used responsibly by other cultures for millennia. The war on opium, which started the drug war, was a racist attempt to combat a plant medicine associated with the Chinese, a medicine that had been used responsibly by other cultures for millennia. The US is no less racist when we travel overseas, not simply to burn the poppy plant but to replace the opium that it yields with the American Christian go-to drug known as alcohol.

May 22, 2020

Six Reasons Why Americans Are Bamboozled by the Drug War

showing why philosophy still matters and why its absence empowers tyrants

The more I write and read about the war on plants (more disingenuously known as the Drug War), the more I understand why America has "gone there," by which I mean they've essentially signed off on the Christian Science notion that Mother Nature's medicines are bad for us, at least when it comes to psychological healing.


First, consider that 1 in 8 American males and 1 in 4 American females are addicted to modern antidepressants. They have their whole lives invested in the notion that these pills are miracle drugs, and they're generally not open to those who dare to say otherwise. There's a whole new social pastime in which patients gossip about their latest pill regimen and how it stacks up to the previously failed regimen that they had been following. In this sense, taking Big Pharma meds is fun. One is never at a loss for a discussion topic in our medicalized culture. When you add in the close friends of these addicts and the doctors who provide the meds in the first place, there are tens of millions out there who are biased in favor of the pill-pushing status quo.


Thus seeing Big Pharma pills as "the light and the way," we are blind to the vast rain forest of non-addictive (and or far-less-addictive) natural godsends that sit there, waiting for us to put them to use, rather than demonizing them, ostracizing them, and ultimately burning them in the name of an anti-nature drug war.


Second, as noted above, the very use of the word "drugs" in "drug war" is disingenuous and helps disguise the fact that what we're cracking down on are plant medicines, which, in the eyes of other cultures have been seen as medical and emotional godsends. Viewed in this way, one can clearly see a philosophical link between the witch hunts of the past, the colonialist outrages of the Conquistadores, and the modern drug war: in each case, the powers that be had nothing but contempt for the plants that brought about consciousness raising - and felt free to marginalize, stigmatize, and even kill those who sought expanded consciousness through plant medicine.


Third, the substitution of the word "drugs" for "plants" also has helped Americans overlook the violation of natural law that is implicit in the outlawing of Mother Nature's plants, recognizing which the whole notion of a drug war becomes both absurd and unconstitutional. The United States was founded on the notion that there are natural laws which must override common law, now and for all time, and surely one of the most obvious of rights under such law is the right of the human being to what Locke called "the use of the Earth and all that lies therein." In other words, the drug war is a violation of natural law. Sure, the drug war has been in effect since 1914, but as Thomas Paine wrote: "If the present generation or any other are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free. Wrongs cannot have a legal descent."


Fourth, Americans have a whole mythology built up around the idea of addiction and salvation. Gabor Mate epitomizes this viewpoint by incorrectly ascribing almost all addiction to inner pain, meanwhile ignoring the great addiction of our time, the one mentioned above whereby 1 in 8 American males and 1 in 4 American females are addicted to antidepressants. Mate's refusal to even call this addiction shows the hypocrisy of the use of that word. "Addiction," it turns out, is really a pejorative epithet which we apply only to the habitual use of those drugs that we love to hate. That's why psychiatrists feel free to ignore the great addiction of our time, because their selective use of the word "addiction" blinds them to it. Meanwhile, they white-wash the psychiatric pill pushing practice by referring to it as "medication maintenance."


Fifth, Americans fail to understand that the impulse to self-medicate makes perfect sense, no matter how hard the psychiatrist tries to stigmatize that practice. Consider what happens to those who FAIL to self-medicate when it comes to tweaking their own moods for the better. What happens? Under the current psychiatric paradigm, that person becomes addicted to Big Pharma meds, turns into an eternal patient, and has to spend an enormous amount of time and money as a ward of the state. One can scarcely imagine a more disempowering process. No wonder that self-medication is considered a serious option by many, despite the self-serving moralizing of the psychiatrist on this topic.


Sixth, Americans have fallen for the notion that a drug dealer is, of necessity, a scumbag. This is an easy bias to maintain when we're talking about a "drug war," but when we correctly describe the new prohibition as a "war on plants," that hateable drug dealer becomes a far less hateable "plant dealer." Still, it's no wonder why folks like Trump want to kill such people, and why calm and sober stakeholders like psychiatrists would cry "amen" were he to do so. Just think how much psychiatry has to lose by people self-medicating. Besides, those who self-medicate are implicitly telling us that the emperor is wearing no clothes, that the pill-pushing psychiatric paradigm is anti-patient - and that's a message that the shrinks must suppress at any cost.

May 19, 2020

Sending Out an SOS

For Sentara to stop disempowering the victims of the psychiatric pill mill

The following complaint was sent on May 19, 2020, to the Sentara Board of Directors: Dian Calderone - Chair, Allan Parrott - Vice Chair, Howard Kern - CEO, Bill Achenbach, John Agola, M.D., Gilbert Bland, Peter Brooks, Esq., (Eric) Frederick Coble, Edward George, M.D., Les Hall, (Sandy) Henry Harris, Ann Homan, Charles Lovell, M.D., Whitney Saunders, Esq., Jeffery Smith, EdD, Michael Smith, Carol Thomas, Marion Wall.


I am a 61-year-old client of Sentara Behavioral Health Services, writing to protest against the fact that psychiatry has turned me into an eternal patient. It has hooked me on antidepressants, which I was never told were addictive, but which I'm now told can never be stopped. In fact, when I told my Sentara psychiatrist that I wanted to quit Effexor (after 25 years of ineffective and mind-fogging treatment with the pills), he said that I shouldn't even bother, because an NIH study shows that the drug has a 95% recidivism rate. I have since learned, from folks like Julie Holland and Richard Whitaker, that antidepressants cause the very chemical imbalance that they purport to fix and that some of them are harder to quit than heroin, because they muck around with a neurochemical baseline that may take months to restore.

If psychiatric outfits like Sentara can't bring themselves to apologize for turning folks like myself into eternal patients, the least they can do is to make it easier for us to get our "meds" without having to undergo the time-wasting indignity of visiting the Behavioral Health office. What business is it of your young psychiatrists to know my innermost thoughts every three months? Even granting that it's a necessary formality, a virtual visit should suffice for us pill-mill veterans - at least if you'd be so magnanimous as to accept the "patient's" word about their weight, height and blood pressure, rather than checking these in person.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are legal reasons why you cannot give veteran patients this small degree of freedom - but that would only go to show that we pill-mill veterans are being disempowered by the psychiatric establishment and treated like children.

I urge you therefore to consider ways in which the system can change to empower anti-depressant addicts - because we seem to be the one group in America that it's still OK to oppress.

Your forms always ask patients if they've contemplated suicide: The ironic thing is that there is only one thing that makes me sick of life these days, and that is the fact that psychiatry has turned me into an eternal patient, one who has to humiliate himself every few months by telling his innermost feelings to strangers - and paying for that "privilege" too - all in order to merely be eligible to spend still more money on ineffective pills to which he's become addicted.

Talk about disempowerment, what about the pharmacy nonsense that Sentara puts me through? If I have any trouble with my prescription refills on a weekend, your staff seems to be under orders to ignore me completely until Monday - even if I've run out of meds whose abrupt cessation is medically contraindicated. Your rather useless answering service insists that nobody on your staff can be contacted on the weekend for any reason - to the point where I had to falsely threaten suicide once merely to have someone call me. (If Sentara is going to hugely inconvenience me, I feel no compunction in forcing them merely to "take my call.")

In my opinion, your power to prescribe medicines involves responsibilities as well as rights. If you're not going to be around on the weekend in the case of refill emergencies involving addictive drugs, then you have no business prescribing so-called medicines in the first place.

Now that I've had my say, here's what I ask you to do: Please consider any and all ways to empower veteran patients like myself so that we don't have to think of ourselves as eternal patients. For starters, please implement virtual counseling for veteran patients, if the legal system will let you.

Given the Covid crisis, you'd think that Sentara would be asking ME to have my next "counseling session" via WiFi, but no. Even during a pandemic, Sentara does not want to untie the apron strings that keep me in my lowly place as a "patient."

I write not merely for myself but for the increasing numbers of disempowered veteran patients of the psychiatric pill mill.


Sincerely Yours,
Ballard Quass


PS If you really want to help the disempowered, rather than just maximize Sentara profits, please use what clout you may have to call for the end of the War on Plants (which we disingenuously call a "drug war"), so that folks like myself can have the same access to Mother Nature's powerful mood medicines that folks had prior to the racist Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914.

May 16, 2020

The Whistle Blower that NOBODY wants to hear

How the drug war turned me into an eternal patient… and why nobody cares

One of the reasons why the anti-patient drug war has survived for over a century now (whereas liquor prohibition died a relatively quick death) is that Americans fail to see the connection between the drug war and the sad state of modern psychiatry.

Worse yet, Americans fail to even see the sad state of modern psychiatry, thanks to a full court PR press by Big Pharma, which foots the bill for prominent and popular doctors to go on shows like Oprah and make addiction to antidepressants seem like a civic duty to be undertaken by any God-fearing American who cares about his or her psychological health. Lately, we even see such well-paid opinion-shapers urging us to get our kids started on a regimen of highly addictive pills if we see any excessive signs of moonshine or hijinx in their childhood spirits. (That could be the deadly ADHD, don't ya know?) Such pill-pushing messages are reinforced at night during prime-time television, as Big Pharma goes directly to their potential client, urging them to pester their doctor into supplying them with a starter kit of highly addictive antidepressants and similarly addictive drugs for anxiety and bipolar illness, etc.

The result? One in eight American males, and one in four American females, are addicted to Big Pharma antidepressants, many of which are harder to kick than heroin.

That's why nobody wants to hear it when I complain about the psychiatric status quo and point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes: Nobody wants to hear it because Americans have too much invested in the status quo: too much money, too much time, and too much blind faith in the honesty and good intentions of psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry.

Indeed, belief in the pill-mill paradigm has become the American religion, to the extent that America has a religion. Despite clinical and statistical proof to the contrary, Americans have become convinced that we now have a scientific "fix" for depression and that sad Americans are stupid - perhaps even selfish - to ignore it and go without this supposedly vital "scientific" assistance. After all, depression is a "disease," so the credo goes, and so what could be more natural than to take a one-size-fits-all pill for that disease and to thus be done with it once and for all (albeit the pill in question has to be taken every day of one's life for the rest of one's life)?

What Americans fail to realize is that the rain forest is full of therapeutic psychoactive medicines, which, if used responsibly, could fix depression organically, by helping the sufferer to see the world in a new light and to creatively work around their mental roadblocks, using medicines that are either non-addictive, or at least far less addictive than the pills on which 1 in 6 Americans have been hooked by Big Pharma. And why do Americans fail to realize this? Because of drug war propaganda, which brazenly lies about Mother Nature's mood medicines , claiming that they "fry the brain," when the truth is the exact opposite, namely that substances like cocaine, opium and natural psychedelics actually strengthen and increase neuronal connections and help the user accomplish more in life.

Sigmund Freud didn't use cocaine to fry his brain, he used it to increase his mental capacity and stamina. Benjamin Franklin didn't use opium to fry his brain, he used it to increase his creative capacity and to ensure his overall affability. Francis Crick didn't use psychedelics to fry his brain, he used them to open his mind to the true nature of DNA.

That's why my plight as an eternal patient goes unnoticed, even though there are millions like me suffering the same disempowering and humiliating effects of the drug war. Drug War propaganda has been accepted as gospel truth by our bamboozled American populace.

Worse yet, if I write about these things, I get blacklisted on Reddit and lose my job as a commentator on Sociodelic.com. Folks just don't want to hear it: they believe in the one and only true Church , "Our Lady of the One-Size-Fits-All Depression Pill," and they don't want to hear from heretics who are unhappy with the pill-pushing paradigm, let alone one who suggests that there's an infinitely better approach that Drug War America is stubbornly overlooking - and ignoring on purpose, in fact, in the interests of the many drug war stakeholders (including, but not limited to, psychiatrists, pharmacists, law enforcement and Big Liquor).

But what exactly is this humiliating plight to which I refer?

Imagine that, like myself, you are a 61-year-old depression "sufferer" who has been "on" Big Pharma antidepressant meds for 40 years (drugs that are so addictive, even your psychiatrist tells you there's no point in attempting to get off them). You still suffer from depression, of course, as evidenced by your ongoing inability to follow through on the goals that are most important to you in life, never mind the fact that the drugs you're taking are supposed to be scientific godsends, (but apparently your brain never got that memo). And so the drug war turns you into the Ancient Mariner of psychiatry, forced to dock at Mental Health Harbor every three months and tell the scientistic landlubbers how you've been feeling over the last 90 days, so that they have the legal cover to write you yet another prescription for the pharmaceutical concoctions that your drug-warped body chemistry can no longer do without. Are you happy? Are you sad? Do you have trouble sleeping? Do you consider suicide? You have to tell the "good doctor" everything, every three months of your life.

Hello? What business is it of theirs after 40 long and patronizing years?

Here's a good answer to one such question, however:

Psychiatrist's question: Do you consider suicide?

Answer: Only when I consider the fact that psychiatry has humiliated and disempowered me by turning me into an eternal patient.

Just yesterday I called my shrink's office to request a refill on my addictive meds. They refused to approve the refill until I had made another appointment to see my doctor. Why? Because my existing psychiatrist was no longer employed there and I had to start over with a new one. And since the new one doesn't know me from Adam, he or she cannot prescribe medicine for me.

Right. So the fact that I've been running in this pill-mill hamster cage for 40 years means nothing. I still have to be treated like a new mental health patient and come in and confess all my weaknesses and inner concerns to a complete stranger. I'm still the Ancient Mariner, but now there's a new wedding guest to whom I have to recite the story of my life.

It's funny that this status quo is acceptable to Americans, given that it is the exact opposite of what we call "empowerment" these days, which folks normally consider to be the ne plus ultra of psychological health.

And so it is that America is literally the most addicted country in the world, and yet nobody wants to hear the whistle blowers who say so. Instead, we rationalize, saying that SSRI users are habituated to their pills, not addicted to them, a shallow drug war equivocation that can be easily devastated by anyone who performs a close reading of the definition of "addiction" in Webster's.

So I can blow my whistle all I want, but I won't be heard as long as Americans remain in denial about the great addiction of our times. That's not the opiate addiction, but the fact that 1 in 6 Americans are addicted to Big Pharma "meds" - an addiction that would be unimaginable except in a world where health-care choices have been starkly limited by an anti-patient Drug War.

May 13, 2020

Comedian Adderall Zoloft Riffs on the Drug War

the only comedian whose stand-up routine is listed as Schedule One by the DEA

EMCEE: Introducing the man who has passed more drugs tests than any other comedian on the planet.

ADDERALL: On Planet Mars, that is.

LAUGHTER

EMCEE: Let's hear it for Adderall Zoloft.

ADDERALL: Hey, use me only as directed, folks.

APPLAUSE

ADDERALL: Here's a little riddle to warm you guys up. What do you get when you cross banisteriopsis caapi with psychotria viridis?

PAXIL: I don't know. What do you get when you cross banisteriopsis caapi with psychotria viridis?

ADDERALL: Ten to twenty years in the state penitentiary.

DRUM

LAUGHTER

No, seriously. You actually get ayahuasca if you're lucky.

PAXIL: Ayahuasca?

ADDERALL: That's right. Ayahuasca. Speaking of which, did you know that there's actually a church in America that has won the legal right to use ayahuasca in its religious rituals?

APPLAUSE

I kid you not. Needless to say, the DEA fought that one all the way to the Supreme Court.

PAXIL: That figures.

ADDERALL: I'm happy to report however that they lost that final case, 9 to freakin' zero.

APPLAUSE



I don't like to gloat, but when I heard that outcome, I was like, "In your face, with a can of mace!"

LAUGHTER

PAXIL: I know what you mean, Adderall.

ADDERALL: Really?

PAXIL: Yeah. I myself was like, "Up your nose with a garden hose!"

LAUGHTER

ADDERALL: Paxil Busspar, ladies and gentlemen, my loyal sidekick. How are you tonight, Paxil?

APPLAUSE

PAXIL: I'm doing great, Adderall.

ADDERALL: Oh, really?

PAXIL: Yes, I just passed my drug test to work at Taco Bell.

LAUGHTER

ADDERALL: Your parents must be so proud of you.

PAXIL: I know, right?

ADDERALL: But I'm a little puzzled.

PAXIL: Oh, really? How so?

ADDERALL: I thought you agreed with me that drug testing was so much Christian Science bull [bleep].

PAXIL: Yes, I usually do, but this drug test was actually fair for a change.

ADDERALL: The drug test was fair? What do you mean?

PAXIL: Well, after the test was over, the lab guys actually congratulated me for the drug that I had in my system. They said I had chosen well.

ADDERALL: That's interesting. And what drug did you have in your system, Paxil?

PAXIL: I can't tell you and give away the answer.

DRUM

LAUGHTER

ADDERALL: Fair point.

PAXIL: Suffice it to say that it was a so called entheogen, and it helped sharpen my thinking and made me more friendly and compassionate. The lab guys actually said that it would help make me a valuable addition to the Taco Bell work force.

LAUGHTER

ADDERALL: Aha. I bet it was a mushroom from the genus psilocybe.

PAXIL: Tut tut Adderall. Nice try, but I'm not going to give away the answer, since you haven't taken this particular drug test yet.

ADDERALL: Fair enough, Paxil. Fair enough. I'm actually waiting for someone to create a church around the ritual use of psilocybin.

APPLAUSE

PAXIL: Good for you.

ADDERALL: Say, Paxil, is it legal to murder a ghost?

PAXIL: I don't know. There's precious little case law in that area. Why do you ask?

ADDERALL: I was thinking of summoning the ghost of Francis Burton Harrison via Ouija Board and then beating the crap out of him, for outlawing opium in 1914.

PAXIL: I'm afraid that would never work, Adderall.

ADDERALL: Why not, Paxil?

PAXIL: Because Francis's ghost would realize that the seance was a set-up job, and so he would never appear.

LAUGHTER

ADDERALL: Well, I'm still mighty sore at that bonehead.

PAXIL: Me too, Adderall.

ADDERALL: That man up-ended American democracy with his so-called Narcotics Act which, for the first time in American history, criminalized a freakin' plant.

BOO

PAXIL: Now, Adderall, watch your blood pressure.

ADDERALL: I know, Paxil, but the man succeeded single-handedly in replacing the natural law on which America was founded with common law, criminalizing plants, which are the birth right of anyone who is born on planet earth.

APPLAUSE

PAXIL: Well, I'm sure he meant well, Paxil.

ADDERALL: Meant well? The man is responsible for millions of unnecessary deaths.

PAXIL: Remember your blood pressure.

ADDERALL: And he single-handedly created a violent movie genre in which sanctimonious Americans go south to intervene in supposedly sovereign countries in order to shoot Latinos.

GASP

BOO

And why? Because they're selling plant-based medicines that have been used responsibly for millennia by non-western cultures.

PAXIL: We've talked about this, Adderall. Your audiences don't like it when you get on your high horse.

ADDERALL: It's just pops my buttons, that's all.

PAXIL: I know.

ADDERALL: I mean, stop the god [bleep] war on mother nature's [bleep] plants already.

PAXIL: It sounds like somebody didn't get a nap this afternoon.

[baby cries]

LAUGHTER

ADDERALL: Sorry about that, Paxil. Now then, where were we?

PAXIL: I think we were just getting to the part where everything that we say is hilarious and elicits hearty guffaws from the audience.

ADDERALL: You hear that, audience? Watch for your cue now.

LAUGHTER

PAXIL: I know, why don't you tell a joke?

ADDERALL: Good idea. Okay, let's see. What do you get when you cross an anti-Chinese electorate with WASP Americans who have a jaundiced view of mother nature's plants and fungi?

PAXIL: I don't know. What do you get when you cross an anti-Chinese electorate with WASP Americans who have a jaundiced view of mother nature's plants and fungi?

ADDERALL: You get the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, that's what you get.

DRUM

LAUGHTER

PAXIL: Oh, there you go again!

DRUM

LAUGHTER

EMCEE: Let's hear it for the only comedian whose stand-up routine is listed as schedule one by the DEA.

ADDERALL: That's right folks. They can't even study me in laboratories without an act of Congress.

EMCEE: Adderall Zoloft!

May 12, 2020

Unscientific American

How the authors at Scientific American self-censor their articles in deference to America's Drug War

I sent the following message to the editors of Scientific American today, on May 12, 2020:

Attention Editors: please start acknowledging the drug war's role in limiting scientific inquiry

Good afternoon.

Could you please pass this along to your staff and management? The following is written in response to a May 2018 article by Dana G. Smith entitled "At What Age Does Our Ability to Learn a New Language Like a Native Speaker Disappear?"

My topic is not so much the article itself as the fact that, like many SA articles, the author has left out a whole angle to the story in deference and obedience to America's anti-scientific drug war, as if the drug war prohibitions somehow provided a rational baseline for scientific inquiry. The fact is that the drug war provides anti-scientific obstacles to research on many subjects about which Scientific American authors write, and I believe it's about time that SA started acknowledging that fact in the articles themselves, thereby shaming the drug warriors for impeding scientific progress in a supposed free country.

Thanks for your consideration,

Ballard Quass.
abolishthedea.com

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Thanks for the fascinating article about language acquisition ("At What Age Does Our Ability to Learn a New Language Like a Native Speaker Disappear?")

I'd like to suggest however that you've limited your inquiry, albeit unwittingly, in deference to America's drug war.

If science were free to investigate and research all the products of Mother Nature (and not just the ones of which politicians approve), it would discover something that psychedelic rebels have known for half a century now: namely, that psychedelic plant medicines can create fascinating and useful new connections in the brain that provide the substance user with whole new ways of looking at the world and whole new ways to process previously unintelligible information about that world.

In other words, there is every reason to believe that one day, when America has finally cast off the anti-scientific slough of drug war prohibitions, we will find ways to vastly improve the language learning abilities of older human beings through the strategic use of psychedelic substances that grow around us in the natural world. Right now, however, scientists who even broach such a topic must keep an eye over their shoulder lest their colleagues eye them askance for invoking the names of plants about which we are not even supposed to speak in so-called scientific America - let alone to speak positively.

I realize that this assertion is speculative, but it is a tantalizing hypothesis indeed, considering not only the anecdotal evidence of psychedelic-inspired mind expansion over the past 50 years, but the fact that there are hundreds - perhaps thousands - of promising plant medicines of this kind that are completely off limits to scientific investigation thanks to the DEA's mendacious and self-serving drug scheduling system, plants which a human being can be jailed for merely possessing, never mind that the substances in question grow unbidden at their very feet.

In short, I think that there is a whole angle to this story that scientists are ignoring thanks to drug war sensibilities, and which they must ignore, since they are currently forbidden to even study the kind of plants that we're talking about here.

Yours in the name of true scientific freedom...

Ballard Quass

Abolishthedea.com



PS If I may make a suggestion: One way to change this anti-scientific status quo is for Scientific American's authors to start thinking about how their articles might change were the drug war not in force with respect to psychoactive plants and their ability to change the mind (to better process new kinds of information, to ease depression, to help one make their peace with death, etc.). Then, once an SA author has determined that their story has angles that scientists cannot adequately pursue thanks to drug war prohibitions, those authors should state this fact clearly and matter-of-factly in their articles, with a comment such as: "Note: Topic X will not be pursued further in this article thanks to American drug war prohibitions which prevent scientists from studying such hypotheses in detail."

By thus acknowledging the censorship function of the drug war viz scientific inquiry, the author can help bring about legal reforms by shaming the drug warriors who have shackled scientific investigation in this way.

PPS I will be publishing this letter on my website (abolishthedea.com) as an open letter to Scientific American, probably under the title (or at least subtitle) of: "How scientists self-censor in deference to America's drug war." I realize that this self-censorship is not conscious, but that really just makes it all the more insidious.

May 11, 2020

In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors

How the Drug War has blinded Gabor Maté to the great addiction crisis of our time

I began reading Gabor Maté's popular book on addiction yesterday ("In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts") but gave it up in disappointment after the first 20 pages convinced me that the author was in the thrall of not only drug war propaganda, but also of the propaganda of Big Pharma as well. My original interest in the book was prompted by the story of his use of ayahuasca to treat addicts and the predictable state suppression that it brought about as Canada attempts to keep in lockstep with America's anti-patient war on mother nature's plants, more commonly (and misleadingly) referred to as the drug war. But if we want countries like Canada to change their policies on these topics, we have to see through the drug warrior lies and assumptions to what's really going on, and Maté seems to be just as blinded on this topic as virtually everyone else in mainstream Western society.

First of all, the very use of the term "addiction" invites us to moralize and pry into a user's past to investigate their inner demons. But this judgmental word, "addiction," only came into fashion with the drug war itself, before which opium enthusiasts, for instance, were merely designated neutrally as "habitues" when they used the drug with a frequency that rendered withdrawal difficult. The judgemental term "addiction" is attractive to Westerners because it helps us Medicalize what we consider to be "the drug problem" - but Gabor's notion that virtually all addiction (i.e. habituation) can be traced to inner pain is just plain wrong. Was Benjamin Franklin dealing with inner pain when he liberally availed himself of opium? Was Sigmund Freud dealing with inner pain when he used massive amounts of cocaine? Was Richard Feynman dealing with inner pain when he casually popped pills that we would derisively refer to today as "speed"? Is a blues musician, for that matter, dealing with inner pain when he or she uses daily marijuana in order to "keep in the groove"?

Let's be honest: the real crime of folks like Franklin, Freud and Feynman is that they self-medicated. They had the gall to bypass the medical establishment which claims to have a monopoly on deciding when and how a human being should adjust their mood.

So this is the first mistake that Gabor makes: he is simply wrong that all (or even most) addiction can be explained by a person's inner pain.

But Gabor compounds this error by his apparent blindness to the great addiction crisis of our time. I say "apparent blindness" because the first 20 pages of his highly praised book on addiction says absolutely NOTHING about this massive addiction: namely, the fact that one in eight American males (and one in four American females) are addicted to Big Pharma medications, antidepressants and benzodiazepines (and I'm sure there are comparably egregious statistics among Maté's fellow Canadians). Is the take-home message from this stealth drug crisis merely that large segments of the American population are dealing with inner pain? No. The take-home message is that Big Pharma is cranking out highly addictive medications while simultaneously suborning the medical world into remaining silent about the overmedicated dystopia that it is thereby creating.


On the disingenuous distinction between addiction and chemical dependency.

The problem is that Maté, like most Western academics, seems to think that there's a meaningful difference between "addiction" and "chemical dependency." According to this line of reasoning, substances like heroin truly addict you and are therefore "drugs," while substances like antidepressants merely render you chemically dependent and are therefore "medications." But the supposed differences here are largely illusory, especially from a user point of view. To see why, let's examine Webster's definition of the term "addiction":

Addiction: The compulsive uncontrolled use of habit-forming drugs beyond the period of medical need or under conditions harmful to society.

One could argue that the antidepressant user is not compulsive and does not behave in an uncontrolled fashion. Yes, but why is that so? That is so because the supply of medication is always forthcoming. A patient in need of an SSRI is never told by the pharmacist that the supply will be delayed due to the recent arrest of a drug runner. Nor does a pharmacist ever "top off" the contents of an SSRI capsule with boric acid or baby powder as a cost-saving measure. And so we're unlikely to see ragged-out white collar workers, sweating and puking on the streets because they're going cold turkey on an anti-depressant or have consumed tainted product. The safe and pristine supply of their go-to drug is guaranteed and, as they're admonished by their own doctor to take the drug for life, withdrawal symptoms never have a chance to occur, least of all in public venues where we can see the cramping and vomiting and think to ourselves, as we do of the strung-out heroin addict: "Tsk-tsk, that poor SSRI addict!"

And so SSRIs do not meet the criterion of "addiction" according to which they must be used "beyond the period of medical need," but this is only because the doctors who prescribe them claim that the period of medical need never ends, which is a very convenient claim indeed, considering that these drugs, which were originally meant for short-term use only, have since proven to be highly habit-forming.

And so, nit-picking aside, the daily use of antidepressants seems to qualify as an addiction according to Webster's Dictionary - until, that is, we read the final subjective criterion of the definition, namely that addiction occurs "under conditions harmful to society."

Here we come to the truth about addiction: it's a pejorative and subjective term, used only in connection with substances that we as a drug-warrior society have decided to denigrate and demonize as harmful. There is therefore a kind of political agenda behind the use of the term "addiction," that is, to implicitly demonize certain plant medicines (namely the illegal ones) while implicitly canonizing others (legally synthesized antidepressants and benzodiazepines). A society that is free of drug-war presuppositions, however, would simply class all psychoactive substances as psychoactive substances and treat them all equally according to the objective and statistical threats that they pose to an unwary user. Instead, we give Big Pharma a free pass to wreak damage with its "medicines," while we wave a disapprobatory finger in the face of those who use "drugs" like heroin. Meanwhile, we fail to register the fact that many of the latter "drug" users could live just as happily in society as their antidepressant-using neighbors, were their drug supply rendered as safe and reliable as that of their law-abiding fellows.

Of course, many people are fed up with being dependent on a given psychoactive substance, precisely because of the dependency itself. But here we encounter another drug-war bias in the way that we think about such topics. Drug Warriors will loudly decry the mere potential of addiction that certain illegal substances might seem to pose, but, like Maté himself in the opening of his book on this subject, they say absolutely nothing about the great dependency of our time: the fact that 1 in 8 American males and 1 in 4 American females are addicted to legal antidepressants, with similar numbers around the globe, at least in Western countries.

For my part, I've always thought that the worst part about an addiction was that it forced me to rely on other people. Yet I find that almost no one -- neither drug warriors nor psychiatrists - has a problem with the fact that my addiction to Effexor has made me reliant on prescribing psychiatrists and has thus turned me into an eternal patient and a ward of the state. Talk about disempowering. I have to travel 40 miles every three months to meet with a psychiatrist in a mental health clinic for a half-hour in order to tell him how I feel. God, I've been a patient for 40 years, what business is it of his???

This is why I make the following otherwise unheard-of claim: that not only can a so-called "drug user" be said to be "self-medicating," but he or she is often right to do so. Consider the options, after all, for someone who desires psychological healing. They can...

One: take the legal route, and become addicted for life to a drug that conduces to anhedonia, for which they will have to make regular pilgrimages to a mental health clinic, in order to receive a three-month drug supply for which they will have to pay dearly, all the time being reminded by this time-consuming rigamarole that they are an eternal patient and a ward of the state...

Or they can...

Two: Buy a psychoactive plant medicine on the black market and, if they've done their research and been lucky, get their head screwed back on straight inexpensively and without having been turned into an eternal patient by doing so.

Ironically, under the drug war's starkly limited psychoactive pharmacopoeia of addictive pills, it almost seems like going the legal route would itself be a sign of mental illness, or at least of pathologically poor judgment.

My goal here is not to slam talk therapy per se, nor to deny that Gabor makes great progress with his patients. But the fact that he's been stymied in that goal by the Drug War itself means that it's imperative for him and other professionals like him to start seeing through the mist of drug warrior lies (the hypocrisy, the newspeak, and the hidden premises) and see clearly what is going on in the world with respect to psychoactive substances, their regulation, and the dilemmas that these legal circumstances pose for well-intentioned people who just want peace of mind without being treated like criminals by law enforcement (or being derisively dismissed as self-medicators by psychiatrists). Only by divining and then shunning the many false drug war assumptions can we disenchant the world from the spell of that anti-patient and violence-causing crusade.

Meanwhile, we should stop imputing pathology to drug users merely because they have chosen to buy plant medicines that have been unjustly proscribed by politicians, and in violation of natural law at that, especially when the drug user's alternative was to turn his or herself into an eternal patient, forced to visit a therapist every three months of their life and, like the Ancient Mariner, recite the same old personal narrative on every demoralizing visit.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Of course, Gabor has grabbed onto part of the truth. The Drug War does stop us from dealing with the underlying conditions that often lead to dysfunctional behavior. This makes it a godsend for conservatives, because if we weren't seeing everything through the lens of the drug war, we'd have to deal with the great inequities of modern social life in terms of education and opportunities. And the drug war has worked incredibly well for conservatives in this regard. It's no coincidence that the death of '60s idealism coincided with the creation of the DEA and the ascendancy of drug war conservatives like Ronald Reagan, folks who wanted guns and business to be as unregulated as possible while they yet prosecuted an unprecedented crack down on mere possession of psychoactive plants. They wanted capitalism that was unfettered by the idealistic visions that tended to arise from expanded consciousness. So they simply made expanded consciousness a felony, to ensure their political hegemony by force of law.

Nor do I scorn Gabor's psychotherapeutic approach, an approach which I trust will be infinitely more fruitful in the future when it is aided by some of the psychoactive plant medicines that modern psychiatrists have dutifully ignored to date in deference to the Christian Science imperative of the Drug War.

Gabor's mistake, I believe, is to automatically associate illicit drug use with pathology -- when, as I've attempted to show above, there are many rational reasons why a thoughtful human being in search of mood medicine would seek a black-market alternative to the psychiatric status quo, a status quo that would otherwise turn him or her into an eternal patient and thus a ward of the health care state, destined to spend a life-time being emotionally catechized by strangers in order to receive yet another "fix" from Big Pharma's expensive, limited, and highly addictive pharmacopoeia. Indeed, if Gabor is in search of pathology, he may well find more of it in Americans who placidly submit themselves to such a life-sapping and disempowering status quo, since the ready acceptance of such a scheme, as legal as it might be, would seem to signal a poor self-image and masochism -- or at very least an inability to clearly see how the drug war is depriving him or her of chemical godsends that might otherwise have afforded emotional salvation.

May 9, 2020

Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe

Drug Warrior censorship at work in American classrooms

If you want to see drug-war self-censorship at work, watch any grade-school teacher speaking about Edgar Allan Poe. Or, better yet, check out which Poe stories they assign their students and which they always seem to avoid assigning. For when it comes to Poe's view on what we would dramatically refer to as "drugs," he had the temerity to describe them unemotionally, as substances that can do both great ill and great good, depending on how they were used.

Poe does not praise drugs, of course, but he understood something about psychoactive substances that the drug warrior has long since forgotten: that no substance is good or bad in and of itself, but only with regard to how it is used: in what dosage, for what reason, by which person, under which conditions, at what time and place - etc. etc.

This contrasts sharply with the simplistic drug warrior mentality today according to which politically ostracized substances can bring about nothing but heartache. Of course, this often turns out to be true in a drug-warrior society, but only as a self-fulfilling prophecy brought about by our own draconian drug laws, laws that create a violent black market which in turn sells products that are unreliable both as to quality and quantity. Such negative outcomes are rendered even more likely thanks to the lack of objective information about substances that is a natural result of the aforesaid simplistic thinking. When we make blanket statements such as "drugs are all bad," we thereby obscure a world of crucial objective nuances which, if known, could be the basis for an adult's mature decision-making about which substances they can safely use to their own satisfaction in order to accomplish their own priorities in life.

This is why an American Literature instructor will rarely assign Poe's "Tale of the Ragged Mountains," for in it Poe dares to write about a morphine "habitue" who strategically uses his poison of choice, not in order to seduce women and ridicule existing social norms, but in order to enjoy nature with a surreal clarity that most of us can only imagine. The sober American is so tired by the workaday world that he or she may well have trouble distinguishing a maple tree from an oak. But in Poe's subversive story, the mysterious anti-hero, one Augustus Bedloe, finds that his morphine use endues the external world "with an intensity of interest":

In the quivering of a leaf—in the hue of a blade of grass—in the shape of a trefoil—in the humming of a bee—in the gleaming of a dew-drop—in the breathing of the wind—in the faint odors that came from the forest—there came a whole universe of suggestion—a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought.

One can just feel the drug warriors squirming in their seats as they read these lines. Not only does the drug in this story fail to "fry one's brain" (as the blatantly mendacious drug warrior insists that it should), but it actually focuses the mind, giving it incomparable clarity. Of course, Poe understood that the drug itself was not sufficient to bring about this clarity - the user must bring something to the party, too, especially humility and a willingness to learn. At the same time, however, Poe saw clearly that the drug was what philosophers call a "necessary condition" for this surreal clarity, at least for the individual named Augustus Bedloe in this story. There may well be folks in this world whose innate chemistry permits them to see Mother Nature just as sharply without the use of morphine. But that doesn't mean we should lie about or discount the blatant evidence before our eyes: namely, that morphine, in certain situations, does provide this marvellous sharpening of the senses.

The censoring of Poe on this topic by our teachers of American Literature is "all of a piece" with the way psychologists downplay or ignore Freud's heavy use of cocaine or the way that biographers downplay or ignore Benjamin Franklin's enthusiastic use of opium. None of these stories fit with the drug warrior's Christian Science view that we are somehow morally obliged to shun mother nature's psychoactive plants as a means of improving our mood, our cognition or our creativity.

May 7, 2020

Without Philosophy, Science becomes Scientism

When Stephen Hawking observed that philosophy is dead (which itself is a philosophical statement, of course, being insusceptible of inductive proof), he was saying so triumphantly, as if this were a good thing. The reality however is that when science ignores philosophy it becomes mere scientism.

Take the search for modern anti-depressants. The logic behind this venture is roughly as follows: find a chemical trait that is held in common by the maximum number of depressed individuals and then seek to change that trait by targeted chemical intervention.

To a materialist scientist, this statement sounds like pure science, but the fact is that it makes sense only if the scientist who affirms it is holding at least one major philosophical assumption about psychopharmacological intervention, namely that we can chemically intervene at some precise point in the causal process of a psychological condition without regard for the larger picture, i.e. without any proof that this similarity that we are thereby treating is a real cause of pathology as opposed to a mere symptom of it.

Many people suffering from headache are known to wrinkle their eyebrows. We do not know why, exactly, but we have noticed that almost all headache sufferers do this. We could come up with an intervention that keeps the patients' eyebrows straight, will they or nil they, but that intervention is based on an assumption: namely, that we are actually intervening at a meaningful and relevant location in a causal chain. Likewise, we can notice that many depression sufferers have a similar type of brain chemistry. We can intervene at this level too and attempt to correct the patient's brain chemistry, but as with the headache, we can only do this by assuming that we are intervening in response to a germane causative factor viz the patient's depression. If we intervene chemically to change a non-causative factor, we are doing no more than straightening eyebrows. In the case of the depressed patient, we are actually causing harm however because we are playing around with brain chemistry that had no need of adjustment in the first place, the anomalous chemistry being a mere symptom of a far more relevant upstream causal factor (or factors) of which we are ignorant.

Of course, in the case of depression, Robert Whitaker has already documented how the anti-depressants of Big Pharma actually cause the chemical imbalances that they purport to treat. But even if we accept that depressed people share a specific brain chemistry, it does not follow that we should intervene by brute force, as it were, to change that specific chemistry. And if we do so, we are not proceeding by the mere dictates of science, but rather we are proceeding under the philosophical assumptions of materialist reductionism.

This is why psychedelic therapy for depression is generally scorned by the scientific community, not because such treatment is non-scientific but because its success would pose an implicit challenge to modern materialism, according to which psychopharmacological interventions are "scientific" (and therefore valid and potentially useful) only to the extent that they are chemically pinpointed and quantifiable.

When modern scientists say that "philosophy is dead," they're essentially saying: "We believe so strongly in the materialist approach that we will no longer even acknowledge that it is based on premises that are susceptible of debate." In other words, to say that "philosophy is dead" is to declare victory in the war of approaches to healing. It's an intolerant statement, to put it mildly, because it says to its opponents (those, for instance, who wish to use psychedelics for psychological healing): "There's no more debate allowed. Materialism is ontologically true and therefore we will proceed according to that understanding, straightening as many eyebrows as we need to in order to make our point!"

This would be funny but for the fact that materialist reductionism already has a body count: It is responsible for the fact that 1 in 8 American males and 1 in 4 American females are addicted to Big Pharma meds -- substances that were created and justified under the materialist assumption that depression sufferers are basically identical clones who are amenable to a one-size-fits-all therapy that involves intervening at the most microscopic level possible.

Such an approach has been a colossal failure, of course, since during its ascendancy over the last 50 years, America has become the most depressed and addicted country in the world. But scientists will never learn from these mistakes if they believe, like Hawking, that materialist reductionism is above criticism, that it is no longer just a way of seeing the world but THE way of seeing it.

There is a word for this kind of arrogant materialist belief that willfully ignores its own debatable premises: that word is "scientism."

May 6, 2020

America's Invisible Addiction Crisis

And what it tells us about drug war hypocrisy

I've been hooked now for three decades on a drug that I hate, an expensive drug that I must take every single morning of my life even though it stifles my creativity and flattens my so-called emotional "affect." And I have been hooked good. The NIH itself has determined that the drug I'm on has a 95% recidivism rate after three years for those who attempt to "kick it." Meanwhile prominent psychiatrists report that the drug in question is harder to quit than heroin. In fact, the guy who's currently giving me the pills told me frankly that I might as well not even bother to quit the drug since it has such lousy relapse rates.

Speaking of the guy who gives me the pills, you'd think he'd be at least a little embarrassed, tell me that he's sorry about my addiction, but nothing could be further from the truth. He has never once suggested that he feels any blame whatsoever for my fate. Meanwhile this guy is prospering financially and is a veritable pillar of the community. Nor do the police have the slightest interest in disrupting his activities, even though he's still hooking new clients on the same addictive substances to this very day. You see, he belongs to a huge organization whose job is to convince the world that this pill-pushing arrangement of his is actually a good thing, and that the folks who are not yet on the pill mill could very well be missing out on living a full life.



Nor am I alone in my addiction. As I type this, 1 in 8 American males and 1 in 4 females are addicted to the same sort of expensive pills that I'm forced to take every day of my life.

I know what you're thinking: the drug warriors must be "up in arms" about this scandalous situation. The DEA must be declaring a national emergency. Donald Trump must be drawing up long lists of pushers (like my own staunchly unapologetic supplier) whom he's going to execute the very moment that Congress gives him the green light to do so.

Unfortunately not. For the drug that I'm addicted to is Effexor, a Big Pharma blockbuster pill, and we all know that Big Pharma pills are exempt from drug warrior criticism. The Drug Warriors couldn't care less, even though the sorts of drugs that we're talking about here are precisely the ones that can really "fry your brain" in the way that the otherwise bogus drug war propaganda suggests.

The result: not only is the drug warrior blind to my own personal addiction, but they are blind to the great mass-addiction of our time. And so they go on demonizing the poppy and the coca leaf and psychedelics, plants that have been used responsibly by other cultures for millennia, blissfully unaware that these plants, even when legal, never caused anything close to the wholesale addiction that has been perpetrated on Americans in modern times by Big Pharma and their psychiatric handmaidens.

How much more proof do reasonable people need that our attitude toward "drugs" (by which we Americans really mean "psychoactive plants") is a social construct, as malleable as clay, and that what passes for drug policy today is really just a hodgepodge of laws and attitudes designed to maintain the economic interests of the status quo and the institutions that represent it (including but not limited to: Big Pharma, Big Liquor, psychiatry, the corrections industry, and law enforcement)?

Of course, if addiction doesn't really matter to drug warriors, as the status quo would suggest, then the question asks itself: why am I not allowed to choose my own "poison" from among the flora that God freely gave us all in the Book of Genesis? After all, the plants that we have since outlawed from thence are far less addictive than the SSRIs that have fogged my mind and turned me into an eternal patient for the last 30 years.

Why not? Because empowering patients like myself in this way would leave stakeholders such as Big Pharma and the healthcare industry out of the economic loop. Why would I want to pay for their expensive and highly addictive pills, pills that dull my emotions and bring me no pleasant dreams, when there are plant medicines growing at my feet that are far less addictive and can actually bring me psychological insight?

Thus I am destined to die as an unacknowledged addict, taking my expensive pills every morning of my life until the end, never to hear so much as one compassionating sigh from the socially respectable pushers who addicted me.

May 1, 2020

Don't Worry, Be Satisfied

the feeble ambitions of modern psychiatry

As a veteran addict of mind-fogging anti-depressants, I sometimes ask myself why so many of my fellow addicts seem to be happy (or at least satisfied) with the psychiatric status quo. Why would they be satisfied with a psychiatric pill mill that shunts them off onto a handful of highly addictive synthetic medicines when Mother Nature has already grown for them a large store of psychoactive medicines that can work psychotherapeutic wonders when administered thoughtfully?

Of course, there's the obvious answer to this question, namely that said addicts are not permitted to access Mother Nature's medicines thanks to the drug war and so the question is moot -- but that still doesn't explain why these depression sufferers don't view this situation as an intolerable obstacle to their mental health and do not protest the drug war accordingly. For the vast majority of such sufferers never connect the dots between the drug war and their own personal lack of treatment options. Instead, they make a virtue of necessity and turn the Big Pharma pill-choosing game into a lifelong quest to find the addictive golden grail that works best for them, a quest to be discussed at social get-togethers, where fellow depressives mingle and share their own idiosyncratic list of the Big Pharma pills (and pill combinations) that seem to be "working" for them.

I have recently concluded that this blase acceptance by patients of the anti-patient status quo has at least the following three causes:

1) Just as we can't know what we can't know, we can't feel what we can't feel. I unwittingly ingested a psychedelic at age 19. The result was so mind opening that I began crying: I began crying because I saw that the world was so full of possibilities that I had hitherto overlooked. Now, the point is this: Had you asked me if I was depressed before the "trip," I might well have said no -- but after that trip, my depression was so obvious to me that it made me cry for the lost hours and years that I had spent failing to take advantage of the opportunities right in front of me. In other words, one can be depressed as hell but not realize the fact until they clearly SEE what that depression has been hiding from them: namely hope and possibility.

2) Psychological health surveys ask the wrong questions. They rely on self-reporting about mood. But if a person has never experienced true happiness and understanding (see point one above), they cannot report their mood objectively. They are prone to report their mood as satisfactory merely because they do not have any idea what it's like to experience true psychological happiness. They're like a car buyer thinking that a beat-up car is in great shape, merely because he or she has never seen a car in perfect condition. A far better question to ask in a psychological examination would be: "How many of your important goals have you accomplished in the last year?" That's how I first realized through rational introspection that my own depression was bad: not by thinking "oh, I feel sad," but by reckoning up the myriad "brilliant ideas" that I had come up with over time but failed to follow through on despite having had plenty of time to do so. My depression, it turned out, was bad indeed, because it had stopped me from taking the actions that I needed to take in order to realize my most important goals in life. To paraphrase the book of Matthew: "You will know them by their LACK of works," at least when it comes to the depressed.

3) Psychiatric nostrums are designed to help us survive, not to thrive. Anyone who reads the horror story of psychiatry's early years in America will realize that the psychiatric goal, for well over a century, has been to render patients "docile," not to render them happy or fulfilled. This is why treatments like insulin shock therapy and frontal lobe lobotomy were both hailed as miracle cures in their time. The raves were not coming from patients: they were coming from the psychiatric establishment itself, whose staff were finding their jobs easier once their psychiatric patients were rendered peaceable. As author Richard Whitaker points out, there is an eerie continuity in this philosophy when it comes to the modern psychiatric go-to drugs of benzodiazepines and anti-depressants. Benzodiazepines were never meant to help one solve a problem or find insight: they were meant to induce satisfaction with (or at least tolerance for) the status quo. The same can be said for modern anti-depressants. This brings to mind "The Stepford Wives" by Ira Levin. Westerners think of that story as a satire about women's place in society, but today it reads more like non-fiction. One in 4 American women are addicted to mind-fogging Big Pharma antidepressants, medications that conduce to exactly the sort of emotional flat-lining and bland acceptance of life that Levin skewers in his book.

April 27, 2020

America's Great Anti-Depressant Scam

I generally avoid watching network television (or any so-called "free" television, for that matter) because I've grown allergic in my old age to the condescending and manipulative power of product advertisements. However, I occasionally watch (or at least hear) one of these sales pitches in spite of myself as I attempt to remain updated on a breaking catastrophic news story such as the Coronavirus.

Last night, for instance, I was messing about in the kitchen when I overheard a commercial for some new medicine that combatted some gnarly-sounding side effects of anti-depressants and bipolar "medicines." The commercial was hugely "telling" when it comes to the way that the media and Big Pharma literally dictate through words how society will think of any given psychoactive substance. Will we think of them as horrid "drugs" or will we think of them as blessed "medicines"? Answer: We'll think of them the way that Big Pharma and its advertising agencies want us to think about them, especially after said pharmaceutical companies have staffed the morning news shows with affable guns-for-hire from the medical industry who will reinforce in general terms the product-specific message of the multi-million-dollar advertisements in question.

I don't recall which notorious anti-depressant side effect last night's advertised medicine was intended to combat (sexual dysfunction, the risk of suicide, severe addiction, emotional flat-lining, weight gain), but what floored me was the fact that the dulcet-toned female narrator referred to the admittedly harmful anti-depressant as an "important medicine." In other words, the fact that anti-depressants caused devastating side effects was not the point of the commercial: the point was that some company was helping you stay on "your important medicine" despite these acknowledged side effects.

Conclusion: anti-depressants are "the drugs that can do no wrong."

If we were talking about any other psychoactive substance - especially one that was produced only by Mother Nature, such as psychedelics - its creation of the gnarly side effects mentioned above would turn it into a "drug" in the worst sense of that word, and it would quickly become a punching bag for outraged medical pundits across the country to trash in professional journals and public media. There would be front-page stories in the New York Times warning us how psychedelic X was the drug from hell. But when it comes to the horrible side effects of anti-depressants, the exact same kind of enormous shortcomings are seen merely as a whole new business opportunity for the marketing of anti-depressant "adjuncts." And so Big Pharma takes advantage of the psychological fact that folks don't like to be wrong in their choices: they have become persuaded of the long-debunked lie that anti-depressants are miracle drugs that fix chemical imbalances, and so the public will readily welcome any new medicines that help them hang onto that "faith," even in the face of increasingly obvious evidence to the contrary.

This is why a war on plants, once started, is so difficult to end in a capitalist society. Naturally occurring psychoactive substances are handicapped from the beginning. They merely have to be responsible for (or indeed associated with) one eye-catching horror story viz. side effects and we suddenly consider the "drug" in question to come from hell. Meanwhile, a synthesized drug from Big Pharma can blatantly addict 1 in 8 American males and 1 in 4 American females, and we will still consider it to be a miracle cure, in fact a "medicine" that it is our duty as health-conscious Americans to take daily, every day of our life!

What further proof do we need that the drug war is about politics, not health, politics designed to keep Mother Nature's godsend plants from competing with Big Pharma? The scam works something like this, by the way: first the DEA outlaws scientific research on natural products that might prove to be competitors to Big Pharma. Then Big Pharma runs prime-time ads that turn their own addictive synthesized substances into apple pie in the minds of the American public. Mother Nature is thus silenced from the beginning while Big Pharma runs advertisements on prime-time television: which one do YOU think is going to win the hearts and minds of the American people?

Of course, in hindsight, it was a telling moment when Congress began allowing pharmaceutical companies to start advertising on television: that was a tacit admission that the world of personal health in America had nothing to do with science and fact, but rather with salesmanship and hucksterism - a fact which any long-term psychiatric patient like myself can readily believe, having frequently shared their doctor's waiting room with an antsy suitcase-carrying sales rep from Big Pharma.

April 25, 2020

How Fretting Drug Warriors Block Medical Progress

while causing inner-city violence and creating drug cartels around the world

It's easy to slam law-and-order conservatives for their part in fomenting the anti-nature drug war. They're hypocritical for starters. They want to keep the taps flowing at their local bar while they hand out life sentences for those who choose to relax using other naturally sourced substances, many of which have been used responsibly by other cultures for thousands of years. They're so bent on making alcohol the drug of choice, that they even have the nationalistic arrogance to send troops overseas and burn plants that pose a threat to the liquor industry. And then we wonder why the US is hated overseas. Imagine an Islamic country entering the United States with the express purpose of shutting down our alcohol producers and burning the plants that constitute their raw materials. That is precisely what the US does, morally speaking, when it enters other countries to shut down plants that process the coca leaf and the poppy.

But conservatives are only half the problem. The tyrannous drug war is fomented equally by the worried parents of America, who fret that their children will become slaves to "drugs" should the drug war be abandoned. This fear is so misplaced that one scarcely knows where to begin in addressing it. But address it we must, since the laws that are promulgated by these Chicken Little parents have a body count: starting with the thousands killed every day in the name of a brutal drug war overseas, and the endless stream of innocent bystanders killed in inner cities -- all because America has elevated common law over natural law and criminalized plants, a step that would have made the garden-loving Thomas Jefferson spin in his grave, just as he surely did, in fact, in 1987 when the DEA stomped onto Monticello and confiscated his poppy plants.

First of all, let's be honest and use the term "psychoactive plants" for "drugs," since "drugs" is really just a pejorative epithet for the medicinal bounty of Mother Nature.

Secondly, there was no epidemic of childhood addictions prior to the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. A law against opium was enacted in that year, not because it would protect youngsters, but rather because it gave racist politicians a socially acceptable way to express their disdain for the Chinese with whom they associated the poppy plant, just as they associated Mexicans with marijuana and blacks with cocaine. Both of those latter two stereotypes would motivate future disingenuous hand-wringing about "drugs" by sixties and seventies racists, culminating in the creation of Richard Nixon's corrupt DEA in 1973, by a president whose drug policy was overtly designed to punish his political opponents, Timothy Leary first and foremost, and then anyone who might so much as give such a rebel the time of day.

And so Americans were expelled from the psychotherapeutic Garden of Eden in the twentieth century, as the American government claimed the unprecedented right to dole out or withhold the psychoactive plant medicines of Mother Nature as it saw fit, a power grab that even God Himself had never contemplated, being happy for his own part to outlaw only one solitary tree from among the myriad plants of his worldwide nursery.


The result is that we now childishly see threats everywhere we turn in Mother Nature, failing to realize that the problem -- to the extent that there is a problem other than in the scheming minds of racists -- is behavior, not plants.

Thirdly, it is enormously selfish, and even racist, to criminalize plants based on a merely theoretical threat that they pose to young people. Why? First, because it ignores the fate of those young people who are already being killed in inner cities around the world thanks to the violence that naturally arises under prohibition. Secondly because our draconian drug laws force millions of Americans (and billions worldwide) to go without powerful psychoactive plant medicines, given that such heavy-handed legislation outlaws mere research of cancer- and depression-fighting godsends, let alone the actual use of such medicine, all out of a fear that white young people might become addicted to some plant medicine or other.

Wake up, white America: 1 out of 4 women, mainly Caucasian, are addicted to Big Pharma meds even as we speak. Why not wring your hands over that grim fact and re-legalize nature's bounty, none of which is more habit-forming than the SSRIs that are being popped like candy everywhere you look.

In the name of the sick and suffering around the world, and in the name of inner city minorities and racial justice, we must return to the days when we cracked down on bad behavior alone - rather than manufacturing violence out of whole cloth by punishing Americans for the pre-crime of merely possessing plant medicines of which our scheming politicians disapprove.

April 24, 2020

A Goliath that even David is afraid of

The ongoing failure of drug reformers to attack the DEA

Imagine there was a government agency that everybody agreed was telling lies. Not only that, but everyone knew that these lies had caused millions of depressed patients and wounded soldiers to go without godsend medicines for almost half a century. Now imagine that the agency in question was also known to have deliberately poisoned American citizens with weed killer, and that this weed killer was subsequently found to cause Parkinson's Disease.

Now, imagine that this all occurred in a supposedly free democratic country and yet no one complained. To the contrary, movie studios cranked out propaganda in which this same lying and murderous agency was portrayed as a hero, a hero that clandestinely uses torture and murder to achieve its goals.

Sounds like fiction, huh?

Well, unfortunately, this is not an imaginary scenario. The agency described above is Richard Nixon's Drug Enforcement Agency, and even the most vocal drug policy reformers have been loath to criticize it. Sure, they may point out in passing that the agency is lying about psychoactive substances through their politically motivated drug scheduling system, but they never take the obvious next step and call loudly and clearly for the agency's abolition, let alone for a criminal trial that would hold its leaders responsible for the great unnecessary suffering that they have knowingly caused over the last four and a half decades.

That's the reason why I created the website AbolishTheDEA.com just over a year ago: to finally speak truth to power and tell the DEA in the words of Shakespeare's Laertes: "Thus diddest thou!"

That's also why I fret over the MAPS' organizations approach of "working through the system" to decriminalize psychedelics, since it obliges them to cooperate with the DEA, thereby granting that agency a kind of moral street cred that it does not deserve. This, after all, is the agency that is fighting tooth and nail to keep godsend medications out of the hands of suffering Americans, and why? Merely in order to preserve its own jobs - which brings up another problem with the DEA about which Americans remain mostly silent: the fact that it has a glaringly obvious conflict of interest in establishing the legality of substances, since their whole raison d'etre is to crack down on illegal drugs. And they freely act on that interest, as was demonstrated in 1985 when the agency went against the advice of its own legal counsel and criminalized MDMA, thus throwing thousands of soldiers under the bus by denying them a godsend therapy for PTSD.

For those who need more reasons to hate the DEA, consider that former DEA Chief John C. Lawn poisoned marijuana with paraquat back in the 1980s, a weed killer that has subsequently been shown to cause Parkinson's Disease. That's the moral equivalent of genocide to punish an unpopular law. This is a ruthless agency that has no one's interests at heart but their own, an absurd nature-hating agency that requires researchers to protect supplies of drugs like psilocybin as if they were fissionable nuclear material rather than Godsend plant medicines from Mother Nature.

Such an agency should be a laughable dinosaur in 21st-century America and treated accordingly. The Israelis got rid of their Anti-Drug Agency. Now it's time for the United States to do the same, preferably replacing it with the Drug EDUCATION Agency, an organization tasked with presenting the objective statistical facts about all psychoactive substances, including alcohol and Big Pharma anti-depressants, including both their pros and cons.

But Goliath is still defiantly loitering in the Valley of Elah, taunting free-spirited Americans with his contempt for constitutional niceties and his disdain for human life, practically daring some modern David to come forth and topple him.

Are we going to rise to the challenge and set out, slingshot in hand, or is the DEA a modern-day Stasi that even rebel spirits are afraid to challenge head on?

April 23, 2020

How to Unite Drug War Opponents of all Ethnicities

Open letter to Sean McAllister, drug policy reform lawyer

Dear Sean Mcallister,

I just watched your presentation on the MAPS Webinar and enjoyed it greatly. When you have a moment, I have some ideas for you about the strategy of drug decriminalization.

You say that it's difficult to find a single unifying motive around which a variety of folks can come together to fight in favor of psychedelic decriminalization. I think there are two main reasons why that problem exists.

1) Drug-law reformers fail to understand (and therefore to adequately publicize) the enormous shortcomings of the current pill-mill approach to modern psychiatry. Those who really understand these shortcomings (especially those, like myself, who have been victims of them) consider psychedelic legalization to be a moral imperative! What shortcomings? Well, one in eight male Americans are addicted to anti-depressant SSRIs and one in four females - an addiction problem that the hypocritical drug warrior ignores, as do most psychiatrists. And, as Julie Holland reports, many of these antidepressants are harder to kick than heroin. These Big Pharma meds turn the individual user into a lifelong patient who has to take these pills every day of their life, which is expensive and demoralizing - but results in just so many annuities for uber-rich Big Pharma. What's more, Robert Whitaker has shown that these drugs actually cause the chemical imbalances that they purport to fix! And now they're being marketed to toddlers!!!


The failure of decrim advocates to point these things out makes me fear that they're afraid to criticize Big Pharma and the American Psychiatric Association. But if these things were known and publicized - along with the psychotherapeutic promise of psychedelics and the fact that they're non-addictive - then there should be a vast community of interested parties lined up to push through psychedelic legalization in order to unhook America and empower folks who are otherwise being turned into "eternal patients." But first someone's got to speak up to the American public and tell them that the psychiatric emperor is wearing no clothes - despite the fact that many doctors have appeared on shows like Oprah over the years (under the pay of Big Pharma) to suggest otherwise. But if we pretend that psychiatry as it exists now is just fine, then few people are going to get excited about legalizing exotic-sounding drugs that can replace the status quo.


2) There is another reason why the psychedelic decriminalization project does not attract more benefactors. That is because this approach ignores the root problem behind ALL drug laws, both in regard to psychedelics, cocaine and opium, etc. The original sin of the drug war is that, beginning in 1914, it began criminalizing Mother Nature's plants. I believe that this can and must be construed as a violation of the natural law upon which this nation was founded. Surely, Thomas Jefferson never for a moment thought that government had the right to give or withhold access to specific plants based on political considerations. I can think of no more obvious fundamental right than our right to what John Locke referred to as "the use of the earth and all that lies therein." By failing to make this point, and arguing for piecemeal legalization of certain plants instead, we are basically conceding that government does have the right to interfere with our access to Mother Nature's plants in the first place. We just want to carve out a few exceptions to that rule. But if we wish to unite all reformers with a common goal, we need to argue for the re-legalization of Mother Nature's plants, period, full stop - for which I've even created a bumper sticker on my website, AbolishTheDEA.com: "END DRUG WAR SHARIA - RE-LEGALIZE PLANTS."






Besides violating natural law, the drug war is a violation of the separation of church and state. Why? Because laws that prohibit the use of plant medicines represent the enforcement of Christian Science with respect to emotional healing. Again, this line of argument is one that can be advanced in regard to both psychedelics and cocaine, etc., and thus it is an approach that could bring together the otherwise culturally separated parties. Once we recognize the common denominator in all drug-war problems - the original sin of criminalizing plants - we reformers can all come together under one banner to denounce the DEA with one synchronized voice.

A comment about peyote and justice. I am sympathetic with those Native Americans who fear for the peyote supply. That said, as I understand it, their interest is in peyote that comes from specific traditional locations, such as southern Texas - and I do not believe that they would be materially injured if peyote were grown elsewhere and then used by non-Native Americans. In any case, I trust and hope that there is a way to respect all parties without using the icky expedient of embracing the intolerant and racist drug law itself. That's kind of like "finding some good" in the "three-fifths law" and embracing it for specific cases. In my opinion, we should be ending drug laws (which are really "plant laws"), rather than seeing how we can accommodate them to our own purposes, whatever our end goals might be.

In ending, I would like to share with you my number-one strategy for deconstructing the propaganda of the drug warrior: simply take drug war statements and replace the word "drugs" with "plants." For instance, when Trump says that he wants to execute drug dealers (a statement that sadly seems to resonate with many Americans) re-write the sentence as: "Trump wants to execute those who deal in Mother Nature's plants." That sounds a lot less reasonable, yet that's what the drug war really is: it's a war on plants (complete with philosophical links to the burning of plant-using witches and the Conquistadors' disdain for plant-centric religion). But the drug warrior knows that sounds silly. That's why they always replace the word "plants" with the pejorative and baggage-laden term "drugs."

Meanwhile, I invite you to visit my website, abolishthedea.com, and spread the word about its existence, if you believe in what I'm doing. I have about zero visitors per day because I neither advertise nor accept advertisements! But I am hoping to publish a book with my content later this year!

Best wishes, thanks, and stay well....
Ballard Quass
Abolishthedea.com

PS I believe the drug war in the west dates back to Emperor Theodosius in 392 CE when he abolished the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries (after almost 2,000 consecutive years of overawing participants such as Plato, Cicero and Plutarch). Why? Because the Emperor (quite tellingly) considered the obviously compelling ritual to be a threat to Christianity. I believe that the modern drug war is waged for the same philosophical reason, to protect Christianity from a perceived metaphysical threat - and also for financial reasons: to support the Corrections Industry, Big Pharma, psychiatry, Big Liquor, and law enforcement - and finally to win elections for conservatives by removing leftists from the voting rolls (after arresting them for felony drug charges). Incidentally, that's another grievance on which all drug reformers can unite: the recognition that the drug war strategically steals elections for drug warriors by removing thousands of drug war opponents from the voting rolls.

PPS Better yet, put the Drug Warriors on the defensive for once. Demand that the DEA not simply be abolished, but call for a trial to prosecute those who have knowingly lied about medical godsends for 40+ years, along with DEA Chiefs like John C. Lawn, who have knowingly poisoned marijuana users with Paraquat, a weed killer that has been found to cause Parkinson's Disease. If the drug war is an actual war, then John C. Lawn is a war criminal, who knowingly poisoned Americans, knowingly endangering their lives and ultimately punishing a misdemeanor with the potential infliction of a catastrophic illness.

NOTE: Another way to interest a wider audience in psychedelics: Highlight their ability to facilitate the growth of neurons and then perform intense clinical trials with them on Alzheimer's patients. Impoverished ethnicities may think of psychedelic "trips" as a luxury, but surely they don't feel that way about preserving and restoring the memory capacity of their elderly parents.

NOTE 2: When Americans encounter unjust laws, they never do the right thing: seek to change the law in question. Instead, they seek to amend the law in order to help out certain interest groups. That's why the tax system in the US is such a mess. No one has the guts or energy to change the worse-than-byzantine nightmare that it's become. And so homeowners demand changes that will help them, investors request changes that will help them, corporations request changes that will help them -- and so the system becomes more byzantine every year.

This is why we hear talk of inequity in the fight against the drug war. One group wants to focus on this drug, the other on that. But just like in the tax example, both sides ignore the one unifying approach that the situation cries out for. Only by rejecting the drug war itself on first principles, as a violation of natural law, can we bring about a strategy that will unite all the stakeholders: including that often overlooked and totally "unleveraged" demographic: those who go without adequate medical treatment thanks to the DEA's lies about Mother Nature's medicines.

So the anti-drug war movement shoots itself in the foot. Its lack unity is all down to the fact that they are not focusing on the principal evil of the drug war, namely the fact that it unjustly criminalizes mother nature's plants and is thus a violation of natural law. Once you rule out fighting back on this the principal ground of complaint, you're left with only piecemeal protests that attack facets of the drug war based on parochial interests. This go-slow, selfish approach to fighting injustice is a recipe for overall failure. Until all parties recognize that the drug war is flawed root and branch, they will remain divided and achieve only partial victories.

April 22, 2020

The Church of the Most Holy and Righteous Drug War

.....And there went out from Judaea, a commandment forbidding the possession of psychoactive plants, for the King was sore enraged that his people might thence derive thoughts that did not conduce to the seamless governance of his dominion. And among these dangerously enlightening flora, hence to be stigmatized evermore with the epithet of 'drugs', were, in no particular order: the kava-kava root of the South Pacific Isles, the bark of the Virola tree of South America, the roots of Tabernanthe ibigoa of equatorial Africa, the Psilocybe cyanescens mushroom of the Pacific Northwest, and all manner of "sacred fungi" from Central America.

May the anti-drug lord give his blessings to today's scripture reading.

Looks like we have some newcomers in the pews today. Welcome one and all. Please remember to sign the register in the narthex as you leave later this morning. For those who would like to become a full member of the church, it's a simple process. Just bring a notarized urine sample to our mini lab located in the Sunday School building on the second floor. Once we verify that you are free of plant substances created by the devil, we will send you a formal invitation to join the Most Holy and Righteous Church of the Drug War on the Hill.

I know, I know. That name is a little confusing. It makes it sound like the drug war itself is on the hill, whereas, as we all know, the drug war is a universal struggle against evil plant medicines and thus is omnipresent. But the church had spent a small fortune on signs before someone brought these ambiguous connotations to the attention of the budget committee. And if I haven't confused you already, how about this? The true name of the church is not just the Most Holy and Righteous Church of the Drug War on the Hill. It is the Most Holy and Righteous Church of the Drug War on the Hill, Cathedral, Tabernacle, and Church Agape Fellowship and Daycare Center and Pillar and Ground of the Truth.

What can I say? That name was decided by committee during a very lengthy and acrimonious brainstorming session.

OK, get your hymnals out folks. We are now going to sing Rock of Ages, hymn number 295 in the New Drug War Edition of your songbook.

Just as sober as a judge
Through this wretched world I trudge
Full of sadness unalloyed
Leaving nature unemployed
But for my addictive pills
I renounce all hippie thrills.

Though my parents groan in death
Pot is never on their breath
Nor do mushrooms grow their brain
Nor the sacred ibogaine
Monkey see and monkey do
I am sober, how 'bout you?

Comes the sad man to a rope
When he gives up all his hope
But he could do worse than die
By deciding to get high
Let him go with drug-less breath
There are worser things than death.

"Worser things than death"? Oh, dear. Well, it's the first edition of the New Drug War Hymnal. I'm sure they will be making improvements as time goes on.

You guys may be seated, by the way.

(Whenever you're ready.)

Turning to church notices. The Royal Order of Self-Righteous Buffaloes will be holding free drug testing from 9:00 to 5:00 at the old firehouse on Stubbins Road from Monday through Friday of this coming week. Names of those who pass the test will be featured prominently in next week's bulletin. Remember, folks, if you pass ten certified drugs tests during a calendar year, you are eligible for our church sainthood program, which confers posthumous sainthood upon any congregation member who passes a minimum of 75 notarized drug tests during their lifetime.

I should mention, there is a nominal registration fee for the program: $50 per candidate per sainthood. There's also a $50 processing fee for anyone who fails a drug test since our staff then has to go back and recalculate your morality score while taking your lapse of sobriety into account. That may sound easy, but this requires a subjective determination by our Board of Bishops, and, well, our Board of Bishops can't even agree on what brand of toilet tissue to buy for the Sunday School building rest rooms.

That's all the time we have time for. I'll ask our organist, Goodie Temperance Babcock, to take us out of here with a big 'un everybody's kind of diggin'. It's Bach's Concerto for Orchestra and Drug Warrior in D Minor. It's all yours, Goodie!

April 21, 2020

The War on Plants

The new American Conquistadores: using flame throwers to keep the world safe for Big Liquor

If you ever want to understand how absurd the drug war is, just substitute the word "plants" for "drugs" in your mind the next time politicians start blaming "drugs" for something.

"Today," says Donald Trump, "I am calling for the execution of those who deal in drugs."

TRANSLATION:

"Today, I am calling for the execution of those who deal in Mother Nature's plants."

For that's what the drug war really is: A WAR ON PLANTS, and as such it is every bit as superstitious and idiotic as the war on plant-using females of the witch-hunt days, to which the drug war is philosophically linked. For witch hunting never died out in America: it is alive and well. The Cotton Mathers of the 21st century have just replaced the word "witch" with the term "drug user" and gone on their merry way persecuting Americans who they don't understand. What was the witch's crime, after all, but the fact that she achieved "forbidden knowledge" through the ritualistic use of psychoactive plants?

To put this another way: The Drug War is just a Christian Science crack down on those who use Mother Nature's medicines for psychological healing and to achieve higher states of consciousness.

Christian Scientists, as you know, believe that we should be able to cure ourselves physically without resorting to drugs. Likewise the Christian Science drug warrior believes we should be able to control our mood and our conscious states in general without resorting to plant medicine. I need hardly add that this latter Christian Science is hypocritical, since the drug warriors have no problem with tobacco or alcohol - or even with synthetic drugs from Big Pharma to which 1 in 8 American males and 1 in 4 American females are addicted even as I type this - with many SSRI antidepressants being harder to "kick" than heroin.

But drug warriors will never use the word "plants" for "drugs" because they know it will make them sound every bit as silly, stupid, and intolerant as they actually are.

Substitute "plants" for "drugs" and then think about so-called "drug testing." That all-American business practice suddenly turns into the extrajudicial enforcement of Christian Science Sharia.

This, my friends, is why the drug war needs to end: not because "it does not work," as my fellow liberals are fond of saying, but because it should not work, it MUST NOT work in a free society, least of all in a country that was founded on natural law: i.e., the idea that there are some rights that the government cannot take away, even under the guise of protecting its citizens from themselves: and the most obvious natural right in the world is what John Locke called our right to the earth "and all that lies therein."

This is not rocket science. It is obviously absurd and unconstitutional to criminalize plants. But tyrants and worrywarts still get away with it. How? By strategically using the word "drugs" in place of "plants."

April 17, 2020

The Joy of Drug Testing

They used to laugh at him, said he'd never be a stand-up comedian. Well, they're not laughing now. Give it up, please, gang, for Johnny O'Clonapan.

APPLAUSE

Oh, I'm sorry. Was that my cue?

LAUGHTER

That's far too subtle for me to pick up on.

DRUM

LAUGHTER

Thanks for coming out. I should warn you, however, that there will be a drug test at the end of my gig.

GASP

So pay attention.

LAUGHTER

Of course, I myself have already taken a drug test before coming on tonight.

WOMAN: Uh-huh.

This is the DEA Lounge, after all, where you're judged not by the color of your skin, but by the contents of your digestive system.

DRUM

LAUGHTER

I'm happy to say that I passed the drug test with flying colors.

APPLAUSE

Oh, thank you very much.

Oh, my government would be so proud of me.

CROWD: Awww!

The drug-testing lab didn't find so much as one single naturally occurring godsend in my system.

ANGELS: Praise God!

That's good because according to Christian Science Sharia, I am not allowed to work in America if I use plant medicine to improve my psychological condition.

Sounds like we have some drug war heretics in the house.

MAN: Yeah.

Speaking of which, it's a good thing that Freud got his psychotherapeutic work out of the way before America's drug war began. Otherwise, he'd be smoking his trademark cigars in the San Quentin prison yard.

LAUGHTER

Freud would be like:

FREUD: Yo, homie. You're in this joint because you had a bad relationship with your father. Wanna talk about it?

And the homeboy would be like:

HOMEBOY: Do you want me to bust your head, yo?

LAUGHTER

Listen to this here cokehead, talkin' about my father? That [bleep] is whack, yo.

And then there's Ben Franklin, who used to liberally avail himself of opium. Just think: If he had lived in the age of the drug war, he would have been a mere unemployed scumbag. Benjamin Franklin would be panhandling on the street, talking about:

FRANKLIN: Hey, dude, I just invented a lightning rod.

And the guy on the street would be like:

GUY: And you know where you can PUT that lightning rod, you damn junkie.

LAUGHTER

Here's an idea for a drug war: Let's criminalize tobacco and alcohol and throw everyone in jail who partakes of them. That's a drug war that I could get behind because it would give the hypocritical drug warriors a taste of their own medicine.

APPLAUSE

We'll have drug tests, too, and anyone who has drank or smoked within the last three weeks won't be able to get so much as a job at Taco Bell.

LAUGHTER

I was about to say you've been a great audience, but I really won't know that until I've learned what you guys have got in your respective digestive systems.

GASP

So let's take a short break while you all provide urine samples to our lab technicians.

BOO

What's the matter? Are you guys anti-American or something? Drug testing is as American as... as... as invading other countries to burn plants that other cultures have been using responsibly for thousands of years.

BOO

You do realize that this is the DEA Lounge, right? I'm sure that the powers that be are taking note of your anti-American reaction to my drug-testing proposal.

MAN: Uh-oh.

Uh-oh is right. Is there not one patriot in the house who is willing to take a patriotic piss for America?

[crickets chirping]

I'll take that as a no... as well as a sign that this lounge has a serious insect problem.

DRUM

LAUGHTER

I'm going to be generous, though. On behalf of the United States government, I'm going to allow you to continue seeking gainful employment in the United States despite your failure to take my drug test.

APPLAUSE

Aren't I magnanimous?

WOMAN: Ah, yes.

Just remember: if you ever happen to ingest a natural substance that promotes happiness or motivation and provides you with psychological insight, chances are you are in violation of American Sharia.

WOMAN: Ah!

So, spit that substance out at once.

[spits]

WOMAN 2: Disgusting!

And kindly report yourself to the nearest DEA office.

MAN, siren wailing: Clear the way, folks: drug scumbag coming through!

[tires squeal] [brake engages] [car door opens & closes] [feet walking on gravel] [knock on door] [door creaks open]

FEMALE AGENT: Welcome to the DEA! [agent cackling]

They will then handle all the pesky details of ruining your life by consigning you to the nearest massively overcrowded penitentiary.

[cell door clangs]

FEMALE AGENT: Sleep tight! [agent cackling]

LAUGHTER

You've been a great audience... as far as I can tell. You sure you're not gonna piss for me?

BOO

OK, relax. There's no harm in asking. That's a shame, though, because I paid a pretty penny to have these lab technicians come along.

CROWD: Awww!

I guess they'll just have to go back to their labs to continue removing marijuana users from the American workforce.

BOO

They must be real proud of themselves. NOT!

LAUGHTER

EMCEE: Let's hear it for Johnny O'Clonapan!

APPLAUSE

April 17, 2020

The Depressing Truth About SSRIs

why psychedelic therapy must REPLACE modern psychiatry rather than simply complement it

Open letter to MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies:

I keep hearing MAPS researchers use the phrase "those who don't respond to regular anti-depressants" when talking about clinical trials. This gives the impression that anti-depressants usually work just fine, but that is just plain wrong - although psychiatrists have been paid millions by Big Pharma to go on shows like "Oprah" and say otherwise.

If such pills are really the silver bullets they are purported to be, why is America more depressed than ever, statistically speaking, decades after these silver bullets hit the market?

Many of these medications are highly addictive and harder to kick than heroin! Heroin can be beat in one grueling week. Anti-depressants can take months as the brain chemistry attempts to return to normal. Some of these meds can NEVER be stopped. I wanted to get off of Effexor, but my doctor told me not to bother because recidivism rates are over 95% after three years.

About one in eight men and one in four women are addicted to Big Pharma antidepressants, according to psychiatrist Julie Holland. And now the pharmaceutical companies are going after the toddler market. This is a huge but silent scandal, especially when you consider Robert Whitaker's finding that antidepressants actually CAUSE the chemical imbalances that they purport to fix.

And yet MAPS researchers are silent on these issues. I can only guess that Big Pharma's influence is keeping them from recognizing the obvious. MAPS researchers should be pushing for psychedelic therapy to REPLACE modern antidepressants, not simply to eke out therapy for those supposedly rare cases that can't be "helped" by these deliberately addictive drugs (these annuities for Big Pharma executives).

And what do we even mean when we say that an antidepressant "works"? In the book "Psychedelic Medicine," Dr. Richard Louis Miller tells the story of a reporter who wrote a first-person story about Prozac. The reporter was bullish on the drug at first, saying that the medicine was definitely making him happier. But then he went to a family funeral and found to his horror that he felt nothing at all. Was Prozac working? You might say yes, it was working all too well. (This is not a surprise, since American psychiatry has a long history of defining "cures" as "treatments that render the patient more docile," as opposed to "treatments that help the patient achieve self-fulfillment in life.")

Anti-depressants are working great for Big Pharma, of course, bringing in $40 billion a year. They are swimming in dough from monthly purchases by addicts. But those who take the drugs are turned into eternal patients and are guinea pigs for substances that were never properly trialed for lifetime use. Worse yet, such patients are ineligible for participation in most new psychedelic therapies for fear of Serotonin Toxicity Syndrome.

MAPS researchers should start speaking truth to power and tell Big Pharma that its whole pill-mill approach to psychiatry is wrong. As a victim of the status quo, I for one would appreciate to hear someone in the field actually recognizing that "eternal patients" like myself exist. I don't expect I'll ever get an apology from the psychiatry business for addicting me for a lifetime to a mind-numbing drug (one that offers no self-insight whatsoever), but it would be nice if someone in the field would at least acknowledge that there is a problem here.

That's why I won't be fully happy with MAPS until they start promoting psychedelic therapy as a REPLACEMENT for the status quo, rather than as a mere helpful adjunct for the Big Pharma pill mill.

April 16, 2020

The DEA: Poisoning Americans since 1973

EMCEE: Live from the DEA Lounge, it's the man who put the "psycho" in "psychoactive."

LAUGHTER

Mr. Johnny O'Clonopan.

That's my name, use it only as directed.

LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE

Thank you. Oh, you're too kind.

I will never understand how I got this gig at the DEA Lounge here in downtown Washington, D.C.

LAUGHTER

Apparently, the Human Relations staff failed to check my politics before signing me up.

The truth be told, I believe that the drug war is...

1) Anti-patient.

GASP

2) Anti-scientific.

GASP

3) Anti-minority.

GASP

4) A violation of the natural law upon which this country was founded.

GASP

5) A way for conservatives to steal elections by locking up thousands of their political opponents.

GASP

6) A make-work program for law enforcement that is their golden goose thanks to the highly lucrative forfeiture of so-called drug property.

GASP

7) A protection racket designed to shield Big Pharma and Big Liquor from competition.

GASP

And an excuse to invade other countries, often with the goal of burning plants that have been used responsibly for millennia by the locals but which now pose an unacceptable competition to the American liquor industry.

Well, aren't you guys going to gasp?

GASP

That's more like it.

DRUM

LAUGHTER

No, seriously. How many of you saw Natalie Reyes, Nicolas Cage, and Laurence Fishburne in "Running with the Devil"?

APPLAUSE

Well, that's depressing. I didn't realize it was that popular.

WOMAN: Oh, yes.

So, let me get this straight: Natalie Reyes is the DEA Chief and she gets to torture and murder mere suspects because they were dealing in....

DRUM

...oh, how horrible...

PLANTS???

LAUGHTER

Thomas Jefferson is not simply rolling in his grave, he is doing handsprings and cartwheels.

LAUGHTER

I mean, did somebody say "Whirling Dervish"?

CROWD: Whirling Dervish!

I thought so. But then the DEA never cared much for Thomas Jefferson anyway. Thirty-five years ago, they stomped onto Monticello in their jackboots and stole the man's poppy plants.

BOO

I know, right? Let me tell you something, folks. U.S. elections aren't being swayed by the Russians, they're being stolen by American movie producers, like the ones responsible for this little 90-minute bit of drug war propaganda.

MAN: That's right.

APPLAUSE

I'd better get out of here. I hear they're having a celebration for former DEA head John C. Lawn. You remember Mr Lawn. He was the guy who tried to poison American pot smokers back in the 1970s by lacing marijuana plants with paraquat, a weed killer that has subsequently been shown to cause Parkinson's Disease.

BOO

What can I say? Your tax dollars at work during America's drug war.

WOMAN: Disgusting

You took the hash right out of my bong, lady.

DRUM

LAUGHTER

Here's an idea. Since he likes that stuff so much, why don't we all chip in together and get him a birthday cake laced with the weed killer of his choice?

[siren wails]

Hey, I was just kidding. I would never try to poison someone with paraquat, unlike certain former DEA chiefs that I know.

DRUM

LAUGHTER

MAN: For sheezy my neezy.

It's scary, though, because 35 years later, Master Poisoner John C. Lawn remains a hero in the eyes of the DEA, and if that doesn't tell you how corrupt this agency is, then nothing will.

WOMAN: Word.

APPLAUSE

My name is Johnny O'Clonopan, and my comedy is every bit as addictive as my Big Pharma namesake, baby. I'll be here until Friday, or until the DEA finally figures out that I hate their friggin' guts.

APPLAUSE

LAUGHTER

EMCEE: Let's put some hands together, please, gang, for Johnny O'Clonopan.

April 15, 2020

In Praise of Drug Dealers

replacing the modern barbaric treatment of so-called addicts with pharmacologically informed shamanism

Imagine a drug dealer: not just any drug dealer, but a drug dealer with a big heart, a thorough knowledge of all psychoactive plants and fungi, and free and unhindered access to every such substance in the world.

How do you think he (or she) would deal with my desire to get off of alcohol, or heroin - or worse yet, one of the modern brand-name anti-depressants, which, as Julie Holland points out, are often more difficult to quit than heroin.

Do you think this drug dealer would send me to a high-rent flophouse and plop me on a couch for three days of cold-turkey hell (in the case of heroin) or of three months of cold-turkey hell (in the case of antidepressants)?

Of course not. He or she would shun this barbaric pseudoscientific protocol and fight fire with fire. How? By prescribing drugs that shout "YOU ARE OK!" just as loudly (or louder) than my withdrawal symptoms will be shouting "YOU ARE DYING." I'm talking about substances which, in the proper setting which our hypothetical dealer will naturally provide, will give me a new appreciation of the world of nature that surrounds me, will give me new insights into my place in the cosmos, and will help me adopt mindsets hitherto unimaginable for me by dint of which I can buck up against the down sides of withdrawal and march on in spite of them.

This dealer might even do the scientifically unthinkable and creatively use his vast natural pharmacopeia to give me an occasional "high" for no reason at all - or rather for the exact same reason that most people drink alcohol these days: namely, to get a break from full-on "reality" and thus a health-inducing vacation from stress in general.

One thing you can be sure of: My "drug withdrawal" would not necessitate the continual retching and puking that our modern puritanical therapists consider to be the addict's due. Nor would it require my self-abasement in front of a crowd of fellow "addicts," where I'm encouraged to speculate-at-will on the hidden forces and motivations behind my fall from grace.

The best thing that a modern therapist can tell an addict is that there's light at the end of a tunnel, but our drug dealer knows better: he (or she) knows how to light up the tunnel itself and make one's journey through it both bearable and therapeutic.

It's not surprising then that the government has such antipathy toward drug dealers, to the point where Donald Trump even wants to execute them. The drug dealers are the ones who threaten to break modern science's puritanical stranglehold on mental health therapy by revealing that the emperor is wearing no clothes, that the bare-bones ministrations that pass as addiction therapy these days are at once barbaric and ineffective compared to what a pharmacologically savvy empath could provide. That's why the drug warrior feels compelled to keep psychoactive substances illegal, not for the benefit of addicts, but rather to ensure that the government and Big Pharma maintain their highly lucrative monopoly when it comes to treating them.

April 5, 2020

The Drug War as a Make-Work Program for Law Enforcement

I was just watching an old episode of "In the Heat of the Night," in which drug runners feature prominently, of course. It made me wonder, what would TV have been like over the last 40 years without the drug war? Script writers would have had to get inventive and picture their bad guys performing actual crimes - rather than hunting them down for the pre-crime offense of possessing politically ostracized substances.

The absurdity of the situation is clear when Chief Gillespie is asked how the officers should confront a newly arrived suspect at a drug dealer's house.

"How do you want to deal with him?" asks Virgil.

"I wanna know what he's got in that backpack," says the Chief.

That says it all about law enforcement during the drug war: they're not interested in how anyone actually behaves: let the individual be as peaceful as a lamb, that means nothing. The police want to see what they have in the backpack, so that the full force of drug war sharia may be brought down upon them if they dare to possess plants of which the government disapproves.

If the police go out onto a peaceful street, their job is to MAKE trouble by poking into other's business, rather than leaving well enough alone and letting peaceful citizens go about their peaceful business. And we wonder why guns proliferate and bullets fly.

In a sane world, it would be none of the Chief's damn business what anybody had in a backpack. The question would be how is the suspect behaving? What a waste of resources is thus employed in ruining American's lives based on what plant medicines they have chosen to use.

But the Drug Warrior never gets it. Their anti-scientific and draconian laws create a black market that results in crack houses popping up thanks to the profit motive. Then they point to those very crack houses as the reason why the drug war must continue!!!

It's circular reasoning thanks to which the drug war can never end - unless uprooted root and branch by folks who point out that it's all a power grab and a violation of natural law to outlaw naturally occurring substances in the first place.

Think of the cost of the drug war: in terms of deaths and ruined lives and all the powerful psychoactive therapies for which even research is blocked, the soldiers going without powerful medicines for PTSD, the elderly going without powerful medicines for depression, the young minorities wasting away in overcrowded prisons for possessing natural substances that politicians have outlawed. Then ask yourself: would there be anything near this kind of drug-related suffering in the world had America NOT chosen to begin criminalizing plant medicines in 1914?

Obviously not. There was no drug problem prior to 1914. Why? Because back then people were still judged on how they actually behaved every day of their life and not on what natural substances they may or may not have in their digestive system.

But the power-hungry politicians saw an opening in 1914 and they ran through it.

Time to rewind and re-answer the question of how America intends to deal with substances: Let's try education this time instead of law enforcement. And let's not moralize about substance use, let's present the statistical facts on every substance known to humankind, without hypocritically leaving out alcohol and prescription drugs and tobacco, but definitely including every non-addictive psychedelic substance, substances which are now thought to promote the growth of new neurons in the brain - neurons that drug warriors could certainly use, judging by the illogical and circular reasoning that they continue to employ to this very day, over 100 years after Francis Burton Harrison succeeded in overturning natural law and criminalizing the use of a mere plant.

PS Not satisfied with arresting the perps, the Sheriff Bill Gillespie in the TV story gleefully confiscates the bad guy's property, under the tyrannical legal fiction that real estate may be held responsible for drug law violations. Of course, the property owner in the TV show is not a nice guy, so it's easy for American viewers to overlook the fact that the legal system is having a tyrannical heyday while cracking down on the mere substances that humans choose to ingest. Yet this passes as entertainment in America: watching law enforcement run roughshod over natural law and common sense, all in the name of combating a drug problem that the law itself has created out of whole cloth.

And then conservatives wring their hands, wondering, "Why do so many people fear, hate, and mistrust the police?" The answer: because the police aren't the police anymore: they are the enforcement arm of the ultra-strict Christian Science Sharia, AKA the war on plants, which tyrant politicians disingenuously refer to as the Drug War.

PPS Even in episodes that are not centered around drug dealing, the show gratuitously portrays cocaine use in the most lurid light possible, something of which only bad guy "trailer trash" partake, whereas Sigmund Freud used the stimulant liberally -- not in order to beat his wife and shortchange his business partners, but rather to goad himself on to a prolific vocational output that led to his self-actualization in life and his worldwide fame (but you will never see Hollywood portray cocaine used in THAT fashion, since that runs counter to their role in cranking out drug war propaganda to keep the war on plants going strong until the end of time).

April 1, 2020

How the Drug War Punishes the Elderly

Are the elderly depressed? America wouldn't have it any other way.

How many readers know of an elderly friend or loved one wasting away in a nursing home? Let me see a show of hands.

Now, how many people know that this is a tragedy created by the Drug War?

Mother Nature's pharmacopeia contains a world of psychoactive substances that can be used in a strategic manner by a pharmacologically savvy empath to not only elevate mood, but to give the treated individual a new perspective on life, while encouraging the growth of new neurons in the brain.

But Drug Warrior America wants none of this. Why? Because they hold a masochistic Christian Science view that says it is somehow wrong to use psychoactive substances in this fashion, a view that's supported, unfortunately, by a breed of scientism that treats the human body as an interchangeable widget (a robotically functioning Newtonian animal) for which we must find one-size-fits-all "cures" that can be marketed in pill form by any psychiatrist with a prescription pad.

The result: as much as we Americans wring our hands about the suffering of the elderly, we wouldn't have it any other way. The Drug War mentality has fostered in us a knee-jerk association between psychoactive substances and hedonism, and we use that as an excuse to willfully ignore the myriad utopian scenarios whereby such substances could, in the hands of a pharmacologically savvy shaman, give the depressed elderly new hope and even help them make their peace with death.

In this sense, drug law sharia is a godsend to modern psychiatrists because it gives them the perfect excuse for doing such a poor job in treating the elderly. If we confront these psychiatrists with the utopian possibilities inherent in nature's pharmacy, they have only to respond that all the substances that could be used in that fashion are illegal. And so drug law sharia keeps an entire new treatment paradigm at bay, leaving psychiatrists with nothing but a handful of heavily marketed addictive pharmaceuticals wherewith to treat severe emotional deficits - and then we have the gall to ask where the opioid crisis comes from. The opioid crisis results from the fact that we have outlawed all of the non-addictive substances that can powerfully affect mood, leaving those who seek self-transcendence with few choices except for the highly addictive ones offered by Big Pharma.

It should come as no surprise that the drug war leads to such hideous outcomes, since the drug war is anti-scientific by design. It represents the triumph of politics over science, propaganda over logic, common law over natural law, and if the casualties of that doctrine include the depressed elderly, then so be it. America really wouldn't have it any other way. After all, pharmacologically informed shamanism can't be neatly fit into a capitalist format that can enrich shareholders. Besides, it would involve ending the drug war, which is the goose that lays the golden eggs for law enforcement and the corrections industry. And it would keep America from intervening in the country of its choice by playing the "narcotics" card, saying in effect: "You are dealing in plants that pose a threat to Big Liquor, therefore we can remove you from office."

And so the honest Drug Warrior would stand by the side of the depressed loved one and say: "Sorry, Mama, we'd like to make you feel better by ending the drug war, but then America would no longer have an excuse to intervene in countries of whose politics we disapprove!"

March 29, 2020

The DEA's War on Alzheimer's Research

and how philosophers completely ignore the great philosophical problem of our times

Funny how we all come to regret some basic decisions in our lives. Take me, for instance. I am just a trifle galled by the fact that I did not become a board-certified philosopher in my 30s when I had that chance, because now, everything that I write on the subject of drugs is merely my opinion, (lil ol' me, one among billions), and so my thoughts on these topics are just as easily ignored as the next fellow's insane musings.

That said, I will maintain until my dying day that philosophy* is studiously ignoring the great philosophical problem of our times: the way that humanity has created a problem out of linguistic whole cloth merely by referring to natural godsends pejoratively as "drugs," beginning round about 1914 when the Harrison Narcotics Act decided that the root of substance abuse was to be found, not in human behavior, amoral capitalism and social arrangements, but rather in PLANTS, the very plants that surround us, thus turning nature overnight into a great temptress rather than a great healer.

Since then, a faux morality has arisen under the battle cry of "Just say no to drugs!" -- which is clearly a political statement, since nobody ever means that statement literally (given its implied exemption for alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, Valium, and anti-depressants, etc.) : hence that statement always means: "Just say no to those substances that have been politically determined to be bad for you and which we are not allowed to study because they are too evil to even touch!"

The use of the word "drugs" these days is so loaded with false and dubious presuppositions that you'd think philosophers would have a field day ending the drug war, not with the usual statistical arguments, but by appealing to first principles, beginning with the absurdity of outlawing mother nature's plants.

Instead, they're musing about whether any of us really exist, whether we're not all victims of a Matrix conspiracy, one so clever that it actually made Martin Luther King seem like a hero to us back in the '60s when he may have well been a mere holographic projection of some great hidden alien manipulator who got a kick out of forcing us puppets to become passionate and compassionate about mere mirages. (Yeah, right.)

Just when the world needs philosophy the most, the philosophers have literally gone mad, and modern science along with it. (Even the seemingly sensible Neil deGrasse Tyson has asserted that we humans may well be mere data points that are being manipulated by some God-like computer programmer, and if that's what the sensible scientists are thinking, heaven shield us from the irrational ones.)

Some readers (assuming this stuff is eventually read, if only decades from now) might say that "drugs" are a parochial issue, since many folks get along just fine using only the politically approved substances available to us, but this is wrong. The drug war has devastating effects on everybody's health, no matter how determined a particular individual may be to avoid illegal substances.

Take Alzheimer's disease. One would assume that everyone, including the government, is in a hurry to defeat that scourge.

Wrong. The DEA has outlawed the mere research of a whole class of drugs (namely psychedelics) which show the power to regenerate memory and facilitate -- if not actually cause -- the growth of new neurons. In a sane world, these tantalizing hints would be followed up with a huge government investment in research in order to glean the therapeutic benefits of this new discovery.

We also know that stress can promote, if not cause, cancer. So when we ban substances that reduce stress, we give cancer a green light to spread in those patients who are genetically disposed to acquire it.

But the scientistic drug war logic has so blinded us to our own interests that we knowingly prevent this vital research, merely because it would involve the free use of substances that politicians have decided to demonize and ban.

This situation won't change until philosophers stop counting aliens on pinheads and finally take up the task of unveiling the illogical and disingenuous premises behind America's imperial drug war, which it maintains worldwide on threat of invasion. Is a country leaning toward socialist policies of which America disapproves? No problem. Let's invade in order to topple a "narcoterrorist." Is an eastern country growing plants that pose a threat to the liquor industry? No problem. Cut off their aid until they let us come in and burn their plants.

America is just plain screwed by the drug war, and American authors are self-censoring. Thus folks write whole books about the depression problem -- entirely ignoring the role that the drug war plays in limiting our emotionally therapeutic arsenal to a handful of addictive Big Pharma meds. Thus folks write whole books about relaxation techniques, totally ignoring the fact that the drug war outlaws all substances that could help us understand and adopt the kind of peaceful mindset that the authors are promoting.

I could go on and on -- were it not for the fact that I failed to get the above-mentioned philosophy certifications 30 years ago and thus have to go back to my day job even as we speak.

But I hope someone digs up this post after I'm gone and does me the favor of recognizing that America is on the wrong politically motivated track -- and that philosophers need to wake up and take notice: not for vague libertarian reasons but for the health of world democracy and ourselves when we grow old -- when, God forbid, we ourselves suffer from the Alzheimer's curse for which our anti-scientific drug war has blocked the cure.

*to the extent that it's currently staring at its board-certified navel, wondering if reality even exists -- and here I will mercifully refrain from naming such over-rationalizing offenders as Daniel Dennett and Donald Hoffman

March 26, 2020

The Educational Use of Psychoactive Plants

Music Appreciation Class in the Year 2120

If there's one thing that the drug warrior steadfastly ignores, it is the power of many criminalized substances to sharpen the mind and increase appreciation of the world around us. That's why Thomas De Quincey indulged before visiting the opera, not in order to "party down" but rather to delightedly devote his full mental capacities to the orchestra; that's why Edgar Allan Poe's Augustus Bedloe indulged before exploring mother nature, not to "get high" according to the drug warrior's vulgar definition of that term, but to be sure that he delighted in each and every botanical wonder that came before his eyes, rather than stumbling through a world of vague greenery, which is all that generally registers in the blurry eye of the hurried "ennuye man of the world," as Poe would have put it.

This therapeutic propensity of Mother Nature's plant medicine is often so pronounced, in fact, that I believe we can look forward to a day in which society sanctions the strategic use of such substances for the express purpose of bringing about such otherwise elusive goals as "music appreciation," even in subjects for whom a minuet by Bach (let alone a concert by Mahler) might have hitherto sounded like a mere cacophony of purposeless audio waves.

The only thing stopping us from employing such pedagogical strategy (other than drug law, of course) is the unexamined notion that there is something wrong with using Mother Nature's plants to improve our cognition and enjoyment of the world around us. This belief, however, is nothing but a matter of Christian Science faith on the part of the drug warrior. There is, in fact, no rational reason why human beings should forego the benefits of Mother Nature's pharmacy. We certainly do not adopt that prejudice when it comes to physical health; to say that we should employ it in the realms of mental health and human consciousness is mere Christian Science prejudice.

Here's where the hypocritical drug warrior will wring his or her hands about the supposed potential for addiction in such a scheme, failing to notice that America is already the most addicted country in the world, not because of cocaine, opium and magic mushrooms but because of the daily use of prescription anti-depressants by more than one-eighth of the American population, some of which "medicine" has a recidivism rate equal to that of heroin. Indeed, so many American women are addicted to these emotion-muting drugs -- a staggering one out of four -- that we have a nation full of real-life Stepford Wives courtesy of Big Pharma.

Rather than blowing the whistle on this overmedicated dystopia, drug warriors spend their time lying about Mother Nature's medicines. But despite drug war hysteria to the contrary, the fact is that opium and cocaine are not addictive when used in moderation, whereas modern antidepressants are addictive EVEN WHEN THEY ARE USED AS DIRECTED. Besides, the most powerful music appreciation drug of all is probably a psychedelic substance, and psychedelics are about the least addictive drugs in the world. At any rate, the pedagogical utopia of which I write presupposes a world in which we've exchanged the Drug Enforcement Agency with the Drug EDUCATION Agency, an organization that presents only statistical facts about substance-use outcomes for every psychoactive substance in the world - including alcohol and anti-depressants, along with a list of not only the potential drawbacks of these substances, but their potential benefits as well.

Once America stops enforcing Christian Science sharia, music appreciation class will finally truly be music APPRECIATION class.

EPILOGUE: I was recently watching a Great Courses lecture series by Professor Robert Greenberg entitled "Understand Great Music." As fabulous as his lectures are, Professor Greenberg says absolutely nothing during these lectures about the astonishing fact that many of Mother Nature's godsend plants seem custom-made to help us appreciate music, which is, after all, the very goal of the Professor's lectures. Surely he should at least mention this astonishing fact in passing. Unfortunately, Greenberg, like the rest of us, would never think of bringing up the topic. He's heard all the drug war lies about how mother nature's plants "fry the brain," never stopping to think that he was being blatantly lied to by Christian Science enemies of Mother Nature's godsends. (Freud used "coke," Benjamin Franklin used "opium," Francis Crick used psychedelics, and none of their brains were fried: to the contrary, their minds were focused and inspired by their strategic use of the substances in question.)

Nor will many of Greenberg's students "call him" on this omission (in fact, I'm the first and so far only one to even notice it, as far as I can tell). Yet I trust and hope that one day this omission will be "glaring" to all sensible people, that it will be natural to speak of using Mother Nature's plants to facilitate learning, to inspire students, and to give them a deep appreciation of the natural world around them. That day will only arrive, however, when Americans abandon the superstitious anti-nature drug war and start considering psychoactive plants objectively, and with a view toward how they can be safely used to achieve real-world educational goals, starting, first and foremost, with inspiring a love of music in formerly tin-eared students.

March 20, 2020

Virus Update

Keeping track of the dreaded Drug War Virus

Just a quick message to let our readership know that we are doing everything we can to fight the drug war virus. The first and most important step is to recognize the symptoms of an infected person:

1) Pathological obstinacy. Those infected with the Drug War Virus stubbornly fail to recognize that criminalizing medicinal plants is the unconstitutional enforcement of Christian Science with respect to psychological healing.

2) Selective amnesia. Infected persons conveniently "forget" that Mother Nature's plants and fungi are the birth right of every human being under the natural law to which the American Declaration appealed in arguing against British injustice.

3) Logical confusion. The infected person also fails to realize that all the problems of drug abuse are either directly brought about or greatly exacerbated by the Drug War itself.

What can you do?

The key is to practice social distancing. Keep at least 6 feet away from every known or suspected drug warrior and their specious arguments. In so doing, you will underscore your contempt for the shoddy reasoning and fascist tendencies apparent in every carrier of the Drug War virus.

March 19, 2020

The Totally Unspoken Truth About Drugs

America (and hence the world) will never understand substance use until it grasps the following so-far unacknowledged truths:



Besides being used in order to secure what the puritan drug warrior would call "a cheap high," many of the substances that we love to hate can be (have been and will be) used for:

• experiencing religious transcendence


• gaining creative inspiration


• gaining motivation

This is all common sense that not only the drug warrior but modern psychology largely ignore, preferring instead to classify illegal drug use as drug abuse and therefore conveniently ascribing it to disease in the DSM manual and so not having to deal with the philosophical motivations of such use. In fact, according to popular wisdom, a personality becomes pathologically addictive precisely to the extent that they manifest a desire for the above outcomes through their substance use.

This is all drug war folly however that does not stand up to the least bit of philosophical scrutiny. Early Vedic religion was founded to celebrate the religious transcendence afforded by a psychoactive plant or fungi. Meanwhile forbidden psychoactive plants have fostered creative visions that led to the discovery of DNA and the authorship of classic literature. As for motivation, Freud was what today's puritan drug warrior would have called a "drug fiend," but it is mere Christian Science faith to suppose that his enormous vocational output would have been passed down to posterity without his frequent use of cocaine.

Psychiatry is doubly hypocritical in ignoring the philosophical ramifications of this latter case, since it begs the question: If Freud successfully combated his own self-limiting demons using the real politik of cocaine, why should his patients be forced to rely on theoretical cures and the starkly limited pharmacopeia of the drug war?*

Why is it crucial that America recognize the above-noted reasons for so-called "drug use"? Because only then will it be clear that the vicious DEA crackdown on mere possession of substances is far more than a crackdown on juvenile delinquents and other "undesirables": it is a crackdown on consciousness, transcendence, artistic possibility, and spirituality in the deepest sense of those words. It is a limitation not simply on thought, but on the very way that we are allowed to think. It is the Christian Science celebration of "sobriety" as the ultimate good, a religious stance which, like any religious stance, should be tolerated in a free country but never, as in drug warrior America, made the law of the land.

"Sobriety" itself is a philosophically fraught word, of course: we are all influenced by chemicals -- the sober individual is simply he or she who has the default chemicals in their system, including in America's case plenty of caffeine, both in coffee and in the rabidly marketed pep pills of 21st century America. So even our use of the word "sobriety" is hypocritical, for it shelters the drugs of caffeine, tobacco, alcohol (and indeed Big Pharma anti-depressants) under its linguistic wing thus shielding their use from the otherwise meticulous moral scrutiny of the hypocritical drug warrior.

By ignoring the above truths, we allow for a world full of unnecessary suffering: the depressed senior citizen moaning to themselves in homes for the elderly, the suicide who died for want of the motivation that a mere plant could have afforded but which we denied him in our self-righteous Christian Science callousness, the would-be artist whom we have shackled in their own emotional self-doubt by superstitiously denying them the motivating plant-medicine that, until 1914, had been that individual's birth right under natural law merely for having been born on planet earth.

*Note that my goal here is not to trash Freudianism, insofar as it posits subconscious motivations for seemingly inexplicable human behavior. To the contrary, Stanislav Grof has produced tantalizing evidence that psychedelic therapy can bring back otherwise inaccessible memories from birth, that can then be processed therapeutically with an empathic counselor. With this in mind, we can say that classic "talk" psychotherapy is not necessarily a bad approach: rather it is one that, in the absence of such psycho-pharmaceutical adjuncts, has proven itself to be hugely expensive, glacially slow in terms of progress, and, at best, marginally successful in helping a patient cope, let alone thrive. Once we remove political prohibitions from medicine and actually treat patients with substances that work, psychotherapy may finally come into its own, as the psychic amnesiac is powerfully reminded of emotions that have been so long repressed.

March 14, 2020

Alternative Medicine as a Drug War Creation

a philosophical review of The Quantum Doctor by Amit Goswami

In "The Quantum Doctor, Amit Goswami discusses the different uses of so-called alternative (or "integral") medicine versus allopathic medicine, in an effort to claim that each has its proper place in the medical world. What he fails to point out, however, is that this distinction between homeopathy and allopathy is really a creation of two related forces: the drug war and capitalism, and is not fundamentally a result of differing medical views. If there are different medical ideologies at play here, they themselves were fostered, if not created, by the drug war (its stark limitations on what may be legally prescribed) and capitalist practice (the need to find one-size-fits-all cures that will be most profitable to the doctor and pharmaceutical companies that provide them).

Amit Goswami, for all his valuable insights, makes the mistake of almost every other author when it comes to discussing these subjects: he ignores the role of the drug war in influencing the "facts on the ground," writing as if the American healthcare system existed on a level playing field when it comes to deciding what sorts of medical treatment we should value and pursue. The fact is that literally all of the most powerful and efficacious "mood medicines" of Mother Nature have been outlawed by the drug war, so that we can only guess what sorts of treatment Americans would choose if they were actually given the freedom to make such a choice.

Amit's goal seems to be to promote "alternative" therapies in a way that will not be a turn-off to allopathic doctors, by saying that each treatment style (homeopathy and allopathy) has its usefulness. A better approach would be to argue for complete medical freedom via the abolition of drug-war restrictions, after which a doctor will be encouraged to use all possible approaches, without attempting to recognize or draw a sharp line between the medicines based on the philosophical systems that their use seems (to us at least) to presuppose. As Amit himself points out, some allopathic drugs function homeopathically (in preventing illness). Amit, however, claims that "alternative" therapies do not function rapidly -- but, again, he is reckoning here without the drug war. The fact is that many natural (alternative) "mood medicines" DO function rapidly. The problem is that they are illegal and simply cannot be used.

March 4, 2020

Surprise Drug Test!

No sharing answers -- or urine!

Hup! Stay right where you are. This site is implementing a surprise drug test on all site visitors.

Hey, zip your zippers back up, guys! My word! This is not THAT kind of drug test -- though I see that the Drug War has already conditioned you folks to submit meekly to the unConstitutional demands of America's Christian Science Sharia, according to which no one is allowed transcendence except through alcohol, with Mother Nature's plants being completely off-limits for that purpose.

Have a seat, and please use a number two pencil -- or a mouse. Whatever.

1) I only have a true right to the plants that government has decided are politically acceptable for personal use. True or false?

2) The drug war is flawed because it can't work. True or false?

3) Opium is a drug from hell and should be eradicated at all cost. True or false?

4) Cocaine is evil because it is associated with murder, money laundering, and inner-city violence. True or false?

[five minutes later]

I see several of you are still furiously scribbling -- which is odd, first because this is not an essay test and second because you should probably be using your mouse, not your pencil.

Those of you who are finished should put your heads down on your desk top, just like in grade school.

Psych! Not really. I'm just seeing how far you guys will abase yourselves, given the fact that 99% of you would gladly give your urine to faceless corporations for them to verify that you have been a patriotic American and forsworn Mother Nature's medical bounty entirely.

Mind you, I can't blame you, since American Sharia states that you either submit to that body check or you starve, insofar as you are pushed out of the drug-testing work environment. Drug testing, indeed. Let's see them start testing to see if anyone drank alcohol in the last month. That would be REAL drug testing. Everything else is just Anheuser Busch's way of cornering the market on providing human transcendence.

Now, where was I? Oh, yes. STOP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jimmy, will you collect the papers, please? And zip your fly up while you're at it. For Chrissakes!

OK, here are the answers:

Score Your Results

1 wrong: You are bamboozled by the drug war. Your punishment? Read Ceremonial Chemistry by Thomas Szasz.. It should clear your head of the remaining illogical cobwebs spun there by the hyperactive spider of drug war propaganda.

2 wrong: You are really confused, my child. Your penance is to read not only Ceremonial Chemistry by Thomas Szasz. but at least one other book from the Anti-DEA bookstore here at abolishthedea.com.

3 wrong: The bad news is, you have been totally bamboozled by drug war propaganda. The good news is, I've got some swamp land in New Jersey for you that I can pass on at a bargain price! Meanwhile, for your punishment, buy and read at least THREE books from the Anti-DEA bookstore here at abolishthedea.com.

4 wrong: Your name wouldn't happen to be Jesse Jackson, Sr., would it? No? How about Donald Trump? Because it's hard to know who is more screwed up by Drug War prejudice these days, the left or the right. Your punishment... Oh, never mind, you're hopeless, I'm afraid. Unless you really WANT to change, in which case I plead with you to buy and read at least FOUR (count 'em, FOUR) books from the Anti-DEA bookstore here at abolishthedea.com.

By the way, if you got them all right, congratulations! Please get in touch with me and tell me so, because I'd love to hear that I'm not the last man on earth that understands these things, now that the clear-eyed but shamefully ignored Thomas Szazs is no longer with us. If you don't think that Thomas Szazs' insights are shamefully ignored, just read pretty much any article in the mainstream (or, indeed, even fringe) media on the subject of the drug war. Every single one of them that I've read is in the thrall of one or more of the kind of nonsensical drug-war assumptions highlighted above. It's not just that they don't agree with Szasz, it's that they never even bother to address his many cogent points, let alone refute them, so convinced are they of one or more of the tacit assumptions held dear by the good old-fashioned patriotic drug warrior of 21st-century America.

What Have We Learned

It's amazing how many of my students get question number two wrong, even though they consider themselves to be solid foes of the drug war.

But the fact is that any time I hear or read someone say "The Drug War isn't working," I know that they, too, have been bamboozled by drug war propaganda.

Why, I want to ask them, SHOULD the drug war be allowed to work? That's the question.

The Drug War is an instance of the common law trumping the natural law, which should be constitutionally impossible in America. For what could be more patently obvious than that the products of Mother Nature are mine solely by dint of my having been born on planet Earth? Thus the Drug War must be opposed on first principles, without regard to its supposed efficacy in fighting a politically established whipping horse such as "drug abuse." Once we grant that government may legitimately allow or withhold access to the various plants and fungi of the world, we have already surrendered to the drug warrior ideology whereby government allows or forbids personal transcendence at will.

Why do so many otherwise sensible freedom advocates make this mistake? It's because they are under the thrall of another bit of drug war propaganda according to which natural plant medicines (such as opium, coca, and psychedelics) can have no possible use except in supplying a hedonistic "high" for morally challenged individuals.

The obvious response to this complaint, were it true, should be so what? These are still plant substances and it is not in your power to prevent me from using them in a country that is founded on natural law. Yes, you can punish me if I endanger others, but in that case you must punish me for that endangerment, not for the pre-crime offense of using plants.

But, in fact, the drug warrior is missing a whole realm of drug use which has nothing to do with hedonism: that use in which a person enters a mind-expanded state in order to improve performance (as in the case of Sigmund Freud) or to become more creative (as in the case of Poe and Lovecraft) or to commune with deity (as in the case of Native Americans and soma-worshipping Indians) or simply to lead a happy life while making others happy (as in the case of Robin Williams or Benjamin Franklin). Besides, even when substance use presents all the outward signs of a hedonistic practice, it yet provides the user with a relaxing break from pressing mortal concerns, and this relaxation can have demonstrably therapeutic results (lower blood pressure, the happiness that naturally arises in anticipation of achieving such occasional blissful states). It doesn't help matters that psychology itself typically ignores these benefits of illegal substances, insisting with the Drug Warrior that our bio-pharmacological whipping boys can have nothing but negative effects for the user.

Unfortunately, many (indeed most) enemies of the drug war commit this same mistake, insofar as they often argue as follows: "Yes, illegal drug use is irresponsible and regrettable, but it's going to happen anyway, so let's allow it."

It's tepid arguments like this that allow the drug warrior to get on a moral high horse, travel abroad, and, in an act of breathtaking imperialism, unilaterally outlaw plant medicines that compete with alcohol, where substances like coca and opium have been used responsibly for millennia, often in religious and ceremonial ways. We simply say, "Drink our alcohol instead," and threaten to punish countries militarily and/or financially should they demur.

How do we live with ourselves after committing these colonialist outrages? We tell ourselves that the substances we have banned are not good for human beings, never questioning why we should be making that determination for the entire world (in the face of millennia of history that says otherwise), especially since our actions represent the de facto promotion of liquor as the one-and-only go-to drug for achieving release and transcendence - a shabby drug whose truly hedonistic use is routinely associated with vomiting, blackout and headaches - to be contrasted starkly with the personal insight and self-awareness that the judicious use of many outlawed plants has been shown to foster.

Why don't even drug war opponents get this? Because they're in thrall to the drug war notion that the mere use of illegal substances constitutes, in and of itself, "drug abuse."

To those who think that they are somehow saving the world from addiction, please wake up. America is the most addicted country in the world, with well over 1 in 10 Americans a bounden slave to anti-depressants, some of which have a relapse rate identical to heroin, to say nothing of America's thousands of alcoholics. Which reminds us of the hypocrisy of the drug warrior, who sees alcoholism as a personal weakness or disease and considers psychiatric medicine to be scientific and thus beyond reproach. But if one has a problem with any other substance, then it is suddenly the fault of the substance, not the individual.

And so society portrays liquor use as perfectly fine if done responsibly, while ahistorically insisting that there is no such thing as responsible use of substances that our politicians have decided to ban.

March 3, 2020

Drug Warriors Fiddle while Rome Gets Nuked

If beer-swilling Drug Warriors are fidgety and want to dedicate themselves to a cause other than drug war colonialism and the overthrow of natural law in America, they might consider channelling their hypocritical hyperactivity toward the worthy goal of preventing nuclear winter. Readers familiar with Ellsberg's "Doomsday Machine" and Schlosser's "Command and Control" know that we are sitting on a time bomb thanks to the proliferation of thermonuclear weapons - weapons for which the Hiroshima A-bomb is simply a fuse.

Yet, somehow the big enemies today are all of mother nature's godsend plants. (Huh?)

In short, our priorities are about as wrong as they can be. We ignore one ginormous problem in order to focus on a problem of our own making: namely, the violence and unrest that naturally results from outlawing naturally occurring substances (not to mention the needless suffering of billions of mortals, forced to go without medicines that have emotionally solaced humanity for millennia).

Have you ever heard of the Damascus Incident, that nearly blew up Arkansas and irradiated a third of the country? How about the nuclear bomb that landed on Goldsboro, North Carolina and miraculously failed to detonate?

An intelligent people would be grateful for these narrow escapes and demonstrate that gratitude by implementing major reforms, the exact same reforms that would have been demanded by an outraged public had either of these potential catastrophes actually taken place: reforms involving the end of nuclear proliferation with the goal of outlawing such weapons universally. If America needs to flex its muscles overseas, this would give it a chance to do so in a moral cause, rather than in the colonialist folly of telling other countries which plants they are allowed to consume.

Yet America's Congress and its military have conspired to hush up the fact that we are living on borrowed time. Meanwhile, they distract us with a Quixotic scheme to prevent the use of any plant substance that poses a threat to liquor distributors.

Ironically, I believe that nature's psychoactive plants, far from being our enemies, are the only hope for humankind. I know that a number of old-school psychedelic enthusiasts now consider themselves to have been naïve for positing that LSD and such could bring about world peace. But I say to them, not so fast. How can we pronounce on the merits of an enterprise that drug-law has thus far forbidden us to meaningfully undertake? That LSD is not an answer in itself I can readily grant. But there are thousands of psychoactive plants out there, many of which could (especially in the proper "set and setting") restore to the human creature the ability to feel deep empathy for its fellows.*

Far from banning such research, we should be fast-tracking and encouraging it, with a goal of nothing less than saving the human race from its own other-hating disposition.

For, given the dicey "situation on the ground" right now viz nukes, I believe our only real hope is to pharmacologically alter human beings such that they all feel a deep natural empathy for each other. And there is every reason to believe that plant medicines, wisely chosen and wisely employed, can go far in accomplishing this task. When a human being is sick, you give it medicine; likewise when an entire species is sick.

I ask those who demur to suggest a more promising strategy to get humanity out of this booby-trapped world that we've created for ourselves.

For me, at least, the cliché is proving itself to be true: "All you need is love." That's truly all the human species needs to survive. What we've failed to realize, however, is that this love is not optional. Without sincere inner love for each other, the human race's days are numbered. And anyone who thinks that this love can be brought about without the help of mother nature's medicines is even madder than the normal human crackpot. Nor is there any reason to reject the freely offered help of mother nature in this regard, unless, like the drug warrior, we have a Christian Science disdain for the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet.

In which case, I ask the drug warrior to look at all of the trembling, inexperienced, lackadaisical and grumpy fingers on the nuclear trigger these days and ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do you, punk?

*Of course, you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. Check out this article entitled "What Would Happen If Everyone Truly Believed Everything Is One," by Scott Barry Kaufman in Scientific American.

March 3, 2020

Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser

author of 'The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous'

Gabrielle,


I hope you're open to the following honest criticism about an excellent article that you wrote for the Atlantic entitled "The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous."

Yours Sincerely,

Ballard Quass

abolishthedea.com


Like almost every other writer on the topic of addiction, you write as if we are living in a free country as far as scientific research is concerned and that we can therefore draw adequate generalizations from the status quo. To the contrary, we live under a drug-war sharia that strictly outlaws almost all research of psychoactive drugs, many of which could work wonders with alcoholics and other addicts. Although you don't mention this, Bill Wilson himself had great initial success in treating alcoholics with LSD. It was not science that stopped such treatment, but rather politics, when Richard Nixon decided to launch a war on Timothy Leary and hippies by outlawing their drugs of choice, namely psychedelics. And US-inspired drug law remains as anti-patient as ever, as therapist Gabor Mate was recently forced to stop his promising treatment of Canadian alcoholics with the entheogenic concoction known as ayahuasca.

So if AA is ineffective -- as I would definitely agree - it is as much the drug war's fault as it is that of Bill Wilson and his theories.

Given the existence of the unscientifically motivated drug war, it may well be true that Naltrexone is a relative godsend for alcoholics. That said, this is a huge "given." We should remember that we are choosing from a starkly limited pharmacopeia when we make that choice. There are thousands of potential psychoactive godsends out there that we are forbidden from studying, notwithstanding our pretensions at being a scientific country. By failing to acknowledge this outrage, we may be giving far more kudos to Naltrexone than it deserves. How good is it, you ask? How can we know until we compare it to the thousands of other potential therapies that we have chosen to ignore? It may well be the best thing currently "going" for alcoholics, and for that I yield to the experts - while yet pointing out that there really are no experts on addiction treatment per se since the drug war has essentially placed all the potentially valuable therapeutic substances off-limits, not merely to individuals but to addiction researchers as well. No surprise there. We'd have just as few aviation experts today if the only legally available planes were gliders.

Also there is a real irony in the use of Naltrexone to block the action of opiates, at least when used in a drug warrior country such as the USA. By waging drug-war colonialism, we have sent our military abroad to destroy opium crops that have been used in moderation in the east for millennia, forcing other countries to turn to the western drug called alcohol to achieve, in general, a far uglier form of self-transcendence and relaxation than that supplied by the judicious poppy user. Not content to destroy the poppy in the East (always against the will of the local people, who have no say in the matter), we now seek out a drug that will obviate the poppy's effects, thus ensuring the prosperity of American Big Liquor for centuries to come. This is fundamentally a racist and anti-scientific war on the poppy, one which dogmatically recognizes only evil in the plant, failing to acknowledge its role in providing human transcendence over the ages - a viewpoint that keeps Anheuser Busch heirs smiling on their way to the bank (just as they were no doubt smiling when the DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1985 to steal Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants).

This brings me to the other problem with the Naltrexone approach, namely that is all stick and no carrot. Yes, the substance helps to destroy the addiction but it also gets rid of the transcendence which the addict was seeking in the first place. Psychedelics, on the other hand, work by actually providing the sought-after transcendent experience and it is that very transcendent experience from which the psychedelic user often emerges with new insights into their earthly condition and a new mental flexibility in dealing with their drinking problem.

One other bone to pick: I would ask you to question your apparently strong faith in science, at least as practiced in the States.

It is the alleged "scientific" approach to psychiatry that has led to the great but unacknowledged addiction of the American people, in which 1 in 8 Americans are now chemically dependent on antidepressants, all under the discredited theory (promulgated by a full-court media press by academic talking heads under the pay of Big Pharma) that these substances fix a chemical imbalance. As Roger Whitaker demonstrates, however (in "Anatomy of an Epidemic"), this is pseudoscience, not science. These antidepressants (SSRIs and SNRIs) have been shown to CAUSE the imbalances that they purport to fix. They certainly don't work for me after decades of use, and I am now forced to take Effexor the rest of my life against my will - Effexor, a drug that has a relapse rate just as high as heroin.

But I've yet to hear of one single addiction "specialist" wringing their hands on my behalf, or on behalf of the tens of thousands of unacknowledged antidepressant addicts actively cursing modern psychiatry online even as I speak - cursing it for one's loss of empowerment, one's unsought-for life-time role as an "eternal patient," having to apply to a doctor for their monthly fixes. (Part of the professional silence is based on the convenient myth that there's a meaningful difference between addiction and chemical dependency. Tell that to an Effexor addict after he or she has gone cold turkey for three days.)

Since psychiatry has no problem with thus addicting users like myself -- and to ineffective medicines at that - they have no leg to stand on in warning me that I might become chemically dependent upon, say, opium, should I be given the same legal access to that drug that I would have had in 1913, and they have even less standing in remonstrating against my use of totally non-addictive psychedelics. If such drugs are not even considered for treating alcoholism it is thus merely for political reasons, not scientific ones. So let's not write so as to imply that these therapies have somehow been tried and found wanting, when in reality such therapies remain unthinkable to Western researchers under the thrall of drug war propaganda.

CONCLUSION: I believe we have no right to opine on the relative insolubility of addiction problems until we have re-legalized Mother Nature's medicines. Until then, any conclusions we reach on this topic should be followed by a huge footnote, both for the patient's benefit and by way of protest, stating that the addiction problem, for aught we know, could turn out to be far more soluble than we currently suppose, once the United States finally renounces its anti-patient drug war, along with its efforts to enforce that war worldwide by way of the financial blackmail of its friends and foes alike.

March 2, 2020

The Myth of the Addictive Personality

When I was a teenager, I was always begging the field of psychiatry to do more. It seemed to me that there must be so many medicines out there, surely something would set my mind straight.

The result of my naivete? I was promptly pronounced "an addictive personality."

I've now had 40 years to think about that diagnosis and I call bull crap.

Imagine a field like psychiatry, that limits itself to prescribing a handful of addictive medicines, suspicious of anyone who dares hanker for more. That hankering is, in reality, utterly sensible.

Suppose you walk into a jewelry store and they have only one kind of diamond. You ask for other kinds of diamonds and they label you ungrateful and greedy. That's what psychiatry does when someone dares to allude to a larger pharmacopeia that psychiatry has dogmatically forsworn, whether in conformance with drug law, scientism, and/or the interests of the pharmaceutical companies that crank out the starkly limited formulary of politically acceptable mood medicines.

How dare I want to pick and choose from among the thousands of rain forest godsends. Why can't I just go along with the modest medicine cabinet of addictive substances that chemists have created to narrow down our choices to a nice politically acceptable roster?

Of course, the true irony of this state of affairs becomes plain when we consider that well over 1 in 8 Americans are addicted to modern-day antidepressants, one out of four when it comes to women, and that many of these drugs are harder to kick than heroin. So psychiatry may have a problem with SOMETHING, but it's clearly not with addiction. My own doctor told me not even to bother trying to "get off of" Effexor, given its 95% recidivism rate. And so I become an eternal patient, with all the demoralizing emotional baggage that comes with that condition. It's pretty much the exact opposite of empowering a patient, to make them a ward of the state, forever to be defined by their so-called illness.

The so-called addictive personality is actually "on to something." They realize that there's a vast pharmacopeia out there and they want psychiatry to use it. Psychiatry, for its part, must label such individuals as pathological, lest their craving for more should serve to illuminate the niggardliness of psychiatric offerings and demonstrate all too clearly that the entire field operates in crass subservience to anti-patient drug war law and ideology.

February 25, 2020

Glenn Close but no cigar

Four Good Days full of drug war propaganda

Shame on Glenn Close for starring in the drug war propaganda movie "Four Good Days," especially at a time when Donald Trump is threatening to use the death penalty to kill minorities who dare to use and sell the plant medicines of mother nature. For shame!

Every horror that Glenn Close's character blames on heroin is actually caused by the drug war itself:

• The lack of a safe supply of the drug: the drug war's fault


• The contamination of product: the drug war's fault


• The lack of objective info about all drugs: the drug war's fault


• The lack of non-addictive alternatives from the rain forest: the drug war's fault


• The expense of a habit: the drug war's fault

Let's examine some of the movies illogical assumptions one at a time by considering a variety of drug-war-biased sound bites of which the movie is so full:


Deb to daughter Molly: "The deal was, you wouldn't come back until you were clean."

Clean? The mother's use of the word "clean" here exposes the puritan Christian Science metaphysics that the drug war presupposes. Psychiatry has addicted me personally to Effexor, but no one has told me that I'm dirty for using it, and it has a relapse rate every bit as high as heroin! Apparently, I'm not "dirty" as long as I settle for being hooked on the drugs that enrich pharmaceutical companies.

High school student to Molly: "I would have never allowed myself to fall that far."

Cruel but true. The fact is that the vast majority of kids do not fall as Molly did, even when the drug war does all it can to confuse them with propaganda instead of straightforward objective accounts of drug effects. Molly's irrelevant response to this challenge is simply to tearfully reiterate how hard she (Molly) has struggled and how continuously she (Molly) has resolved to go straight, but to no avail. Her goal seems to be to imply that there are devil drugs out there that will snag anyone, but smarter kids know that substances are only substances and that the terms "good" and "bad" only apply to how they are used, for what reasons, and in what doses, etc. To think otherwise is to call on government to wage a bloody war on drugs to protect fools like Molly from herself, a drug war that ironically creates the very incentives that cause drug sellers to peddle addictive meds in the first place.




Deb after seeing drug dealer: "That guy should be shot."

Great. Thanks for that, Glenn. That's all we need to hear from a cinematic representative of middle America, now that we have a president who is all-too-eager to take your suggestion literally and start murdering Americans, mainly minorities at that - and why? - for merely meeting the needs of the market that the drug war itself has created. Unless we suppose that the profit motive will someday disappear from human hearts and that human beings will renounce their desire for spiritual transcendence, a "war on drugs" can only bring about endless killing, first on inner city streets and then on the public scaffolds.

The answer is clear, Glenn: remove the profit motive by ending the drug laws that create it. Then turn the Drug Enforcement Agency into the Drug Education Agency, an organization tasked with objectively informing the public of the statistically verifiable dangers (yes, and benefits) of every psychoactive substance on earth: from Big Pharma antidepressants to cocaine, from alcohol to cigarettes.

Meanwhile, if someone needs to be shot, how about shooting those who create legislation that 1) violates natural law, 2) keeps godsend medicines from the depressed, 3) turns inner cities into shooting galleries, 4) locks up 10s of thousands of minorities, thus stealing elections for conservatives, 5) justifies drug war colonialism, 6) prevents Earthlings from accessing the plants that grow at their very feet, and 7) makes Christian Science the state religion when it comes to psychological healing. I'd rather not shoot anybody, of course, but if you think we have to, let's get our priorities right first when it comes to targeting.

Mother Deb, in reference to her detoxing daughter: "She's in hell right now."

Too true, Deb, but did you ever stop to ask WHY she's in hell? She's in hell because the drug-war has outlawed all the non-addictive substances that might otherwise be used during the withdrawal process to ease withdrawal symptoms, and/or give the patient the psychological insight to better tolerate them. For even the detox centers are in the thrall of the drug war, throwing addicts on cots and forcing them to go cold turkey when there are hundreds of psychoactive godsends that we're not even allowed to study, let alone use, medicines that can change attitudes and give addicts a new start in life.

Deb to Molly: [There's your] boyfriend Eric. Outside that flophouse.

Flophouse? Deb's referring to the bombed-out building in which Molly used to "shoot up," of course, but then what is the detox center but a flophouse, with meals included? The difference is that the rent is much higher, but otherwise they just flop you down on a cot and let you suffer, without ministering to you with any of the thousands of psychoactive balms of the rain forest, many of which, if used with reverence, can temper the mind of the addict to allow them to envision new realities and thus to make the desired changes in their life -- all without going through the hell that the Christian Science Drug Warrior insists that they must suffer.

Detox Doctor Ortiz: "Heroin has a 97% relapse rate."

What Doctor Ortiz fails to point out is that antidepressants like Effexor have almost identical relapse rates.

Speaking of the Doctor, it's rather amusing to see him puffed up with professionalism in his white coat and carefully trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, obviously in the prime of his professional life, and yet for all these customary bells and whistles, his job seems to consist merely of injecting Naltrexone and nodding gravely or cheerfully, as circumstances warrant. If appearances weren't everything in such treatments, a cost-sensitive CEO would instantly replace him with an LPN.

Dr. Ortiz has not one single weapon in his pharmacological arsenal, not one (though thousands of rain forest meds are practically crying out to be assayed for such therapeutic purposes), except for Naltrexone, which, however, for him must seem a literal godsend, since it keeps a person from "getting high," which is the absolute no-no in drug warrior parlance, even though one person's "getting high" (off of, say, a non-addictive substance such as the psilocybin mushroom) can be another person's "spiritual transcendence."

Worst of all, the heroin addict is constantly lighting up a cigarette containing tobacco -- about the worst drug on the planet -- and the clueless mother sees absolutely no irony in that fact. As long as the drug being consumed supports capitalism, Glenn Close's usually apoplectic character is as quiet as a mouse. It's only when she see someone attempt to seek transcendence without the use of a board-certified doctor that her character's hackles start to rise. The mother herself freely rushes to the refrigerator for a stiff peg whenever she becomes overwhelmed with her addict daughter's erratic behavior, blissfully ignorant of her own hypocrisy in so doing.

One can only conclude that the mother's problem is not so much with the daughter's addiction as it is with her failure to conform to the usual social norms of the coffee-swilling, cigarette-smoking, alcohol-swigging drug warrior.

February 21, 2020

The American Stasi

putting Americans in their place since 1973

It's amazing. When I tell friends and family members that I'm working on a website to abolish the DEA, they generally go silent. This seems a truly taboo topic for many Americans. And this is surprising to me. These are the same Americans, after all, who express themselves so vehemently about hot-button topics such as sexual harassment and global warming, ready to lay down in the streets and demand immediate justice in these areas, yet they suddenly get stage fright when the subject turns to the drug war. Suddenly they're afraid to speak. They sometimes even look at me after I raise the topic, in a kind of mute reproach, as if to say: "Ooh, the DEA. Are we even allowed to CRITICIZE them? Better be careful there, son."

And I'm like: What happened to my big loud-mouth rebel? Which anti-democratic cat has suddenly got their tongue?

Answer: the anti-American DEA.

This is just not an agency that should exist in a free country, an agency that's armed to the teeth and ready to intimidate would-be protestors by dint of its sheer militarized existence, an agency devoted to protecting us from naturally occurring plants, an agency whose job is to enforce a harsh Christian Science sharia in a never-ending task of separating Americans from Mother Nature and separating human beings from the profit motive. Of course, neither of these tyrannies can succeed except by cruel authoritarianism, under craven leaders like Donald Trump, who are glad to take existing injustices and run with them, not simply imprisoning harmless minority Americans but executing them into the bargain.

It's about as anti-American as can be -- so much so, apparently, that Americans have learned to shut up and let the DEA have its anti-scientific (anti-patient and anti-minority) way, much as East Germans once resigned themselves to the seemingly inevitable injustices perpetrated by the Stasi.


American Stasi, stay away from me
American Stasi, mama, let me be
Don't come kicking down my door
In the name of common law
I got a right to Nature's meds
Ain't no business of the Feds

Common law can't override
The rights for which my fathers died
Plants that grow are mine by birth
Stop criminalizing Mother Earth

Thomas J was all shook up
When you dug his garden up
To steal the poppies that Nature grew
What the hell is wrong with you?

American Stasi, I said get away-ay
American Stasi, well, that's the D-E-A-A-A-A!

February 19, 2020

Calling All Philosophers

Stop counting angels on a pin and speak up against the drug war

Stephen Hawking said that philosophy is dead. I beg to differ. It may appear to be dead, but that is only because it has been hiding its head in the sand, ostrich-like, ever since the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. That was when Congress first set the illogical and unconstitutional precedent of criminalizing plants, which had hitherto been considered our birth right as mere Earthlings under natural law. Since then, the Drug War and its anti-scientific laws have thrived in the hands of tyrants based on a propaganda campaign of sloppy logic, superstitious metaphysics and linguistic equivocation, all designed to make us look upon Mother Nature as a drug kingpin rather than as our medical benefactor and the source of countless therapeutic godsends. In other words, the "Drug War" is the philosophical problem par excellence of our time for it thrives on a series of misunderstandings and presumptions that only a true philosopher can hope to parse with nicety and expose in such a way as to make the need for reform obvious to the man or woman on the street - and thus to the man or woman in Congress.

That's one of the reasons that I've created this website, as an attempt to get the friends of liberty to start attacking the Drug War on philosophical grounds, rather than on the feeble grounds that the Drug War just does not work as advertised. Such latter arguments yield enormous ground to the Drug Warrior, implying that militarized tyranny, domestic surveillance, SWAT raids on unarmed citizens, foreign intervention and the suspension of natural law would be fine if only it cut down on the use of naturally occurring substances.

SWAT raids and domestic surveillance, in a supposedly democratic society, to cut down on the use of substances? And why exactly do we assume that it is good to cut back on the use of naturally occurring substances? That is a mere Christian Science prejudice, not a logical conclusion from any set of agreed-upon propositions. A drug war critic who argues in this way may as well find another button-pushing injustice about which to opine, since the Drug War cannot be ousted by those who hastily grant all the false unspoken premises upon which it is founded.

If philosophers should read this, there's plenty of work to do, so let's not stand upon ceremony. "Grab a musket and get in rank," as my Jeffersonian ancestors used to say. Here are a few promising projects to fire your respective imaginations.

1) Elucidate the theological, political, and ideological links between the following events: The Drug War of modern times, Emperor Theodosius's 392 AC banning of the psychedelic Eleusinian Mysteries, and the Conquistadors' scorn for the plant-based psychedelic rites of MesoAmerican cultures.

2) Explain how modern employee "drug testing" is the extrajudicial enforcement of Christian Science with respect to psychological healing.

3) Trace the modern antipathy to "substance use" to the distrust of witches and their use of psychoactive plant medicines.

February 17, 2020

What We Mean When We Say 'Drugs'

How the drug war is a creation of language

The term "drugs" as used in the West is really just a pejorative epithet designed to stigmatize naturally occurring psychoactive substances and those who use them. The superstitious metaphysics underlying this stigma is identical to the mindset that countenanced witch hunts in the 14th through 17th centuries. It is the metaphysics of Christian Science as applied to psychological states, the unverifiable notion (i.e., opinion, or faith) that it is in some sense wrong to avail oneself of psychoactive substances to alter consciousness, and that those who do so are, in some sense, devilish.

That this belief is superstitious is easily seen, since those who use this term pejoratively have almost always done so in wilful ignorance of the precise function (or even identity) of the psychoactive substances in question, implying that a mere detailed knowledge of psychoactive plants placed a woman (and today a drug "user" of any sex) under grave suspicion of non-Christian behavior and intent.

When a "witch" of the old school imbibed extract of mandrake and similar trance-inducing substances, it was (at least according to the stuffed shirt Witch Warriors of the time) in order to commune with devils. But from the witch's point of view, it was surely to seek personal transcendence, whether to engage in what she took to be divination, or simply to relax. When a rock star imbibes plant-based substance, it is also to transcend his or her customary personality and inhibitions on stage, this time not for divination but for vocational success.

Yet psychology insists that anything a star could do on stage using a substance could be done twice as well without that substance.

What wilful self-deception! This is not to say that every rock star or mad comedian REQUIRES substance use (though surely the probability rises as the art form entails an increasingly dramatic split between the artist's on-stage persona and their off-stage behavior, as do both rock-and-roll and hip-hop, and increasingly so, as yesterday's behavioral outrages become today's norms). There are a vast variety of people, and in many cases, the social, cultural and familial stars and planets will so align as to allow the performer to be his or herself on stage, completely, without any impulse to hold back, requiring no chemical incentive other than the baseline chemistry provided by his or her daily metabolism.

But if the vast majority of us are really going to let our hair down, it is completely understandable that -- barring 21st-century laws and mores to the contrary -- we would want to achieve some form of the ecstasy of the witches of yore to help us "let go," such that our "nay-saying" childhood (in which we were psychologically tortured, albeit unintentionally so, by the implicit and/or explicit condemnations of parents, family and friends) are not allowed to stop us from bringing out the Jimi Hendrix in ourselves.

But psychology ignores the ancient need for transcendence, stubbornly insisting, with the drug warrior, that we can get all the transcendence we need by simply "telling ourselves" to be happier -- for that's what the whole self-help genre field consists of (not to mention the whole field of psychotherapy itself, at least until the pill-popping paradigm took hold): words, to tell us how to be happier, as if rationality could control our feelings, a central tenet of Western society, which is just plain wrong upon the slightest serious reflection.

Nor is a poor upbringing a necessary prerequisite for seeking transcendence through plant medicine -- at least for those who wish to explore what they are truly capable of in life, those who reject the Christian Science credo that it is somehow wrong to adjust mood via plant medicine.

Even Freud knew better. He did not attempt to improve his life by talk therapy. He engaged in the psychological real politik of cocaine use, early and often, a fact that psychologists ignore at their own peril, thus keeping their discipline out of touch with the real impulses of humankind.

All because the psychologists believe in this thing called "drugs," by which certain substances (i.e., psychoactive plants) are superstitiously believed to possess nothing but evil qualities: the same know-nothing credo that motivated the witch hunters, who cast a jaundiced eye on any woman who dared so much as learn about psychoactive plants, let alone used them.

The word "drugs" works wonders for law enforcement. Imagine if we saw a SWAT team ramrodding a house while a helicopter flew overhead, all because the owners of the house possessed PLANTS! Then it would be instantly clear how tyrannical the onslaught was. The police and politicians know this: that's why they never talk about a war on plants, but rather a war on "drugs." This is how the police departments grow in wealth: the darker they paint this whipping horse of "drugs," the more money is thrown there way by way of funding and forfeitures -- and the American people sit by idly, lulled into complacency by the malevolent use of a synonym.

February 14, 2020

How the DEA determines if a religion is true

after two millennia of disagreement on that subject among philosophers and theologians

In granting exceptions to the laws prohibiting use of psychedelics, the DEA makes exceptions for religious practices that they determine to be genuine. This raises an interesting question: how precisely does the DEA determine something that even great philosophers across the ages have been unable to agree upon, namely, which religions are genuine and why?

Not to worry. I have uncovered a government form that is apparently used by the DEA to make precisely the sort of metaphysical determinations mentioned above. So, theologians, take note: Here's what the DEA will be looking for should you ever happen to adhere to a religious belief whose ceremonials involve the use of plant life that the DEA has seen fit to criminalize.

Psst! Hey, Job Seekers...

DEA Seeking Demigod to Rule on the Validity of so-called "religions." Must be willing and able to evince inflexible certainty on a topic that the world's greatest thinkers have disagreed about for millennia, namely what constitutes a true religion.

February 12, 2020

President Calls for Executing Drug Dealers

Herding minorities into overcrowded prisons no longer enough for booze-swilling Drug Warriors

Donald Trump has now called for the execution of drug dealers, which should come as no surprise from a president who has openly collaborated with authoritarian Russia to destroy basic democratic institutions in America. But if one's fearing for the lives of cigarette and alcohol producers (whose products kill tens of thousands a year), you can relax. Nor need we lose sleep over the wellbeing of our local psychiatrists, who, even as I type, are running socially-sanctioned pill mills across the country (by means of which 1 in 10 Americans are addicted to the daily use of Big Pharma "meds"). No, as usual, the drug warrior animus is not directed at the substances that cause the most harm to Americans, but merely those substances that the drug warriors have decided to criminalize for political and religious reasons, though many of these "drugs" are found to be growing unbidden across the planet. Thus they override the hitherto unalienable natural law which gives Americans the right to the use of what John Locke calls "the earth and all therein," replacing it with a capricious common law interdiction based on the propaganda-induced fears of 21st-century Americans, in this case a kind of Christian Science "Sharia," every bit as intolerant as any legislation that was ever enacted in that name.

This Constitution-based objection to Trump's authoritarian gambit cannot be overstressed, because the mainstream media these days is dangerously missing the point. The left and libertarian response to such totalitarian proposals as Trump's is to point out that such a draconian strategy would not work to reduce "drug" use, typically by adducing the failure of similar approaches in other countries. But to argue in this way is to yield crucial ground to the enemy of freedom, since this "argument from efficacy" implies that executing drug dealers would be just fine if it only served to decrease the use of naturally occurring substances in America. And to argue thus is to demonstrate one's limited grasp of the subject at hand, by implicitly granting that government has a right, in the first place, to prevent Americans from reaching out and using the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet, a proposition which Jefferson would have found absurd and even conducive to tyranny if not rejected at once on constitutional grounds.

And that tyranny that Jefferson would have predicted has come to pass. It started in 1914, when bigoted politicians decided that too many undesirables were using the opium plant. Their answer: make a natural substance illegal, thus setting the precedent that some plants were no longer the birthright of a free citizenry to use as they saw fit. In a rush to penalize the lower class and the ethnic Chinese, few American politicians of that era noticed the contravention of natural law that was implicit in this government intrusion into personal decisions about health and happiness. If they had really cared about the health of these minority populations, they would have educated them about the wise use of psychoactive substances rather than criminalizing a plant.

Fast-forward 50-plus years, when President Richard Nixon takes advantage of that anti-Constitutional precedent to punish his enemies, with so-called anti-drug laws that were designed, not to protect the health of Americans, but to land his political prisoners in jail and, if possible, remove them from the voting rolls by charging them with felonies.

Fast-forward another half a century, and Traitor Trump is now ready to pick up where Nixon left off, harnessing America's unconstitutional drug law for the purposes of becoming a dictator with the power of life and death over his vassals. It is not enough for Trump's power lust to merely incarcerate millions of mainly minority "drug dealers," (those who dare sell the plants and fungi for which drug law itself has created the black market), he wants to get rid of them entirely, which I suppose is useful, since it allows him to limit the number of minority offspring which might otherwise grow up to eliminate the drug war entirely, along with totally amoral politicians like Trump himself who strategically parlay those laws into populist victories.

So let me get this straight: a doctor can legally addict my anxious 92-year-old mother to the benzodiazepine of his choice, but should I arrange for her to get miraculous, non-addictive relief from a mere plant, the source of that godsend can be strung up at high noon?

When policy's such as the drug war yield such absurd results, they must be fundamentally wrong, at least for a freedom-loving people. But we can't stand up to drug war tyrants on the basis of statistical charts that "prove" that tyranny doesn't work. We must deny those tyrants the right to outlaw Mother Nature in the first place - and the power for that pushback is waiting there in the US Constitution, whose very genius lies in its elevation of natural law over common law, and if natural law tells us anything, it tells us that human beings have the right to the use of "the earth and all therein," and that no law can justifiably supplant that right - ever.

February 9, 2020

Self-Censorship in the Age of the Drug War

The more I learn about western society's wilful ignorance of naturally occurring psychoactive medicines, the harder it is for me to find good books to read. Almost all self-help books studiously avoid any reference to the power of psychoactive plants to facilitate the miraculous psychological changes that the authors advocate. Almost all scientific books pretend to be giving us the last word on consciousness and meaning, while yet ignoring the profound insights on these subjects that psychoactive plants can provide. Almost all books on depression speculate on what can be done with modern anti-depressants and/or talk therapy, as if psychoactive plants did not exist, as if the drastically limited pharmacy available to us under the drug war was a natural condition with which all suggested treatment protocols must conform in order to be scientific. In other words, all of these books take the drug war prohibitions as a natural given of life, and thence proceed to speculate and deduce at will, with the author never realizing that he or she is engaging in self-censorship in order to curry favour with the puritan sensibilities of the drug war.

I don't know what's worse, however, authors who ignore speaking about psychoactive substances or those who speak about them -- because the latter authors almost ALWAYS adopt invalid drug-war premises when they attempt to analyze the so-called "drug problem" in America.

Take the book by David and Nic Sheff called "High." They say that you can't judge a book by its cover, but this is clearly the exception that proves the rule.

One can just look at the cover to see that the authors subscribe to all the usual drug-war assumptions. The cover features a frenetic and jagged color-scheme obviously intended to be the abstract depiction of an abnormal state of mind associated with the phenomenon of "getting high."

Thus the authors accept the drug-war presupposition that psychoactive substance use (when not prescribed by a board-certified physician, keen to get one addicted to big pharma meds) can only be for hedonistic purposes -- which is simply false. One person's high is often another person's self-enlightenment, is another person's making peace with the world, is another person's healthy break from reality -- in the same way that moderate alcohol is said to constitute healthy relaxation.

Are the tribal members of the Native American Church getting "high" when they consume peyote for religious purposes? Are alcohol addicts getting "high" when they take ibogaine to kick that habit? Was Sigmund Freud getting "high" when he used cocaine to get his work done in the wee hours of the night? Was Benjamin Franklin getting high when he resorted -- frequently -- to the use of opium?

Of course not.

So the depiction of the word "High" on such a book cover is pejorative and meant to imply all the narrow views of the drug warrior -- designed to separate Americans from mother nature's medicines under the drug-war lie that such substances can only be used for the nonsensical and dangerous practice of "getting high."

This is time-saving, however. I simply need not read the Sheff's books, because their very book cover shows that they're philosophically in the thrall of all the usual drug war propaganda and presuppositions. And given the dictum that "confused thinking in, confused thinking out"... the judicious reader will move on.

How many so-called authoritative books on depression completely ignore the fact that drug law outlaws all the most promising cures? How many books on relaxation ignore the fact that the motivated mind-set that you need for exercising is just one mushroom away? How many books on consciousness completely ignore the testimony that psychoactive plants have to give on this topic? Welcome to self-censorship in the age of the drug war.

February 9, 2020

Addicted to Ignorance

problems with the 'no pain, no gain' school of de-tox therapy

The drug warrior holds many logic-challenged assumptions, but one of the worst in terms of its human consequences is the notion that withdrawal from illegal substances must necessarily be hell.

Really? How would we even know? No one with pharmacological savvy has ever been free to use psychoactive plants in America, shaman-like, with a specific addict in mind. Who knows what would be possible if every psychoactive plant were at hand to be employed advisedly in improving the mental outlook and resilience of a specific individual?

What exactly is addiction, anyway? Whence comes this hell of which we speak?

It is the result of the body screaming bloody murder for want of a substance to whose presence it has become accustomed.

Well, an answer to that problem readily suggests itself, albeit one that's sure to rub the Christian Scientists among us the wrong way: that of fighting fire with fire: treating the addict with psychoactive substances that push back against and obfuscate the hellish withdrawal symptoms as the user seeks to "get off of" his or her poison of choice, a plant substance that will attempt to shout "feel good!" every bit as loudly as the withdrawal symptoms are shouting "feel bad!" If such treatment cannot totally suppress the negative physiological symptoms of withdrawal, then it can at least render them psychologically bearable thanks to the positive attitudes induced by the ritual use of entheogens carefully chosen for that purpose according to the facts of the case.





Absent our prudish drug war assumptions, we could even find a variety of substances that positively ELATE the addict at set intervals, thus giving the patient something to look forward to during the most negative emotions of withdrawal, since I speak from experience in saying that the real hell of withdrawal is the feeling that the negative feelings will never end -- and we can palpably teach the patient otherwise with what we might call (at the risk of irritating the puritan) the occasional administration of "feel good" entheogens to remind them that happiness still exists in the world, that everything is not merely grey skies and drizzle, now and for all time.

This is the process of fighting bad drugs with more drugs (as Google purports to fight bad speech with more speech), a paradigm in which the pharmacological artist that I envision (the replacement for yesterday's pill-peddling psychiatrist) would drown the addict's negative physiological reactions to withdrawal in a sea of positive feelings engendered by yet other carefully chosen psychoactive substances, such that the entire withdrawal process can take place without the addict experiencing the intense psychological suffering that we have hitherto concluded was the addict's due.

Presumably the drugs used for detox would be non-addictive, either by nature or by dint of their carefully timed administration. That said, we have no right to denounce such a cure should it lead to a new addiction, provided that the new addiction is, as is to be expected, one with which the patient can live a productive life. Psychiatrists have for decades now administered pills that their patients are required to take daily for a lifetime, so psychiatry has no leg to stand on in denouncing medications for requiring daily or weekly administration (whether that medication be Effexor or opium). The question only is: is that addiction something that the patient is both willing and able to live with?

But the patient should be free of all "drugs," you say? Fine. That's your opinion, based on your philosophical assumptions about what constitutes the good life. The decision is up to the addict, based on their own metaphysics, thank you very much. But should the addicts themselves choose this "drug-free" course, more power to them, for there are an almost endless number of possible entheogen-assisted therapies that, singly or in aggregate, have every chance of achieving this hitherto improbable goal, given the strategic alignment of therapy with patient goals. But we can't make such therapies available until we renounce an unscientific and anti-patient drug war that stops us from merely even investigating such cures.

(Even the use of the term "addict" is a nod to drug war sensibilities, since it implies a character fault, whereas the early 19th-century term of "habitue" remains a far more objective descriptor for the unique human lives that we are discussing here. But then the drug war depends on the strategic use of words such that merely broaching them implies a politically correct viewpoint and thus the speaker's acceptance of a series of widely believed but fundamentally false premises. Thus Big Pharma pills require daily "administration," but drugs like cocaine and heroin require daily "fixes." It's not the actions that repel us - we can take Prozac and Effexor daily until the cows come home -- but the disdainful connotations that we selectively impose upon those actions through the politicized language of a drug war society.)

In short, there is a vast world of treatment options out there for the so-called "addict" once we envision a free world in which a highly trained empath can customize psychoactive protocols to meet the needs and goals of specific individuals. But until government gives that freedom back to the medical world, we have no business opining on the supposed intractability of the addiction problem, since the inadequacies of the current approaches can all be explained with reference to the drug warriors' ongoing efforts to drastically limit the pharmacological arsenal with which we might otherwise respond to this problem. The problem itself may well be solvable - should the government ever be so magnanimous as to give us renewed free and unrestricted access to the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet. (Funny. And I used to think that such access was my birth right as a resident of planet Earth, ensured via natural law, which, at least until the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, was supposed to trump common law in America.)

Yet many addiction specialists believe today that detox can't be detox if it doesn't include muscle spasms, cold sweats, fever, vomiting, paranoia, and insomnia.

What's the customary process for detox in anti-scientific America? Dump the patient on a cot, monitor them as they go through hell for three days, charge them through the roof, and then let them go.

How dare we consign these sufferers to such hell when there are psychological balms out there by the thousands, all of which we have been intimidated into ignoring thanks to the drug war?

This will surely seem like the barbarous neglect that it is in some future enlightened era in America, when both drug and liability legislation is reformed to allow for the highly personalized treatment of drug addiction, wherein a pharmacologically savvy empath can choose freely from an entire world of therapeutic plant medicines to minister to the mind and soul of the addict, beginning with ibogaine, ayahuasca, psilocybin -- to encompass the thousands of psychoactive plants that seem custommade to reboot broken lives, psychologically speaking.

Another reason why detox doesn't work: Because psychology does not recognize the value of entheogenic transcendence. They therefore dismiss the phenomenon of "getting high" with the drug warrior conviction that it is mere hedonism. Instead, they should recognize the reality of a search for transcendence in all human beings (a search for "escape," if the therapist prefers that prejudicial and assumption-laden term) and provide that for the patient, through one of the many psychoactive plants that can provide that experience.

Instead, they assume that the whole challenge of detoxification is to stop the patient from "getting high," an approach that is all stick and no carrot. It ignores the fact that the addict's drug use had a purpose: namely, self-transcendence, rashly assuming that this spiritual quality can be safely dismissed as mere hedonism (which, admittedly, even the user may do, but only because they lack the self-awareness to linguistically parse their drug experience with any degree of nicety). And so the therapists wring their hands, wondering why there are so many relapses in the world.

Better yet, we can nip counterproductive addictions in the bud by abolishing the Drug Enforcement Agency altogether and replacing it with a Drug EDUCATION Agency, an organization which will report objectively on the specific addiction profile of every known psychoactive substance in the world, clearly indicating when and how such substances become addictive (based on real statistics, not politically-inspired guesstimates), so that those who decide to use the plants of Mother Nature for psychological healing are enabled to do so advisedly, without having to rely on the superstitious propaganda of so-called anti-drug organizations who do everything they can to paint illegal plants as substances from hell.

We must also abolish the naive drug warrior conviction that all addictions must be dead-ends. Benjamin Franklin was no doubt "addicted" to opium, at least according to the censorious and fastidious "medicalized morality" of 21st-century America, but no one of the man's own time would have viewed him as anything but a great man, for they had yet to develop the notion that a man was to be judged by something other than the way that he actually behaved every single day of his life, which is to say intelligently and with flair. But today's drug warrior treats the modern Ben Franklins of the world as threats to society and would gladly judge such a person's entire life based on the mere fact that they partook of a natural substance that politicians had taken such great pains to demonize.

AFTERTHOUGHTS: To see the folly of modern addiction therapy, consider the 12-step approach in which a small group of addicts sits around in a circle retailing morbid autobiographical stories, all under the problematic Western world presumption that cures come from merely talking about a problem and "understanding" it, as if understanding and feeling have ever been synonyms. Many a suicide understood their situation all too well before pulling the trigger or tightening the noose. Compare this with a group who meet together under a starlit sky to undergo psychedelic therapy that encourages them to confront their true self in relationship to the world at large. The latter approach actually has the possibility of changing lives, sometimes even overnight. The former has the depressing recidivism rate that we are already familiar with. Moreover, many of those who do not technically backslide in the 12-step approach do not go on to achieve anything approaching self-fulfillment, since that is not even the goal of therapy. Its goals are far more limited and pessimistic at heart: One day at a time, this too shall pass. Fine sentiments for a stoic, perhaps, but not for an ambitious American seeking to realize their full potential in 21st-century America, let alone one seeking to appreciate the wonder and diversity of the exquisite natural world that surrounds them.

AFTER AFTERTHOUGHTS: When we speak of withdrawal, everyone thinks of heroin and opiates. No one thinks of an attempt to get off of modern anti-depressants, many of which are harder to kick than heroin. 1 in 8 American males are addicted to such pills and 1 in 4 American women, pills that have long been known to actually cause the very chemical imbalances that they purport to cure. Yet no one cares as long as the big economic stake holders are getting their cut of the addiction pie. In fact, psychiatrists continue to prescribe these same uber-addictive pills to this very day, thus gaining business for life at the expense of their clientele, who are thus turned into patients for life and wards of the healthcare state. And so the professional world covers up America's huge addiction crisis under the philosophically shallow lie that habituation to heroin is evil while habituation to Big Pharma drugs is somehow good. With what hypocrisy do we thus protect all the great piles of wealth that are firmly invested in maintaining the drug war status quo.

February 7, 2020

Open Letter to the Virginia Legislature

on behalf of my 92-year-old mother

Today I sent the following e-mail to Republicans in the Virginia state legislature. I was both peeved and in a hurry when I wrote it, but I trust that I've made my basic points plainly enough. Don't laugh, Democrats, you're on my list too. I'm just following a hunch of mine that the right side of the aisle remains most in favor of intolerance and injustice when it comes to the drug war -- or rather the war on plants -- or rather the war on the elderly. Take your pick: there's plenty of injustice to go around when it comes to the so-called drug war.

Dear Representative:

Please stop fighting the wretched drug war.

By doing so, you are preventing my 92-year-old mother from getting relief from the many natural godsends of mother nature, so many of which have been stupidly and unscientifically banned by the DEA even for simple research -- the DEA, a corrupt agency that has a HUGE conflict of interest in "scheduling" substances, since their jobs depend on those substances being illegal. The DEA acted against the advice of its own counsel and kept MDMA illegal for the last 35 years, and to hell with the thousands of soldiers that could have gotten relief from the substance.

Stop cracking down -- unless you're like Donald Trump and want to kill and torture folks who dare to use Mother Nature's plants -- or like Natalie Reyes in the movie "Running with the Devil," a DEA agent who murders and tortures drug suspects for using plants -- while SHE SMOKES A CIGARETTE containing tobacco, the worst drug on the planet!!!

If you really want a drug war, let's arrest everybody that uses cigarettes -- or has so much as a cigarette stub on their person. Let's confiscate their houses. Let's remove them from the voting rolls. Let's confiscate any book profits that they may make by writing about their arrests.

Then let's do the same for alcohol use or possession.

That's a drug war I could get behind because it exposes the hypocrisy of our approach against natural substances and gives the drug warrior a taste of his or her own medicine.

The unscientific drug war is anti-patient because it forces physicians and psychotherapists to treat patients using a fraction of the therapeutic bounty that actually exists, outlawing almost all of the psychoactive plants of Mother Nature. Then we wonder why depression and PTSD flourish unchecked in America. Why? The American drug warrior wouldn't have it any other way. They must demonize Mother Nature's cures at all cost, so that Big Liquor and Law Enforcement may flourish.

Or, if you think this is wrong, then stop the anti-patient drug war, this war on plants, that's depriving my suffering mother of natural and non-addictive godsends, shunting her off onto a handful of addictive drugs from Big Pharma doled out by today's psychiatric pill mill.

Please stop the war on mother nature's plants -- plants that we all have a right to use by natural law -- which should trump common law in America. Stop making substances a scapegoat for bad actors and bad social conditions.

As John Locke wrote in his Treatise on Government:

"The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being."

This is a right that cannot be usurped by common law, if America is to remain the America about which Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.


PS Tried to get medical marijuana today for my 92-year-old mother and found out that Virginia does not want my mother to have relief from anxiety -- except through addictive Big Pharma meds. What nonsense. Do you think Thomas Jefferson thought that some of the plants he grew should be banned??? Do you think he didn't spin in his grave when the jackbooted DEA barged onto his property in 1985 and stole his poppy plants???

February 6, 2020

American Sharia

the drug war as Christian Science

The 2019 movie "Running with the Devil" features a DEA heroine who tortures one drug suspect and murders another - this latter murder being committed while the hypocritical heroine is smoking a cigarette containing tobacco, a drug that has killed far more Americans than the natural substances that the murder victim happened to be peddling at the time. Meanwhile, we have elected a president who has openly praised the murderous Duterte for killing so-called "drug suspects" in the Philippines, i.e. Filipinos who dared to access the plants and fungi of Mother Nature. This is a president who openly envies the power of dictators and thus would gladly turn America into a country where the film heroine's no-nonsense drug war strategy was countenanced by law. In short, the nation (both its leader and its hoi polloi) is in the thrall of a Christian Science sharia, every bit as fanatical as the worst Islamic law of that name, dehumanizing enemies and treating them like garbage merely because they dare to partake of naturally occurring plant medicines provided by Mother Nature.


It may be said that the movie, at least, is fiction, but I have yet to hear a DEA spokesperson come out to denounce the film as libel. Meanwhile, the online reviews of the movie prove that the American people still don't get it. I have yet to see a review that slams the movie as dangerous drug war propaganda, as making the case for torture and murder as government policy. To the contrary, I've read multiple reviews whose authors sympathize with the DEA murderess, regretting that still more can't be done to fight this menace from all those evil naturally occurring plants out there. Meanwhile the website Common Sense, though quick to warn parents about the movie's dirty words, has absolutely nothing to say about the anti-democratic lesson that the movie was peddling: namely that torture and murder are okay as long as the violence is directed toward scumbags who dare to access the plants that politicians have banned.

So if you're wondering what it's like to live under strict Islamic law, stop wondering: Americans are already living under a strictly enforced Sharia, targeted against those infidels who dare to look upon Mother Nature as a goddess rather than a drug kingpin.

February 2, 2020

Is Rick Doblin Running with the Devil?

The drawbacks of collaborating with a corrupt system

I'm a big fan of Rick Doblin and his attempts to mainstream the therapeutic use of psychedelics through MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Rick is obviously a courageous man with the patience of a saint, given the slow-and-steady mindset that his ambitious project calls for. That said, I'm beginning to wonder if his strategy of compromise does not entail a Faustian pact with the devil - or rather with two devils, as noted below.

DEVIL 1: THE DEA

Take the DEA, for instance. I realize that Rick is teaming with the DEA for practical reasons, in order to make legal research possible, but I fear that such cooperation tends to legitimize the agency's role as the rightful gatekeeper for scientific drug research, as if the government should be playing such a politicized role in the first place when it comes to scientific investigation. This is the same DEA, after all, that has deprived depressive folks like myself of thousands of potential rain forest godsends for the last four decades, making our lives a shadow of what they might have been, psychologically speaking, in terms of self-fulfillment, self-realization, and the simple, humble appreciation of the wonderful world of nature that grows at our very feet.

Had researchers been given mere scientific freedom to follow up on the breathtaking therapeutic results of the work of Strassman, Fadiman, Grof et al., America would surely no longer be the most depressed country in the world, where a tenth of the population is yet addicted to the handful of mind-fogging antidepressants dealt out by modern psychiatry - an institution for which pill-peddling is unabashedly promoted as the new therapeutic paradigm. But the DEA has long said no to the mere scientific research of psychedelics, classifying them unscientifically as "schedule 1," thereby ensuring the agency's own law-enforcement workload for decades to come, all at the expense of the health, happiness and sheer human potential of the American people.

As one of the countless victims of the DEA's politically motivated crackdown on psychoactive substances (part of an eclectic victims list that runs the gamut from imprisoned minorities to morose nonagenarians wasting away in a nursing home), I can't help but think that our role as freedom-loving Americans is to loudly protest the injustice being perpetrated here, not to play by the rigged handbook of a political institution designed to strictly limit conscious awareness and keep effective medicines out of public hands.

When Americans aren't busy submitting sheepishly to drug tests, they are watching drug war propaganda movies in which the DEA tortures and murders South Americans who are suspected of selling Mother Nature's plants: especially those that American politicians have gone to such trouble to demonize.

DEVIL 2: THE SCIENTIZATION OF PSYCHEDELICS

This points to a second problem with the MAPS back-door approach to psychedelic legalization: it seeks to destigmatize psychedelics by professionalizing their use, by putting them in the hands of materialist scientists who will analyze such substances "every which way to Sunday" in order to find the exact chemical interactions associated with their efficacy. Even if this reductionist analysis prompts the scientific community to "sign off" on the efficacy of psychedelics for treating various illnesses, the folks who will be empowered are not suffering individuals, but rather large pharmaceutical companies. If not otherwise constrained, Big Pharma will soon strip the psychedelics of all consciously noticeable effects, especially those unscientific "hallucinations" that they seem to cause, in an attempt to derive therefrom a socially acceptable "one-size-fits-all" cure for depression, yet another daily pill regimen that they can market aggressively to the statistically over-depressed American people by running slick but ethereal advertisements during commercial breaks for "Dateline NBC" and "48 Hours."

This is why leaders of the Native American Church are, I believe, justifiably leery of the new psychedelic revolution, because it is being advanced under the banner of materialist medicine, not under the banner of human freedom, personal humility, and a sincere desire to learn about oneself and one's place in the universe. To put it another way, it's one thing to destigmatize psychedelics, it's quite another to denude them of all their awe-inspiring qualities, and that's what happens when psychedelics are wrenched from the hands of a shaman and placed under the microscope of a clinician.

CONCLUSION:

Don't get me wrong: I congratulate Rick Doblin on his so far successful, if frustratingly slow, approach to legalizing psychedelic therapy in America, an approach which might be described here as "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." As for the concerns that I've highlighted above, I'm sure that MAPS is aware of them all and that they are working to obviate them wherever and whenever possible. I write this, not in order to play Sunday morning quarterback, but to remind Rick's fan club (to which I myself belong) that there is another way to address the intertwined problems of unjust drug laws and the lack of effective psychotherapy in America today. This alternative to Rick's strategy of compromise can be easily outlined as the following two-step process:

1) Reclaim the human being's right to naturally occurring substances via appealing to natural law (which, as John Locke writes, gives us unfettered access to "the earth, and all that is therein").

Then, once this basic human right has been reclaimed from power-hungry politicians...

2) Replace psychiatrists with empathic and pharmacologically savvy shamans who will improve their "patients'" psychological well-being with plant-assisted therapy, using ANY PLANT IN THE WORLD that said shaman deems propitious for achieving the goal(s) of the patient in question.

Then again, maybe I am a Sunday morning quarterback, for I see my approach to drug legalization as a kind of "hail Mary" pass, denying the right of politicians to outlaw plants in the first place, whereas Rick's strategy involves gaining a series of fiercely contested first downs by exploiting the various minor weaknesses of his opponent.

Despite our different strategies, however, we're both headed toward the same goal line, i.e. the legalization of psychedelic substances for the psychological benefit of humankind, and I'll be the first to congratulate Team MAPS should they reach the end zone before me.

January 24, 2020

The Therapeutic Value of Anticipation

towards a realistic psychology of substance use

The use of the term "recreational" to describe substance use is misleading. Those who use the term are ignoring the fact that enjoyable or interesting drug-induced experiences often provide a psychological respite from the dullness and difficulties of so-called sober life. And thus, although a drug experience may be defined as "recreational," that does not imply that the substance use was ONLY recreational (which is generally the way in which drug warriors intend the term).

To the contrary, such use is often psychologically therapeutic, and in two ways, the second of which psychology has yet to recognize: 1) It is therapeutic thanks to the relaxation and/or diversion that the actual drug experience affords, and, 2) It is therapeutic thanks to the relaxation induced by the MERE ANTICIPATION of the upcoming relaxation. DeQuincey wrote of this latter benefit of drug use when he praised the therapeutic value of anticipation in connection with his use of opium (this was before he began his ill-advised daily use of opium for the relief of physical pain, after which he necessarily lost the anticipatory benefits of his substance use).

Not only were the author's weekend experiences at the opera enhanced by opium, but his "sober" weekdays were rendered more bearable as well, not directly by the drug, but thanks to the author's sure and certain knowledge of the upcoming intellectual ecstasies that were awaiting him. It is this "something to look forward to" of which modern psychiatry stubbornly refuses to take cognizance in estimating the value of occasional substance use, preferring instead to categorically demonize substances such as opium and cocaine as having no therapeutic value whatsoever, in slavish deference to the politically inspired laws against such drugs. Such substances are then held to health and safety standards that no one would ever think of applying to alcohol and tobacco, let alone to the Big Pharma antidepressants to which 1 in 4 women are addicted, in a scandal that has yet to make the hypocritical and purblind drug warriors lose a minute of sleep.

(One can only conclude that addiction is not the real bugaboo for the anti-drug fanatics, that what really alarms them is the marketing of substances for which big business is not getting its fair share of the profits.)

Thus, the bi-monthly use, say, of psychedelics cannot be dismissed as "recreational" merely because the user has assigned no nobler purpose to the use, for the anticipatory aspect of any positive experience -- drug-induced or otherwise -- can itself conduce to relaxation and a happier life. Thus such use can be psychologically therapeutic even if the user fails to explicitly note that fact.

January 20, 2020

John Locke on Drugs

It's funny. I've read and re-read Locke's Treatises on Government, and I have yet to discover a principle whereby government can justifiably confiscate the naturally occurring substances to which we have legally claimed ownership. To the contrary, section 26 of his Second Treatise of Government (Book 2) tells us:

"The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being."

You'll notice that Locke did not say, ""The earth, and all that is therein, with the obvious exception of psychoactive plants, which the government may justifiably confiscate at will, while vigorously persecuting the owner of the property upon which said demon-plants reside."


Thomas Jefferson shared Locke's views on property, insofar as he wrote to Virginia Lawyer Samuel Kercheval:

"A right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings."

In other words, Jefferson understood the right to property as existing under natural law.

We cannot therefore suppose that Jeffersonian democracy would countenance a common law exception to property rights based on a politicized scare campaign about dangerous substances - least of all one in which the drug warriors claim that alcohol and tobacco, the two most dangerous drugs in the world, are going to be exceptions to the substance criminalization that they otherwise advocate.

Certainly, Jefferson had no need of referencing a list of government-banned plants before arranging his extensive and ever-changing gardens at Monticello. Why? Because Jefferson considered that his right to his own botanical property was self-evident, based on natural law, and thus not subject to abridgement by the common law of a politically motivated government. What's more this ban on government meddling was meant for all time, insofar as natural law is considered to be both universal and immutable.

We conclude therefore that the DEA violates the rational dictates of natural law when it criminalizes naturally occurring plants, and that it is therefore not simply the right of Americans to protest this usurpation, but their duty. For the drug war represents a repudiation of the principles upon which this country was founded, especially property rights as defined by John Locke (i.e., the right to "the earth and all that is therein").

Considered in this light, the DEA's 1987 confiscation of poppy plants from Monticello should have been a wakeup call for America. In this action, the DEA was demonstrating its scorn for both Locke's natural law and the unalienable rights as alluded to (and partially enumerated) by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson's poppy plants simply had to go. Why? Because the government had decided that this particular bit of personal property was somehow "bad" in and of itself.

Thus the common law was suffered to triumph over natural law, getting things precisely backwards from the Founding Fathers' point of view. And so the champions of Big Government won the day, committing brazen-faced robbery - of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, no less -- under the disingenuous and hypocritical banner of a superstition: the idea that some plant medicines are evil and somehow beyond the ability of free human beings to use wisely.

It was the age of the Christian Science propaganda campaign known as "just say no," when Americans were not only persuaded by the government's superstitious beliefs about plant medicines, but went so far as to renounce their privacy rights in a bid to show their patriotic support of America's new secular religion known as the drug war, practically vying with one another to be the first to offer their urine for drug testing to demonstrate their allegiance to the new anti-Jeffersonian status quo. Through drug testing, the true believers could be separated from America's new class of enemies, those who, like Jefferson, dared to consider their right to Mother Nature's bounty as unalienable, as established by natural law. Thus big business conspired with government to ruin the lives of those who dared help themselves to Mother Nature's plants in defiance of politically motivated common law.

It was in this anti-American atmosphere that the sight of jackboots invading Monticello failed to arouse so much as a whimper in the hoi polloi. (But was not the freedom-loving Thomas Jefferson literally spinning in his grave!) But then values were all askew back then. This was the era when Bush and Reagan were encouraging children to turn their parents in to the police for using politically stigmatized substances, a law-enforcement strategy that would have earned kudos from Joseph Stalin. What better proof that the drug-war is anti-democratic than that it leads to the normalization of such chilling totalitarian political tactics.

Ominously, this normalization of government evil has continued apace since the DEA's Monticello raid, as the latest drug war movies from Hollywood openly extol the virtues of torture and murder as means of separating humankind from the therapeutic plants of Mother Nature. In "Running with the Devil," DEA agent Natalie Reyes tortures one "drug suspect" and murders another, in a plot whose script seeks to render her as the hero of the film, a no-nonsense fascist determined to separate humankind from mother nature's plants at any price - even that of turning America into a totalitarian police state. If millions of the depressed and lonely have gone without godsend rain forest medicines for 50 years thanks to her agency's ban on drug research, that's not Natalie's problem. She's just doing her job, that is, killing "scumbags" (meaning any Americans who dare to make use of the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet).

The popularity of such fascist-friendly films is a measure of the drug war's success in alienating Americans from the Jeffersonian legacy of personal freedom and goading us toward the acceptance of a new totalitarianism based on the demonization of Mother Nature's plants. This is an anti-American power grab by anti-Jeffersonian fascists who tell us: "Your pursuit of happiness may go thus far and no farther, lest we confiscate your property and throw you in jail."

The government thus legislates as if Thomas Jefferson had added the following footnote to the Declaration of Independence: "Of course, these natural rights must give way should the government find it politically expedient to insert common law in their stead."

Such a fascist power grab cries out for refutation and pushback by freedom lovers throughout the country - and throughout the world, in light of America's drug war colonialism, whereby we financially blackmail our trading partners into toeing our government's own superstitious party line about naturally occurring psychoactive substances.


"But actual liberty is dangerous!" cries the Chicken Little drug warrior.


Of course, any naturally occurring object can be dangerous when misused -- whether we're talking about Jefferson's riding horses or his poppy plants -- but so what? Nothing in Lockean theory limits a citizen's right to Mother Nature's bounty based on the danger that such liberty might seem to pose in the jaundiced eye of a busybody observer, let alone in the impersonal eye of a jealous and power-usurping government. For when it comes to the natural law on which our rights are founded, John Locke understood what the drug warrior has long forgotten, that mere things are neither good nor bad: only people are. Hence it follows that correcting behavior in a free society involves working with people to improve their lives, not scapegoating the ever-changing list of personal property with which we associate their bad or dangerous behavior as time goes by.

This basic understanding is implicit in everything that Locke wrote about natural rights: that people, not things, may be good or bad. If he did not always mention this explicitly, it was only because he never thought that a rational people could be so misled by political propaganda as to come to doubt such a manifest truth.

January 13, 2020

Rationality Uber Alles

the link between the drug war and the western world's scientistic contempt for human emotions

For years, I've been obsessed with answering the following question:

Why are Americans convinced that it's wrong to expand and improve one's conscious mind with the help of plant substances?

After all, we're more than eager to use plant substances for easing the pain of stomach or tooth ache. Why do we stint at using natural plants to improve our feelings?

This morning I awoke with a new answer: The problem is western philosophy.

Beginning with the pre-Socratics, western society became convinced that thought was the best way to understand and cope with the world around us: thought, not feeling. Our feelings could not be trusted, after all, whereas 2+2 was always 4.

This view is so basic now to the western world outlook that we're unlikely to question it, the view that thought should always trump feeling as our guide to the world. But no matter how compelling this proposition must seem to a society in which its truth is taken for granted, there are reasons to believe that it is wrong, or at least that it provides a drastically inadequate means of approaching life and its problems from a human point of view.

For evidence of this one-sided focus on rationality, we have only to consider the absurd presupposition of Freudian psychotherapy: namely, that one will be cured of psychological problems merely by understanding them. Somehow merely explaining the origins of one's bad feelings will make them go away. Such a proposition would not even make philosophical sense to us (it would read like the non-sequitur that it is) unless we presupposed the philosophical superiority of thought over feelings. In a world without that presupposition, an outspoken psychiatric patient would naturally be tempted to chide their Freudian psychotherapist as follows:

"I'm hurting emotionally inside and you're going to cure that problem with WORDS? How about giving me a hug, instead - or a plant-based entheogen - or both?"

Even the highly educated standard bearers of this rationality-based modality tacitly acknowledge its ultimate uselessness, as Freud ensured his own self-fulfillment not with psychotherapy but with the frequent use of cocaine.

Having rendered psychotherapy expensive and ineffective for well over half a century (before it was replaced by the even more expensive and ineffective pill-based therapy), this purblind reliance on reason alone (at the expense of feeling) is now boding a bleak future for society in general, as materialists like Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt strategically seek to make their users behave more like robots, and thus become more predictable for the purposes of surveillance capitalism. Such robotization, after all, is the end game of thought-based society, at least when it embraces the dreary tenets of materialism: namely, that human beings are nothing special, that consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon, and that there is no inherent meaning in life. If that's all there is, as Peggy Lee might sing, then we may as well be robots.

But this preference for thought over feeling is not the only way to approach life. There is an alternative approach, based on feelings and experience, an approach that is aptly evoked by Quanah Parker of the Native American Church when he observes that:

"The White Man goes into church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his tipi and talks with Jesus."

In other words, in religious matters, as in psychotherapy, western society finds it unseemly to actually experience strong emotions. We would rather talk about them. And so when it comes to religion, we are ready to talk the talk, but we would never feel comfortable actually walking the walk. To do so would make us feel like a classical waltzing pro who has been suddenly transported to a hip-hop dance floor. The whole experience would feel wrong and embarrassing to overthinking westerners like ourselves!

Likewise, psychiatrists are comfortable talking to their patients about emotional problems, but they would never think of pharmacologically inducing the actual positive mental states that a cure would represent - that would be too messy, with results too hard to capture on an Excel spread sheet. Better a cure that involves rational understanding than one that "merely" makes one feel better. (Luckily for the squeamish thought-obsessed psychiatrist, the drug war has thrown them a face-saving lifeline. By outlawing mother nature's vast array of mood-altering psychoactive substances, they have given psychiatrists an excuse for depriving humanity of no-brainer medication to improve their mood, medication in whose ritual use the patient can even come to appreciate his or her place in the universe -- a side effect that no one has yet to notice in the Big Pharma antidepressants to which more than one in 10 Americans are addicted even as I type this.)

So we have an answer, then.

Why are Americans convinced that it's wrong to expand and improve one's conscious mind with the help of plant substances?

Because we westerners are overthinking prudes. Or, to put it in the telling vernacular of certain African-Americans, we are, if you'll pardon my French, a bunch of "tight-ass bougies," preaching relaxation as a theoretical virtue while staunchly refusing to "shake it like we really mean it" out there on the dance floor. That would be scandalous after all and most unseemly for us. But leave us alone with a word processor and we can crank out a short book in one afternoon on the relaxation value inherent in modern dance. For all our bashfulness, we westerners are always good at producing what Hamlet derided as "words, words, words."

And so we make a virtue of our psychological necessity by pretending that the emotive world is not so important anyway, in fact it's downright misleading, we say. And so reality for us is to be discussed and parsed, not to be enjoyed. But note that this is a conclusion based more on sour grapes than on logic.

But there is another way of being in the world, the world of feeling, wherein we strive to be a part of the world, rather than merely attempting to understand it from a supposed god's-eye view - a viewpoint that is no longer even theoretically obtainable to us in any case given the observer-centric nature of the quantum universe.

It is amusing, and perhaps even informative, to realize that in a society in which feelings truly count, the Pied Pipers of the digital revolution would be considered madmen. They would be the inveterate curmudgeons of society who mope around the tribal fireside, mumbling

"must be rational"

in monotone, dogmatically eschewing the food of the gods, whilst the rest of the community dances ecstatically under a star-filled sky.

January 12, 2020

Just Say No to Surveillance Capitalism

How social physics teams up with the drug war to give a knock-out blow to human transcendence

As Shoshana Zuboff reveals in her 2019 book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," one of the biggest cheerleaders of that new data-based economic system is Professor Alex "Sandy" Pentland of MIT, an expert in the creation of creepy software designed to harvest data about a wired Netizen's feelings and intentions. But Pentland's goals are more ambitious than just enabling a new approach to economic control. He envisions a Skinnerian world run according to the mathematical principles of "social physics," a brave new world in which humans are controlled by the once-maligned processes of operant conditioning, with the behavior of formerly free citizens being nudged and corralled by data-controlled algorithms designed to steer their actions in "beneficial" directions, at least as the term "beneficial" is defined by Pentland's deep-pocketed clients.

"Such dehumanization sucks," you may say, "because it treats human beings as widgets. But what does it have to do with the drug war and the DEA?"

Consider:

When the Conquistadores arrived in South America, they immediately saw the ritual use of psychoactive plants as demonic. Why? Because their rational European mind was laden with a material bias that denied any special abilities to the conscious mind. The idea that psychoactive plant use could open up new useful visions was therefore entirely foreign to them. They therefore had no compunction in abolishing such plant-based rituals, often abolishing the tribes that practiced them, too, for good measure.

The Conquistadores' attack on the humanity of indigenous peoples can be seen as part one of a two-part process of social control spanning half a millennium. The Conquistadores stole the soul from the indigenous people in the 1600s by denying them one customary means of self-transcendence. Now, hundreds of years later, Social Physics has come along to tell us how the social reality of the dispossessed can be re-created, not through transcendent experiences with plants, of course (since the materialist Conquistador mentality maintains its grasp on the western mind, even in post-colonial times), but through the robotization of humankind.

Viewed in this light, all Americans (and the world, for that matter) face the plight of those indigenous people, for we have all been barred from accessing transcendence through plants, thanks to the drug war. And now, to add insult to this unconstitutional injury, materialists like Pentland come along to quantify the soulless residuum of our lives with algorithmic formulas to ensure that our stymied ambitions for transcendence become acceptable to us as the new status quo. If we're unhappy about being transformed into Pentland's predictable data-making robots, not to worry: algorithms will be written that will sense our distress and take appropriate action, adding a smiley face to our online calendar, perhaps, along with a link to a feel-good article about puppies that were recently rescued from a puppy mill.

Pentland's ideal world seems to be one in which the richest capitalists are happy and the rest of us are pacified. This is a world that uses the average person as a widget to ensure the happiness of the top 1%. It is a despotic project that sees efficiency as the ultimate good, while viewing personal transcendence as the enemy. Why? Because transcendence can result in behavioral changes that cannot be predicted by data-crunching algorithms, changes that may even predispose some to overthrow the whole Big Brother project of social control entailed by social physics.

When it comes to humanity's desire for personal transcendence, the drug war has already knocked us down "for the count." Now Pentland's "social physics" wants to come along and deliver the coup de grâce to our aspirations, by using data-based algorithms to construct a reality in which humanity will be taught to make its peace with a strictly material and economically focused world.

Conclusion: It's time to just say no to surveillance capitalism.

January 10, 2020

Tune In, Turn On, Opt Out

Why fans of psychedelic medicine should just say no to Surveillance Capitalism

Any psychonaut who is aware of the anti-democratic practices of Big Data companies (and of what those practices portend for a free society) has to ask themselves the following question:

Isn't it time for Americans to "Tune in, turn on, and opt out" (opt out of participating in the digital world that is, to the extent that such a thing is still even possible these days)?

Psychonauts who do not immediately answer "yes" to this query are hereby invited to read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff, a 2019 classic already considered by many to be "The Silent Spring" of the Digital Age. The book clearly reveals, in the words of the Silicon Valley uber-nerds themselves, the disdain for democratic processes that is implicit in and necessary for the triumph of Big Data companies, financial behemoths for whom human beings are commodities, mere sources of data to be analyzed for predictive purposes by businesses of every kind.

I got so spooked by reading the book last night that I turned off my location finder on my phone, having learned from Shoshana's research that potentially hundreds of companies have access to the data that I may be unwittingly sharing through the handful of apps that I use on my Android device.

Things got even spookier the next morning, however, when my weight-monitoring app refused to record my latest weigh-in, stating in a pop-up message that Google insists on knowing my location if I wish this particular health-related app to be fully functional.

Fortunately I had read Shoshana's book, so I knew immediately what Google was up to: they were out to find my destination by hook or crook, whether I wanted to supply it or no. "Fine," I thought to myself, "I'll just do without a graphic rendering of my daily weight, or else create one of my own, with good old-fashioned pencil and paper!"

I then settled down to some computer-based freelance work, forgetting all about Big Data's creepy inroads into my private life - or at least attempting to. But when I checked out my e-mail in-box, I discovered a message from Google Maps with the subject line: "Ballard, here's your 2019 Timeline update." Curious, but with a sense of foreboding (based on the morning's events), I opened the e-mail and clicked "Explore Timeline," only to discover an extensive annotated map clearly indicating everywhere I had been in the world for the last year. Without my knowledge or approval, Google had helped itself to my Android location data for 2019 and now was informing me of that fact by spitting out the data in a format that it supposed might seem useful to me. I felt kind of like a Mafia don had just thrown down the map in front of me and smiled a knowing smile, as if to say: "See? I know where you are whenever I need you."

Had the government sent me such a map, I would have been horrified. Why am I supposed to be pleased when the same information comes to me from a multi-billion-dollar company like Google?

The e-mail in question said that I was receiving this map because I had turned on "location history." But I had never knowingly done such a thing, and even if I had, it was probably because Google was holding an app's functionality hostage until I did so. In any case, I never was informed that Google would be monitoring my every move based on that one uninformed click that I may or may not have made, perhaps as a prerequisite for playing chess on my smart phone or browsing through a digital version of the periodic table of elements.

The inhuman metaphysics of Surveillance Capitalism

But there's another reason that fans of the psychedelic revolution should "Tune in, Turn on, and Opt Out," and that is the inhuman metaphysics upon which Surveillance Capitalism is based. Big Data posits a human being as a means to an end, and a strictly materialistic means at that, one from which all relevant data must be extracted to benefit the needs of business. The psychedelic vision, on the other hand, posits the human being as a precious and ineffable part of nature, with a mysterious inner life that needs to be examined and understood over the course of a lifetime. Why? Because the psychonaut believes with Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living. The pushback against Surveillance Capitalism should therefore be led by fans of psychedelic therapy, since they are the ones who know how much is to be lost when we consider human beings to be robots, mere cogs in an economic wheel, of value only insofar as they impart reliable data points to Big Data and its customers.


But what would it mean to "Tune in, turn on, and opt out"?

This obviously doesn't mean abandoning the Internet entirely, since the Net, just like LSD, is neither good nor bad, except in the way that it is used or abused. This new "Leary challenge" does mean, however, that we should "call" Big Data on its penchant for claiming our data through surreptitious means, such as withholding app functionality until we agree to their grasping terms, or burying their ambitious data grabs in lengthy unreadable disclosures. Meanwhile, those of us who don't consider ourselves to be robots should remind the Big Data companies of our point of view and put them on notice that our emotions and desires are off-limits to data mining, no matter how practical such an extraction may become in theory thanks to the increasing accuracy of digital mood detectors and the like.


Facebook's Zuckerberg and Google's Schmidt both insist that it's Manifest Destiny that our privacy rights are going to disappear, that the future will be one of ever-increasing efficiency, powered by a myriad of data-points supplied by obediently wired Netizens. It's inevitable they say, "so don't bother trying to stop us." But what about those of us who do not consider efficiency and profiteering to be the ultimate goals of life? Why should we play along in order to boost the profits of the most profitable companies in the world?

Fortunately, we champions of the human spirit can still opt out of this robotic dystopia that the Big Data companies are trying to foist upon us under the guise of its supposed inevitability. We can start by actually reading those disclosure and privacy notices and crying "foul" when they oblige us to part with privacy expectations that we have always taken for granted in analog life.

Meanwhile, we must realize that the Big Data end game is not simply to corner the market on our private information, but to use that data to change our behavior in accordance with the economic needs of its deep-pocketed clients. In this way, the goal of surveillance capitalism dovetails with the interests of the drug war: both are committed to keeping human beings as predictable as possible: one by rendering us more robotlike and programmable, the other by denying us the mind-expanding blessings of Mother Nature.

January 8, 2020

Urine Testers Needed

must be willing and able to piss on the US Constitution

A big player in the drug-testing business is looking for new urine testers. Must be willing and able to ruin the lives of Americans who attempt to profit therapeutically from Mother Nature's plants. Will check employee urine for every natural substance known to man -- except for the two most dangerous substances, of course, namely alcohol and tobacco. (Nor will the successful candidate be checking for addictive antidepressants, in keeping with the social status quo of ignoring THAT epidemic entirely. Hey, Americans can only handle so much truth at one time, you see.) Must, however, be willing and able to punish Christian Science heretics with expulsion from the U.S. job market based on no probable cause whatsoever, let alone proof that would hold up in court... read more

January 7, 2020

There is a Specter Haunting Science

the specter of the Drug War

An actual speech from an actually imagined meeting of the National Science Foundation

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid there was a bit of a typo in the bulletin for today's science lecture. My speech today is not going to be on, and I quote, "Genetic Variability in Hydrastis Canadensis." (I'm not sure what your secretary was smoking when she came up with that title, since it bears so little resemblance to the actual topic of my proposed animadversions for this morning's session. Humph.)


BOO


The actual title of my address today is: "Scientists are Cowards: Yes, I'm talking to you."


BOO

And I begin. Ahem.

There is a specter haunting Europe - and the entire free-world for that matter -- the specter of the anti-scientific drug war.

GASP

You doubt it? Just hear me out.

Suppose that the Catholic Church had come forth in the last half-century and told you that there were thousands of plants that you scientists were no longer allowed to study, on pain of being ostracized, removed from your job, or perhaps even arrested?

You guys would be up in arms. Especially the rabid atheists among us. Not to mention any names, of course (such as Daniel Dennett or Sam Harris or Michael Ruse or Richard Dawkins). You'd be like: How dare the Church tell science what it can and cannot study?

APPLAUSE

Enough with the hypocritical applause, folks, because guess what: you scientists DID let an outside force trump the cause of science over the last 50 years - it's just that the force in question was the government, not religion.

GASP

The Drug Warriors declared that you must stop studying a wide variety of psychoactive plants (on pain of the aforesaid penalties), and you guys essentially said, in the immortal words of Sergeant Schultz from "Hogan's Heroes": "Jawohl, Herr Kommandant. I know no-think about such plants, I say no-think about such plants!"

QED: You scientists are cowards. End of discussion.

You failed to push back and declare science off-limits to political manipulation... read more

January 4, 2020

Torture 101 at DEA University

prerequisite: Subverting the U.S. Constitution

PROFESSOR: Welcome to Torture 101 here at DEA University. I'm Professor Himmler. Check your schedules, people. "Subverting the US Constitution" is across the hall with Professor Goebbels.

There's no use in taking the roll while so many DEA recruits are wandering around the hallways like so many drug-addled zombies, so I'll just start lecturing and see what happens.

Earth to the students loitering at the door: this is Torture 101. Either shit or get off the pot.

Now then, what comes to mind when I say the word "torture"?

WILLIAM: A Justin Bieber concert.

*laughter*

PROFESSOR: Get out.

WILLIAM: I beg your pardon

PROFESSOR: Get out of my class. You disgust me.

WILLIAM: But—

PROFESSOR: This is a teaching moment, class: There is no room in the DEA for humor.

*gasps*

Now you too can dangle drug suspects from grappling hooks and shoot them in cold blood while they're sitting across from you, unsuspecting, at their very own kitchen table. Learn from the experts as they teach you how to subvert the US Constitution, consequence free, all in the name of our most righteous and holy drug war. (First 50 enrollees get free jackboots!)

PROFESSOR: No, wait, I lie. It's okay to let your hair down and laugh at the folks whose rights you have trampled...

But we must reserve that talk for the break room, where we can gloat in peace over the lives that we have ruined.

Ach! More zombies loitering at the door. I can see that we're going to get nothing accomplished today.

Well, at least I can assign tonight's homework: I want you folks to go home and watch "Running with the Devil" starring Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne and Natalie Reyes.

Notice that the DEA agent (played by Natalie) takes her drug suspect to a nondescript storage hangar and suspends him from a meat hook.

MIKEY: Isn't that illegal, sir?

PROFESSOR: Well, if you had taken Dr. Goebbel's excellent course on subverting the U.S. Constitution - which, by the way, is technically a prerequisite for this course on torture, young man - you would know that the DEA scoffs at the outdated precepts of the Constitution and wastes no opportunity to snicker at its impotent allusions to suspect rights.

Let's show Mikey some examples. Suzie, you're interviewing me and I demand to see a lawyer. How do you answer in such a way as to heap scorn upon my appeal to Constitutional protections?

SUZIE: That's easy, Professor. I just say, as incredulously as possible of course: "Lawyer? Here's your lawyer," and with that, I slap your forehead with the back of my gun, whereupon you fall bleeding to the floor and I kick you in your all-too-insolent ribs!

PROFESSOR: She shoots, she scores! Excellent, Suzie. You were really paying attention in Dr. Goebbels' knowledge-fest, aka "Subverting the US Constitution: How the DEA can get away with literally anything." A short round of polite applause for Suzie.

Still, Mikey does have a point, in spite of his seeming cluelessness about DEA values. You see, technically speaking, it remains wrong to torture suspects in any way.

*boos*

I know, right? It's a real drag. But the good news is, the DEA is such a big and authoritative organization that we can get away with almost any anti-American behavior, provided that we all keep our stories straight and have each other's backs when we... how shall I put this... "bend" the law a little. Wink, wink, wink!

CLASS: Wink, wink, wink!

PROFESSOR: I didn't get a wink wink wink from Cedric over there. Don't tell me that we've got an idealist in our midst?

CEDRIC: Wink wink wink.

PROFESSOR: That's more like it, Cedric. I've got my eyes on you. Why can't you be more like Suzie?

Suzie, you're good at this stuff. What would you say if I'm a reporter and I ask you: "Did you ever violate a drug suspect's rights?"

SUZIE: I'd say, "We read him all his rights, sir," neglecting to point out, of course, that the exposition in question took place while the drug suspect was suspended from the ceiling by a meat hook!

PROFESSOR: Ha! Now that really IS funny. I bet the suspect was even wearing a Speedo, which you had thoughtfully supplied him for the occasion, just like in the movie Running with the Devil.

SUZIE: You know it, sir! Anything to humiliate the beggar who presumes to sell naturally occurring plant substances to a fellow human being.

PROFESSOR: Mind you, it's the kind of thing that we should only laugh about around the water cooler, though... for legal reasons, you understand.

SUZIE: Word.

PROFESSOR: Now, of course, when you're in the field, you may have no access to a meat hook - but the point of the movie still holds: that the good DEA agent will make a suspect talk, Constitution or no Constitution.

NANCY: But doesn't Natalie Reyes end up actually murdering the drug king pin at the end of the movie?

*gasps*

PROFESSOR: Nice move, Ex-lax. You just ruined the movie for everybody in the class.

SUZIE: Oh, no!

PROFESSOR: But you do make a fair point. Torture may indeed work, but there are times when even torture is just not enough.

BOBBY: When is that, Professor?

PROFESSOR: Well, suppose that an American has been selling naturally occurring plants to his fellow Americans for decades and decades, in brazen defiance of the American Sharia against the use of Mother Nature's pharmacy.

JUNE: Oh, that's disgusting!

PROFESSOR: I know, right? And when a citizen thus makes a mockery of our belief in the evilness of naturally occurring substances, there's sometimes nothing left for us to do but to murder them.

*applause*

BOBBY: Serves them right.

PROFESSOR: Still, we must remember that murder, technically speaking, is not condoned by that pesky Constitution of ours.

*boos*

That's why it's important that the DEA come together as one single corrupt agency and deny that it's doing anything wrong, while meanwhile trashing the hell out of civil liberties, in ways that conduce to plausible deniability.

*bell rings*

Speaking of plausible deniability: I did not say anything in this course that encouraged illegal behavior, did I, class?

*silence*

DID I, Class?

CLASS: NO, Professor Himmler, you did not!

PROFESSOR: Good for you, class. Now you're catching on! Just be sure to refrain from snickering cynically about our anti-Constitutional predilections until you reach the break room down the hall! In public, the DEA must remain as American as apple pie.

SUZIE: Apple pie suspended by a meat hook, that is!

PROFESSOR: Stop it, Suzie! You're gonna make me laugh before I reach the break room!

January 2, 2020

Hypocritical America Embraces Drug War Fascism

a warning to any remaining friends of freedom

This morning I searched the vast image catalog of Shutterstock for some photographs that illustrated the general concept of abolishing the drug war. I was sure I'd find something since the site has over a billion images submitted by well over half a million contributors.

Wrong.

To my dismay, there were very few if any images that suggested, even obliquely, that the drug war was folly. Instead, the site was full of propaganda images that associated cocaine in particular with all manner of vice. First we see an image of a white tabletop littered with bloody bullet casings and a credit card half covered with cocaine. Next we see a handgun lying in front of a half-dozen plastic bags full of white powder. One row down, there are the trademark lines of cocaine starkly displayed on a black tabletop, just waiting for some hedonist hit man to snort, no doubt before taking a scantily clad mistress in his arms and lavishing her with a highly salacious kiss. (Needless to say there are no images of Sherlock Holmes, using related substances to hone his observational skills, nor of Freud, using such substances to ensure the prolific output whereby he achieved self-actualization in life.)

Is America blind? Does no one realize that the dystopia thus depicted on Shutterstock is caused by the Drug War itself, the very war that we assume will solve our problems? Just as Prohibition created the Mafia, the Drug War has turned inner cities into shooting galleries.

The answer is obvious: decriminalize drugs, cocaine first and foremost, since it seems to be the natural substance of choice for marketing illegally... read more

December 30, 2019

Campfire Stories about America's Drug War

live from Lake Rights-Be-Gone

COUNSELOR RICK: Kids, gather around, I have a good horror story for you.

KIDS: Oooh!

COUNSELOR RICK: That's right, ears in the full upright position. This one's downright eerie.

Now then, once upon a time, there were these godsend plants that could help people get over depression and conquer loneliness.

ANTOINE: THAT'S not scary!

COUNSELOR RICK: Oh, just you wait, Antoine. See, these plants grew all around us, they were our natural birthright as Earthlings, but then these bigoted people known as "drug warriors" decided that these plants were somehow evil.

SALLY: That's silly, Counselor Rick. Plant medicines can't be evil, only people can be evil.

ANTOINE: That's right. Medicines can be good OR bad: it all depends on how they're used.

COUNSELOR RICK: You know that, kids, and I know that, but these people were... well, how should I put this...?

ANTOINE: Dumb as crap?

COUNSELOR RICK: Well, let's just say they were superstitious.

SALLY: Sounds like they were regular cretins to me.

COUNSELOR RICK: Now, now, Sally, be nice.

ANTOINE: Counselor Rick! Counselor Rick!

COUNSELOR RICK: Yes, ANTOINE?

ANTOINE: I think I've heard this one before.

COUNSELOR RICK: Oh, really?

ANTOINE: Oh, yeah, you're talking about that science-fiction story called "Fahrenheit 452," where the government burns plants in order to stop citizens from improving their mental focus and expanding their minds!

COUNSELOR RICK: Antoine shoots and scores!

SALLY: Ooh, Counselor Rick, I don't want to hear that story. It scares me.

ANTOINE: Me too, Counselor Rick... read more

December 29, 2019

Depressed? Here's why.

Exposing the anti-patient drug-war lobby in Washington

The DEA is the enemy of depressed individuals worldwide because it has blocked the research (let alone the use) of godsend antidepressant medications now for over four decades. Technically, it has only done this in America, but Drug War colonialism has spread this anti-scientific policy worldwide, as America financially blackmails its trading partners into touting the anti-patient party line about so-called drugs.

MDMA was legal in 1984 and ready to treat soldiers with PTSD. However, in 1985, the DEA acted against the advice of its own regulatory judge and criminalized the substance. The result: American soldiers have been without a godsend medication for PTSD during the last three and a half decades, during their fight with al-Qaida and the Taliban. While our forces were living through hell overseas, the DEA was hunkering down in its comfy Washington offices, determined to keep its jobs at any cost, even at the expense of soldiers' lives and well-being. Meanwhile, psychedelics (such as ayahuasca, psilocybin, and ibogaine) which showed profound potential for virtually curing alcoholism in the '50s, have been listed by the DEA as schedule I drugs since the DEA's inception (based purely on politics, not on science) ensuring that the depressed must continue to rely on Big Pharma meds that create chemical dependence.


But the DEA is not the only group that's determined to keep valuable medications from those who need them. To figure out who else is anti-patient in this way, just ask yourself: who stands to lose money if the drug war is finally terminated? A partial list of such groups follows... read more

December 27, 2019

The Drug War is a War on Patients

my letter to Republican senators of the 116th U.S. Congress

Dear Senator:


Please end the Drug War. It is a war on patients.


I am a 61-year-old American who has been denied godsend medications for depression for the last 40 years, all because Washington legislators care more about punishing "drug users" than they care about helping those suffering from alcoholism, depression and PTSD.

When is Congress going to stop the war on drug research and the war on patients?

It is nothing less than a crime against humanity when the DEA knowingly withholds godsend medications from the American public - and lies while so doing.

Please end this war against patients today. Abolish the DEA and put its leadership on trial for causing immense and unnecessary suffering for America's patients through its anti-scientific lies about substances like MDMA and psilocybin.

And stop financially blackmailing other countries to make them follow suit with America's unscientific drug war. Is it not bad enough that you've made it impossible for me to get help in America? Do you really have to make sure that I can't get help anywhere on the planet?

Substances are not evil, Senator. That is a drug-war superstition. They are good or bad, depending on how they are used.

Stop demonizing godsend medications just because they may be subject to occasional abuse.

Please stop denying godsend medication to millions merely because a few thousand may abuse them.

Get rid of the fascist DEA - the jackbooted thugs that stomped onto Monticello and stole Thomas Jefferson's poppies -- and let scientists study any substance that they please without government interference - that is, if you really want to live in a free country... read more

December 26, 2019

DEA Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity

The DEA has blocked soldiers receiving MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder, in defiance of their own judge's recommendation that the therapy move forward. That judge said the therapy could go forward in 1985 -- but the DEA shut it down, based partly on bogus scientific reports written to curry favor with drug warriors.

In doing this, the DEA is responsible for 30 years' (and counting) worth of unnecessary suffering for American soldiers.

They have blocked depressives and alcoholics from receiving godsend medications for four decades and counting.

In doing this, the DEA is responsible for 45 years' (and counting) worth of unnecessary suffering for alcoholics and the depressed.

They have blocked study of ayahuasca, even though it has been shown to grow new neurons in the brain. Pity the DEA fools who reach retirement age and start to unnecessarily suffer from Alzheimer's because they blocked this godsend plant from even being studied.

The question is no longer if the DEA is acting rightly. The answer is clear: the DEA is a despotic, violence-causing anti-democratic force determined to keep their jobs at the expense of the health and happiness of the American people. Just as alcohol prohibition single-handedly created the Mafia, substance prohibition has resulted in the creation of inner-city shooting galleries.

Abolishing the DEA is just the first step: Its officers need to be tried for crimes against humanity, to be hauled before a court to answer for their lies about mother nature's medicines, their self-dealing, their withholding of godsend therapies from the depressed, alcoholics and America's soldiers... read more

December 25, 2019

Speaking Truth to Big Pharma

an open letter to the Heffter Research Institute

In the book Psychedelic Medicine, Dr. Richard Louis Miller refers to a lack of support for psychedelic medicines, especially LSD, concluding that there are only a handful of specialists who are pursuing the work and that the public, especially in Britain, are largely indifferent to the whole topic.

In my opinion, this indifference exists only because no one has yet attempted to connect the dots between the outlawing of psychedelic therapy and the current sad state of depression therapy in America, namely that addictive and starkly inadequate solution of Big Pharma known as SSRIs and SNRIs. If this connection were understood by the depressed public, I imagine they would be plenty motivated to support change.

The dots may be connected as follows:

Psychedelic therapy showed great promise for the depressed and it's non-addictive.

The government banned that therapy half a century ago.

As a result, the depressed have been shunted off onto addictive medicines that simply do not work as claimed, drugs that actually create the chemical imbalance that they purport to fix. These ineffective medicines are expensive, must be taken daily and turn the pill-taker into an eternal patient, since they have to visit a psychiatrist every 3 months of their life in order to be catechized about their mental health. This is the exact opposite of an empowering therapy. Speaking personally, I consider it highly demoralizing (a fact that I've never heard psychiatrists recognize, let alone regret).

I personally have been a guinea pig for Big Pharma for the last 50 years, and their nostrums have not worked... read more

December 21, 2019

Snoop Pearson's Muddle-Headed Take on Drugs

I don't want to pick on Snoop, but I cannot resist because her confusion about so-called "drugs" is so typical of the muddle-headed thinking of Americans in general on this subject. So hopefully in clarifying her confusion, I'll be of assistance to others who may be similarly bamboozled.

First, let's be honest about what we Americans mean by drugs, Snoopie: We do not mean liquor. We do not mean tobacco. And we certainly do not mean Big Pharma's massively prescribed antidepressants to which 1 in 4 American women are currently addicted.

No, by "drugs" we merely mean natural substances that our government has decided are bad for us. In other words, our hatred of drugs is simply Christian Science with respect to psychological well-being, it is the metaphysical idea that we have some moral duty to forego the mind-improving pharmacopeia of Mother Nature.

Why? It's hard to say*. But our mistrust of Mother Nature is "all of a piece" with our historic fear of witches in the west and the way that they freely availed themselves of psychoactive plants. This fear in turn no doubt dates to societal PTSD from the Garden of Eden debacle. More recently, the psychoactive bounty of Mother Nature has become a threat to traditional medical practitioners, and they're right to be concerned.

If the government allowed humanity to access its natural birthright of Mother Nature's pharmacy, then who in their right mind would use the handful of addictive and inadequately effective synthesized drugs that Big Pharma has created to take Mother Nature's place? No one, at least if the cure and/or benefit that we seek is psychological... read more

December 15, 2019

Lock 'em up! Lock 'em up!

you want a drug war, we'll give you a drug war

[standup]

Welcome back to the DEA Lounge.

APPLAUSE

You know, the drug warriors don't want a real drug war.

MURMURS

That's right, because a real drug war would crack down, first and foremost, on the use of the two most devastating drugs in American history: alcohol and tobacco.

APPLAUSE

I kid you not.

LAUGHTER

If we launched a REAL drug war, then the hypocritical William Bennetts of the world would be the first so-called "scumbags" to be thrown into the slammer.

GASP

And when Billy complains, we'll be like: "Hey, we're just taking your own advice: cracking down on nasty drugs -- and the scumbag druggies like yourself who use them."

DRUM
LAUGHTER

Mind you, in such a drug war we'd have to leave sentiment behind and get tough.

GASP

The William Bennetts, I'm afraid, will have to be removed from the voting rolls pronto.

APPLAUSE

And have their urine tested for tobacco and alcohol at least once a week by government-provided health experts. We should probably televise that testing, too, so that innocent Americans who are subjected to that debasing procedure for no reason at all (i.e., in the absence of all probable cause!) can see that we're not just singling them out... read more

December 13, 2019

Tweet to Alex Adams

author of How to Justify Torture

December 6, 2019

What if Arthur Schopenhauer Had Used DMT?

Psychotropic plants as a cure for modern pessimism

In the "Wisdom of Life," Arthur Schopenhauer sums up an unspoken assumption of Western philosophy when he writes:


"Every man is pent up within the limits of his own consciousness and cannot get directly beyond those limits any more than he can get beyond his own skin."


Indeed, Schopenhauer's famous pessimism is derived from the daily observance of this supposed "fact of life."

But what if it's not a fact? What if we discovered that human psychology was quite therapeutically pliable after all? Wouldn't such a finding require a revision, not only of Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy but of Western philosophy in general, insofar as it presupposes stark limitations on the ability of individual human beings to change their own psychology for the better? Wouldn't it require the doomsayers of today to admit that there may be hope for humanity after all, if we only open our eyes (and our research laboratories) to the astonishing psychological healing potential of psychedelic plants?

These are not just hypothetical questions, for a scientific study of psychoactive plants is now proving to Western researchers what partakers of these substances have known for millennia, namely that plants like ibogaine, ayahuasca, and psilocybin can be used strategically to foster new understandings in the human mind, to help one rise above a parochial and neurosis-making upbringing, as well as problematic genetics, and to thrive in the world, in spite of the negative cards that they may have been dealt both by nurture and by nature.

But Western philosophy has entirely missed the implications of these developments... read more

December 2, 2019

Euthanasia in the Age of the Drug War

doctors can now kill patients but they can't make them feel better

If you want proof that the drug war is insane, think about the increasing popularity of euthanasia in the west, which is already the law of the land in Holland. Think about what euthanasia means in a country that has banned plant medicines.

It means that I can ask my doctor to give me plant medicines that will make me happy and he will indignantly say "no." But if I ask that same doctor for a drug that will kill me, he will say, "Your wish is my command."

What more proof do we need that the drug war is a nature-hating sadomasochistic incarnation of Christian Science? It is the triumph of extreme puritanism that says that death itself is preferable to feeling good with the help of Mother Nature's psychoactive plants.

Would a sane society allow doctors to kill their patients BEFORE first giving those doctors free rein to prescribe the naturally occurring medicines of their choice, many of which have been proven to help the elderly (and the rest of us, for that matter) make their peace both with life and death?

Only a society that had a pathological distrust of Mother Nature's pharmacy could take such a heartless stance and then seek to enforce it by draconian laws.

Doctor to depressed elderly patient: "The bad news is, we can't give you psilocybin for your depression. The good news is, we can kill you if the depression gets too bad."

November 26, 2019

Se Llama Mushrooms

Live from the DEA Lounge!

[standup]

Welcome back to the DEA Lounge.

APPLAUSE

How many know that psychedelics are good for learning languages? Raise your hands?

APPLAUSE

Let's see, 24, carry the one...

Looks like nobody here knows that.

DRUM

No, seriously. That's just one of the millions of things that we don't know about Mother Nature's pharmacy thanks to our government's policy of placing her off-limits.

BOO

Wake up, folks: that's as anti-scientific as it gets.

BOO

Think about it: Why do kids learn languages? Surely, it has something to do with the flexibility of their brains. Whereas the adult brain has gotten into a rut. Am I right?

MURMURS

Look at the guy at the bar over there. He's like, "I can't speak for the rest of us here, but my own brain is certainly nothing to write home about."

DRUM

I know you didn't say anything, sir, but there is such a thing as telepathy, you know.

DRUM

No, seriously... read more

November 23, 2019

In Praise of Augustus Bedloe

In the short story "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" by Edgar Allan Poe, an artistic but moody young man named Augustus Bedloe walks off into the highlands, under the influence of an immoderate dose of morphine. As he begins to lose his way in the dense and foggy forest southwest of Charlottesville, Virginia, he describes the drug's onset as follows:

"In the meantime the morphine had its customary effect- that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. In the quivering of a leaf- in the hue of a blade of grass- in the shape of a trefoil- in the humming of a bee- in the gleaming of a dew-drop- in the breathing of the wind- in the faint odors that came from the forest- there came a whole universe of suggestion- a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought."

I don't know about you, but that's the kind of wide-awake world that I want to live in - or at very least have access to - and I have no patience with the meddling drug warriors who insist by law that I renounce that desire. They seem determined to make me view Mother Nature with the same bleary eyes that they possess. "If God had wanted us to improve our minds," they seem to say, "he would have boxed up the relevant therapeutic plants, stamped them with a bar code and placed them on sale at the local Rite-Aid or CVS Pharmacy. Besides, surely a blade of grass is a blade of grass. If you've seen one, you've seen them all. Now, let's go bowling and have some brewskis."

Such drug warriors are like a self-satisfied Mr. Magoo who wants to outlaw glasses in the belief that his own natural vision is as good as it gets for anybody - or as good as it should get, according to Mr... read more

November 23, 2019

Let's burn some plants!

In the movie "JoJo Rabbit" by Taika Waititi, a Nazi school teacher turns excitedly to her young uniformed charges and shouts: "Now let's burn some books!"

That's a funny line to modern Americans, because we still recognize the obvious importance of free speech. Therefore burning books seems downright silly to us. But before we clap ourselves on the back for our democratic enlightenment viz. the Nazi past, let's remember that we ourselves live in a country that burns plants and holds them responsible for social failings, a so-called scientific country that even bans research on such substances.

Thus the myriad plants and fungi that can improve the mind are outlawed by a superstitious belief that these substances are somehow evil in and of themselves, without regard for the way that they are used.

Let's hope that the idiocy of this drug-war zeitgeist will be apparent to the movie-goers of the future, so that the line "Let's burn some plants" will someday elicit the same howls of amused derision that Americans reserve today for the line "Let's burn some books."

A hundred and fifty years ago, the mob was worried about Frankenstein. Today they're worried about devil plants. That's why millions around the globe have to go without Mother Nature's godsends, to cater to the superstitious and anti-scientific fears of the masses, dutifully propagandized by politicians and lobbyists for Big Liquor, the American Psychiatric Association, law enforcement, and the corrections industry.