LSD is a powerful therapeutic tool.

To Pee or Not to Pee

Not everyone's a coward, however. Remember, Secretary of State Schultz in the first Bush administration? When his own boss demanded drug testing, Schultz publicly demurred, saying, in effect: "If the government does not trust me, then they are free to fire me." Makes you wonder: where are the George Shultzes of our day who are willing to speak democratic truth to unconstitutional power?

*Author's note, update July 20, 2019: I should have known better. Turns out, Schultz is no hero. He objected to polygraphs, yes, but he thought that drug tests were "scientific" -- in other words, he had no principled stand about his constitutional rights, let alone about the folly of turning Mother Nature into a drug kingpin.





Who barged on to Jefferson's Monticello and destroyed Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants? 1) The Mob 2) Juvenile delinquents 3) Terrorists 4) The DEA
The DEA






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time





AbolishTheDEA.com











July 2, 2019
Arrest Warrant for DEA Commissioner John C. Lawn



Wanted



1980s Commissioner John C Lawn



For enforcing drug law by poisoning American citizens



Warning: Lawn is armed with unscientific ideas about Mother Nature's plants and should be concerned a threat to American democracy.




If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










June 29, 2019
Mycologists as DEA Collaborators


In response to "Drugged, Castrated, Eager to Mate: the Lives of Fungi-Infected Cicadas", by JoAnna Klein, in the June 28, 2019, edition of The New York Times.

Your article about the cicadas was simultaneously fascinating and depressing. Am I the only one who finds it sad that the DEA has to be consulted by a scientist before he or she can even investigate certain kinds of mushrooms and their byproducts? The fungi in question are grown by Mother Nature after all, not by Pablo Escobar: and where does the government draw its moral right to criminalize the freely offered bounty of Mother Nature?

The government's interference in mycology must steer a lot of scientists away from that field. What scientist would want the government looking over their back on every mushroom-hunting foray? I can't help feel, therefore, that those who remain in the field are complacent about government interference in science and may actually take pride in being DEA collaborators first and mushroom hunters second.

Dr. Kasson himself seems to be in thrall to the Drug War based on his use of terminology. He twice refers to mushrooms as “narcotics,” when from a scientific standpoint, this is just plain false. Psilocybin is a psychedelic, not a soporific agent. But in our society, "narcotic" is a drug-war pejorative, and so Kasson's use of the term betrays his knee-jerk desire to libel those substances of which the DEA does not approve, thereby making a patriotic virtue out of a government-imposed necessity.

As strange as the cicada story sounds, Kasson would not be so flummoxed by it had he read the book by Giorgio Samorini entitled "Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to Alter Consciousness." That's a politically incorrect book par excellence, because it demonstrates that the desire to alter consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the animal kingdom, not some evil impulse limited to 20th-century hippies and 21st-century ravers. (As Samorini points out: moths get drunk on the nectar of the datura flower, caribou trip on fly-agaric mushrooms, and cows have such a penchant for locoweed that it caused an agricultural crisis in Kansas in 1883.)

English Biologist JBS Haldane once said (a la Werner Heisenberg’s comments about the universe): “Nature is not only odder than we think, but odder than we CAN think.” This is no doubt especially true for those who expect the animal kingdom to respect our modern drug-war sensibilities about psychoactive plants.





The ritual persecution of these pharmacological and human agents must be seen against the historical backdrop of the ritual persecution of other scapegoats, such as witches, Jews, and madmen.
Ceremonial Chemistry: The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers. Thomas Szasz.






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










June 28, 2019
Illegal Drugs and the Imp of the Perverse



- You strive to be free of thinking too much about what you're doing. -- David Gray

- To indulge, for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost. - Edgar Allan Poe


In illegal drugs, we have found an all-powerful boogeyman that we can safely moralize about and condemn regardless of context.

Did Elton John use “illegal drugs”? Then it follows for us in this simplistic psychological view that his success was always IN SPITE of those horrible substances, and that his musical output would have been so much better had he only said “no.”

This is mere wishful thinking on the part of a society that has been deluded by the unscientific moralizing of the drug warrior.

True, John may have had a far safer life by “saying no” to drugs (or rather saying no “to non-doctor-administered mental health treatment”) but it is mere speculation on our part to say that he would have produced as much and been as popular without the aid of his poison of choice.

To think otherwise is to ignore the psychological phenomenon of “the imp of the perverse,” which Edgar Allan Poe explained 150 years ago today, though modern psychiatry continues to pretend that this phenomenon does not exist. “The imp of the perverse” is that voice in the ear of the public singer that whispers: “Oooh, what if my voice came out weak and my throat became constricted: wouldn’t that be horrible???” As Poe wrote, merely to think such thoughts is to be lost: for to fearfully imagine such hideous acts of masochism is to bring them about. Is it any wonder then that insecure performance artists will occasionally avail themselves of illegal mood enhancing substances to silence that self-doubting masochistic voice?

Answer: It’s no wonder at all – yet we still shake our heads in clueless disbelief whenever we hear of a public performer using “drugs.” “Tsk-tsk! Why would they do something so senseless?” we say, thereby displaying our ignorance of what Poe called “the prima mobilia of the human soul,” the aforementioned “imp of the perverse,” that ineradicable inner voice whose one and only goal is to keep its victim from reaching the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of self-fulfillment.

Despite all the de rigueur hand-wringing over Elton John’s drug use, what we’re really upset about as a society is the fact that he had the nerve to medically control and improve his mood without the assistance of established psychotherapy (in other words without getting on a program of chemically addictive SSRI antidepressants for life!)

But Americans insist on viewing illegal drug use as mere inexcusable hedonism; to think otherwise would force them to confront the fact that the drug war is being fought on behalf of modern medicine; its goal: to disempower Americans by forcing them to rely on others when it comes to controlling one’s own mood and mental acumen.




Any idea or act that gives men and women a sense of what their life is about or for-- that, in other words, gives their existence meaning and purpose-- is, properly speaking, religious.
Ceremonial Chemistry: The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers. Thomas Szasz.






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










June 27, 2019
The Psychedelic Secret of Self-Help Books


Have you ever noticed that most psychological self-help books merely describe, over and over again, a way to look at the world that can be engendered naturally with the guided use of entheogens? "Be calm, be focused, be imaginative," they say, "and above all, feel yourself to be part of the great creative forces of the universe that flow around you! See the world in a grain of sand! Dissolve into nature and become a new creative being! Yada yada yada!!!"

Sounds great, but how do we accomplish this feat, exactly? The authors never say. The implication is that we should "just do it," as if their readers were able to control their emotions in the same way that they control their arms and legs. Earth to self-help authors: this does not work.

If the Seth Godins of the world know what's good for them, they should be fighting tooth and nail against the legalization of psychedelics, because the properly guided use of substances like psilocybin, peyote, ayahuasca and even LSD will finally allow the psychologically challenged human being to BE the sort of person that self-help authors only want such people to READ about.

*NOTE: Credit where credit's due: I'm the first one to point out how the self-help movement supports the war on drugs, philosophically speaking. It does so because self-help authors imply that the human being is endlessly malleable, psychologically speaking, to the point where they can accomplish any goal if they only put their minds to it.

Bollocks.

But note that if anyone truly believes this demonstrably false proposition, this American mythology, then it follows that one has no need of psychological medicines -- least of all those naturally growing medicines that the government has told us to forget about under penalty of law.

That's why I wish mindfulness writers would put up their pens -- until such time as they have the guts to point out in their books that the best way to mindfulness, for many people, would be through the guided use of psychoactive plants, were they only made legal. By failing to note this inconvenient truth, these self-help authors are tacitly advancing a sort of Christian Science view of psychedelics, according to which we are only entitled to as much higher consciousness as we can achieve WITHOUT the help of Mother Nature.

Meanwhile the drug warriors are delighted with this muddled reasoning: “See, they say," pointing to these endless shelves of self-help books from which the subject of psychoactive drugs has been expunged by the author's self-censorship: "You can do anything you want WITHOUT the help of Mother Nature. All the more reason to arrest you if you use psychoactive plants!"





For many, [LSD] seems to lead to self-help -- long overdue.
Dr. Keith Ditman, Semi-Weekly Spokesmen-Review (Spokane, Washington), Nov. 8, 1959






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










June 26, 2019
My Letter to Dennis McKenna


Hi, Dennis.

I hope this message reaches you. I’ve found that when a person like yourself has reached a certain level of celebrity, they become quite difficult to reach online, and even if the message gets through, they may not welcome the imposition on their busy schedule, as I learned to my cost in attempting to contact Rick Strassman last year.

My goal in this message is to advocate a new shamanic therapy to replace psychotherapy as we know it in the United States. I hope you’ll find time to read on…

INTRODUCTION

My name is ... and I am the 60-year-old founder of a website called AbolishTheDEA.com, which I describe as a series of essays constituting “one long argument” against America’s drug war.

That’s just by way of introduction, mind. I’m not writing to plug my website but rather to pick your brain on a novel idea that I have about the shamanic use of psychedelics in such a way as to help millions of depressed Americans. I am thinking specifically of the millions of Americans who are currently unable to profit from the new psychedelic renaissance in medicine for the reason that the SSRIs that they are taking are contraindicated in most psychedelic therapy. So, for instance, these Americans cannot profit from LSD, psilocybin, or ayahuasca therapy for fear that using these substances will result in so-called Serotonin Toxicity Syndrome.

I have a personal interest in the matter.

Like tens of millions of my fellow Americans, I have been forced onto Big Pharma’s addictive (or dependence-causing) SSRI antidepressants thanks to the drug warriors’ criminalization of the non-addictive bounty of Mother Nature. In my case, I am dependent on Effexor, which appears to be the most chemically addictive substance in history. I say this in light of a recent NIH study which shows that over 95% of those who wean themselves off of Effexor are back on it within three years. My psychiatrist claims that this recidivism rate is proof that Effexor works, but by the same logic, we could say that heroin works for depression, since depression will inevitably return when an addict quits that drug. At least in the case of heroin, the user would have been warned in advance of the addictive nature of frequent heroin use, whereas no such warning was ever given me about the use of SSRIs (though psychiatrists may quibble that SSRIs are not addictive but merely cause chemical dependence, as if this made a difference from the entrapped user’s point of view).

THE PROBLEM

To sum up the problem: a large number of depression sufferers in America (perhaps even a majority) are ineligible to benefit from the new psychedelic renaissance. They cannot participate in trials, nor can they travel to South America to take part in ayahuasca rituals and the like: all because of their chemical dependence on SSRIs, which are contraindicated in most psychedelic therapy.

THE PREREQUISITES OF A SOLUTION

I believe there is a solution for this problem, but it requires a whole new mindset for how we treat addiction and chemical dependency. Rather than relying on modern doctors (with their small arsenal of commercial drugs that have been pitched to them by corporate sales forces) we should rely on empathic shamans, whose pharmacy is the rain forest and the plants and fungi of Mother Nature in general.

We must also question the assumption of “no pain, no gain” when it comes to treating addiction and/or chemical dependency. Certainly, the “patient” in these cases must approach such treatment seriously and with good intentions, but the notion that addicts must join 12-step groups and don sackcloth and ashes must be reexamined. I contend that this approach is based on a puritanical mindset, one which is particularly manifested in our refusal to consider the use of medicines that provide on-the-fly mood elevation and entheogenic insight to the addicted or chemically dependent person “in real-time,” so to speak.

Materialism is also the foe of the sort of shamanic addiction therapy that I am advocating here. Materialists insist on treating specific physical “causes” of depression. This is the reductionist focus which gave rise to the fallacious sales pitch that SSRIs were targeting specific chemical imbalances in the brain which cause depression, whereas Richard Whitaker has subsequently shown that Big Pharma’s SSRIs actually CAUSE the chemical imbalances that they purport to correct.

Thus both Puritanism and Materialism impede progress in the treatment of the addict. They each have their own reason for distrusting the symptomatic treatment of discomfiture, that discomfiture which is so often the death knell of the addict’s attempts at withdrawal from a given substance.

They both also ignore the therapeutic quality of anticipation. As De Quincey wrote, until his back injury, he had no desire to take opium on a daily basis. Why? Because his mood was lifted merely by the foreknowledge that he was going to “use” opium on the weekend in order to better appreciate an opera. In short, he got a mood boost by merely looking forward to his opera experience. Likewise, if the SSRI addict knew that he or she was going to be provided with a mood-elevating psychoactive plant on a regular basis during the withdrawal process, they would have incentive to “keep the course.” Again, amazingly, our modern focus on “no pain, no gain” seems to blind us to the symptomatic use of drugs for keeping the addict on track. We want him or her to “struggle through the pain” (and even talk about that pain in front of their fellow addicts) rather than to be lifted by natural substances over the deepest, most painful stages of the withdrawal process.

Materialists cannot be big supporters of entheogens, in any case, since they consider spiritualism itself to just be so much “touchy-feely” nonsense.

I almost despair of making myself understood on this topic because my ideas on this subject are so far from the status quo. Even the most progressive books on addiction these days seem determined to turn a person’s depression into a big psychological melodrama focusing on archetypes and childhood memories. Meanwhile, medicines that would “cut straight to the therapeutic chase” are growing at the author’s very feet.

For a clearer idea of what I’m driving at, I invite you to read my essay entitled “What Psychotherapists Can Learn From Drug Dealers” on AbolishTheDEA.com. The essay title really says it all. For all the moral shortcomings of many “drug dealers,” (meaning those who deal in medicines of which the government does not approve) they deal with the real world when it comes to making their clients feel better. Our society’s current therapeutic approach, to the contrary, is firmly based on wishful thinking. We tell the addict to “grin and bear it,” as if we have no need to deal with their real-time discomfiture, as if the huge pharmacopeia of Mother Nature does not exist or is somehow off-limits in the symptomatic treatment of withdrawal symptoms. We’ve convinced ourselves that this psychologically naïve approach to withdrawal symptoms is somehow pious (to the puritanical mindset) and medically correct (from the materialist’s point of view).

SOLUTION

I have searched in vain for programs that help people get off of Effexor. And I’m sure that this is a problem for SSRI users in general. This is depressing to me because I find that I am ineligible for all the self-insight and mental relief and clarification that could be provided by entheogens, at least to a person who approaches the plants reverently, so to speak, and in good faith.

This absence of withdrawal therapy is a huge problem. I recently attended an online MAPS session about ayahuasca. And the most common question, according to the hosts, had to do with the interaction of SSRIs with ayahuasca. This is not surprising since, by some estimates, 1 in 6 Americans is taking an SSRI antidepressant. And so, thanks to the contraindication mentioned above, the most chronically depressed patients in America are precisely the ones that cannot now benefit from the psychedelic renaissance.

The answer, in my opinion, is the creation of a new world of shamanic therapy, one that avails itself of the vast pharmacopeia of Mother Nature, rather than just those few synthetic drugs whose sales benefit Fortune 500 companies.

In specific, I envision a treatment center at which the SSRI user tapers off of their Big Pharma antidepressant while receiving increasingly higher doses of entheogens. On week one, for instance, I might start using 225 mg of Effexor (given that my current daily dosage is 250 mg) and then given psilocybin or ayahuasca (etc.) at a very small dose. On the following week, I might start using 200 mg of Effexor and be given an entheogen at a slightly higher dosage, and so forth.

Meanwhile, the discomfiture that I experience as withdrawal side effects would be treated by other psychoactive plant and fungi substances of which the shaman is aware, in order to prevent relapsing. Note that the occasional use of euphoriants would be strongly indicated at such times. (I can hear the puritans gasping now – followed shortly by the “tsk-tsks” of the materialists.)

For once we put aside the objections of puritanism and materialism, we can realize (as even many “drug dealers” do) that it is the ANTICIPATION of “guaranteed upcoming joy” that makes life livable under tough conditions. As I know from decades of depression, it is never the depressed feeling itself that is intolerable – but rather the firm conviction on the part of the depressed that “this feeling will never end.” It is this fatalistic conclusion that leads to suicide, the conviction that the bad feelings will never end. But with the skillful employment of psychoactive plants, we can change the sufferers’ mindset by showing them that psychological relief is always “just around the corner,” which understanding, paradoxically, provides the addict with immediate psychological relief.

WHY I’M WRITING TO YOU IN PARTICULAR

Having read several books by your brother Terence, I think I have reason to believe that my ideas might make some kind of sense to you, Dennis. If so, I’d appreciate your feedback.

I only wish that I could offer myself to science as a guinea pig, to be a recipient of the kind of shamanic depression treatment that I’ve attempted to outline above. My goal is to finish my life completely freed from Effexor, after which I hope to occupy my remaining time on earth as a psychonaut, following the Socratic admonition to know myself. But there are currently no realistic options to do this.

Psychiatry itself says that I shouldn’t even bother trying to get off of Effexor. Psychiatry has thus made me an “eternal patient,” an effective ward of the state, and I find myself rebelling against that fate, so far to no avail. It’s not just that I wish to explore entheogens (from which the use of SSRIs debars me) but also the fact that Effexor use increasingly muddles my mind and leads to anhedonia and a loss of the creative spirit that I had prior to beginning my decades-long reliance on SSRIs.

I believe that I could be successfully guided off of Effexor with the help of plant and fungi medicines as used in shamanic-guided healing rituals – until such time as my psychological needs could be met entirely by the intermittent use of entheogens, and even marijuana. (Note: It’s my experience that Effexor mutes the effects of marijuana and quashes the longer-term feelings of peace that the drug used to provide me in my pre-Effexor days.)

Something needs to be done. There are thousands of depressed Americans like myself who are chafing at the bit of their SSRI addictions – and almost no one is doing anything about it.

Psychiatry as a profession refuses to even discuss the matter, insisting to this day that SSRIs are some kind of materialist wonder cure. Rather than addressing the issue of chemical dependency, they flip the script and tell patients that SSRIs (initially prescribed as short-term therapy) need to be taken for life, thus freeing themselves of the necessity of telling patients how to get “off” of these “wonder drugs.”

I hope you agree with me that, to be truly effective, the new psychedelic renaissance requires a new treatment approach, one that empowers empathic shamans to treat the psychologically suffering patient (addict or otherwise) by choosing advisedly from among the full panoply of psychoactive substances provided to humankind by Mother Nature.





Casting a ballot is an important act, emblematic of our role as citizens. But eating and drinking are much more important acts.
'Our Right to Drugs', Thomas Szasz






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










June 24, 2019
Dr. Houston, We Have a Problem


...with your "go slow" approach to ketamine, that is.

My response to the article by Dr Muiris Houston entitled "Is use of ketamine for treating depression a step too far?" in the Irish Times of June 24, 2019.

Psychiatry does not have a leg to stand on when it argues that ketamine may cause addiction. The treatment with SSRIs -- which were initially introduced for short-term use -- causes such severe chemical dependency in the user that psychiatrists finally made a virtue of necessity and insisted that the pills were intended to be taken for a lifetime.

I recently wanted to get off of Effexor -- to try some of the new depression treatments that you're no doubt worried about -- and my psychiatrist basically told me that it was IMPOSSIBLE. He cited a recent NIH study that showed that over 95% of those who weaned themselves off of Effexor were back on it within three years.

So please stop trying to keep me from using ketamine based on the idea that I might become addicted. Even if I did become addicted, at least ketamine is a drug that I could theoretically get off of again if I tried, unlike Effexor which turns one into an effective drug addict.

If you really want to steer me away from ketamine, then start fighting to give me access to a powerful potential alternative such as psilocybin and LSD. Our Nixon-inspired "go slow" approach (or rather "go nowhere" approach) on psychoactive drugs has set back depression therapy for 50 years already. Let's not set it back another 50 years by invoking a standard for safety that psychiatry itself has never met when it comes to SSRIs.





The constraints on the power of the federal government, as laid down in the constitution, have been eroded by a monopolistic medical profession administering a system of prescription laws that have, in effect, removed most of the drugs people want from the free market.
'Our Right to Drugs', Thomas Szasz






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










June 18, 2019
Looking for Magic in All the Wrong Places


Check out this line from “The Librarians,” spoken by a self-satisfied “magic hunter” who claims to understand M-Theory.


“Once I notice something, I can’t ignore it anymore. I have to find out everything about it.”


Really? Then why are you looking for magic in a Victorian frat house? Why not just walk outside and gather the psychoactive mushrooms that grow at your very feet? They are surely the ally “par excellence” in our search for magic in the world around us.

Instead, this know-it-all has censored her own search for magic, obediently looking for it only in those places that her government will allow her to look, in other words, in those places where she’s sure not to find it. The conclusion? This magic hunter can and does ignore things – so thoroughly, in fact, that she does not even realize that she is ignoring them! This self-induced amnesia is, in turn, a testament to the drug war’s insidious effect on free thinking.

She’s just as bamboozled by the drug war mindset as the fuddy-duddy professor in the same episode, the one who vehemently denies the very existence of magic. He’s correct, of course, but not for the reasons that he supposes: Magic really does not exist – but only because our government has criminalized the very plants and fungi that can open our eyes to it.





By means of this drug[LSD], people can view themselves objectively and can then accept themselves which is a great step forward in the care of mental illness.
Dr. Kahan, Executive Director Mental Health Saskatchewan, The Leader-Post, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, July 20, 1961






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










June 15, 2019
Richard Nixon Gets the Last Laugh on Baby Boomers


I can’t help but think of all the depressed Baby Boomers who are starting to molder away in nursing homes, thinking to themselves, “Well, at least we gave Richard Nixon the boot during the Watergate crisis!”

Really? Don’t they realize that Richard Nixon has had the last laugh on them after all with his anti-patient drug war? By denying the elderly access to their medicinal birthright, namely the therapeutic bounty of Mother Nature (magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, peyote, etc.), Nixon has single-handedly ensured that depression and fear of death will unnecessarily affect millions (perhaps even billions) as they approach what might otherwise have truly been their “golden years” of life.

To illustrate this sad reality, consider the following typical scene that is taking place, even as we speak, at a nursing home near you:

SKETCH 1

MARY: Life is shit.

NURSE: Now, Mary, be nice. You’ve got a nice bingo game to look forward to this afternoon.

MARY: Just let me die.

NURSE: Now, stop that, gloomy puss, or I’ll report you to Dr. Pillman, and you know what that means.

MARY: More brain-fogging drugs: I know, I know.

NURSE: That’s right.

MARY: You call this life? I can’t even walk by myself…

NURSE: I’ve been trying to get you to attend rehabilitation exercises ever since you moved in here.

MARY: Not much point in walking when the only destination round here is the gloomy group meeting room.

NURSE: Oh, snap out of it. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s a lovely day outside.

MARY: Oh, just let me sleep.

NURSE: You’ve been sleeping all night: now, get up and get dressed. You can’t play Bingo in your night gown.

MARY (softly): You know what you can do with your Bingo.

NURSE: I heard that, Mary!

Now fast-forward 50 years, to a day when the medicinal output of Mother Nature is actually legal to access (can you imagine that – a day when our government trusts us mere private citizens with the responsibility of legally accessing naturally growing plants! How considerate of them!):

SKETCH 2

MARY: Awesome!

NURSE: What’s that, Mary?

MARY: What are those tall spiky purple flowers growing outside the window there?

NURSE: Uh… that would be anise hyssop, if I’m not mistaken.

MARY: Do you know, I’m seeing flowers for the first time since last night’s psilocybin session?

NURSE: Be that as it may, you’d better get dressed if you’re going to attend today’s Bingo playoff.

MARY: What’s that line: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”?

NURSE: Oh, yes. Dylan Thomas, I think.

MARY: Do you know, I actually feel that force today, both inside and outside of me.

NURSE: Well, fine, you can tell the Bingo club all about it, but do get going now!

MARY: Bingo? What a silly game.

NURSE: Now, now.

MARY: But you know what, Ellie? I actually think that I can DO silly now, after last night’s session, I mean.

NURSE: Good for you, Mary.

MARY: Yeah, it’s funny, but I think I can actually DO silly now!

NURSE: Whatever you say, Mary, but chop-chop, double time!

Granted, that latter sketch represents a best-case scenario in which the proverbially stubborn mind of old age is made to yield to persuasive and targeted psychedelic therapy. That said, there is every reason to believe that psychedelic therapy can work wonders in a large proportion of cases when facilitated by a modern-day Shaman (i.e. an empathic caregiver with a thorough knowledge of the psychoactive power of plants). We know, after all, that such substances have the power to override the “default mode network” of thought. They can also grow new neural pathways. In other words, these plants are godsends that can facilitate a whole new era of empathic psychiatric practice. Unfortunately, modern psychiatry is doing its best to ignore this fact, as it stubbornly clings to its status quo practice of pushing addictive and dependence-causing pills on the public on behalf of Big Pharma.

Conclusion

The Baby Boomers may have successfully removed Nixon from office, but they also “fell” for Nixon’s superstitious and bigoted rhetoric about “drugs.” They cheered on the drug war, gladly offered to urinate for drug tests, and eagerly went to see the latest shoot-em-up movies about good patriotic Americans cracking heads in Colombia. The Baby Boomers thought: “Sure, why not? Let’s make Mother Nature illegal: it does not affect me, after all. To the contrary, it gives me some exciting movies to watch!"

But the Baby Boomers were wrong, as they are now learning to their cost. It turns out that the same drug war that cracked heads in Colombia for the last 50 years has stifled drug research in America for that same amount of time. The result: the elderly baby boomers are now forced to endure old age without the therapeutic godsends that would otherwise have accrued to them had the psychedelic renaissance of the 1950s and 60s been allowed to continue.

These depressed baby boomers believed in the “drug war.” Now they themselves must pay the price for that belief.





Any idea or act that gives men and women a sense of what their life is about or for-- that, in other words, gives their existence meaning and purpose-- is, properly speaking, religious.
Ceremonial Chemistry: The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers. Thomas Szasz.






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










June 9, 2019
Addiction Therapy in the Year 2100



(a philosophical satire written to encourage a complete rethinking of our modern attitudes toward addiction and its treatment)


SCENE: 12 adults seated in a circle.

JOHN SMITH: My name is John Smith and I’m a miserable wretch.

[GROUP MEMBERS TITTER RELUCTANTLY, FINALLY BREAKING OUT INTO FULL-BLOWN LAUGHTER]

SMITH: What? What’s so funny?

[LAUGHTER CONTINUES]

LEADER: You’ll have to forgive us, Johnny boy, but you must not get around much these days.

SMITH: What do you mean? I thought the whole point of addiction therapy was for me to find the protestant God of the Bible.

LEADER: Oh, yeah?

SMITH: Or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.

[LAUGHTER RESUMES]

SMITH: That’s why I started out with the customary self-abasement and grovelling.

LEADER: That is so 21st century of you, dawg. The point of modern therapy is simply to SHOW YOU GOD – or “at least a reasonable facsimile thereof,” as you put it.

SMITH: What?

LEADER: Everything else follows from that point, bruh: self-respect, respect for others, temperance, you name it.

SMITH: And just how do you intend to show me God?!

LEADER: Earth to Smith: Americans stopped criminalizing Mother Nature over fifty years ago!!!

SMITH: Meaning?

LEADER: Meaning we have amassed a whole pharmacy worth of psychoactive plants and fungi with which we can now ceremonially lead you on a voyage of inner discovery…

SMITH: Yeah?

LEADER: …after which you’ll see the folly of addiction – always assuming, of course, that you enter our program in good faith, committed to learning from Mother Nature.

SMITH: Oh.

LEADER: Get it?

SMITH (reluctantly): Well… I guess…

LEADER: Good.

SMITH: All I can say is that the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous is probably rolling over in his grave right now.

LEADER: To the contrary, the legendary Bill W. was a big fan of treating addiction with LSD therapy…

SMITH: Really?

LEADER: Until a corrupt politician by the name of Richard Nixon criminalized the substance in his effort to crack down on hippies.

SMITH: Oh.

LEADER: That’s right: “Alcoholics be damned,” said Nixon, “as long as I can get my own back against Timothy Leary!”

SMITH: Fair enough, I guess, but…

LEADER: Yes?

SMITH: I still don’t get how you’re gonna make me see God.

LEADER: As far as the specifics of the process, I’d better turn you over to our team pharmacologist, Terence McKenna VIII. Terence?

TERENCE: Well, jefe, the precise combination of plants that we use is a trade secret, of course, kind of like the 11 herbs and spices still used to this very day by KFC.

LEADER: True dat. (Love me some KFC.)

TERENCE: But I can give you a random list of some of the big-hitters in our line-up of therapeutic plants.

LEADER: Proceed when ready.

TERENCE: We’ve got Acorus calamus, Amanita muscaria, Anadenantherea peregrina, Ariocarpus retusus Scheidw, Atropa belladonna, banisteriopsis caapi, Boletus manicus Heim—

LEADER: Enough, dawg. We don’t want to provide a shopping list for our competitors in the therapy biz.

TERENCE: Not to worry, bruh: these substances are useless (yea, even deadly) when used in the wrong doses…

LEADER: I heard that.

TERENCE: …or in the wrong set and setting.

JOHN: But then why are we sitting around in a circle?

LEADER: So you guys can get acquainted before we start our plant-guided rituals next week.

JOHN: Oh.

LEADER: Speaking of which, why don’t you introduce yourself again?

JOHN: OK.

LEADER: But this time, go easy on the self-abasement, would ya?

JOHN: Will do.

LEADER: I think we can take it as a given that we all have much to learn from our plant friends. No need to dwell morbidly on that fact during this introductory session.





What has three letters and ruins the lives of people who want to maximize their potential using time-honored natural plants?
The DEA.






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










June 7, 2019
The Hypocrisy of the Gun-Owning Drug Warrior


It’s amazing how many American gun owners fiercely defend their right to firearms while gladly relinquishing their right to the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet. Talk about misplaced priorities! Any government that claims the right to criminalize naturally growing plants will not refrain from outlawing man-made firearms should the winds of political expediency happen to blow in that direction. Yet these gun owners gladly (and even proudly) support the Drug War’s efforts to keep naturally-occurring plant remedies out of the hands of those who need them most: the depressed, the lonely, the anxious, and the victims of chronic pain – all because our government (conveniently assisted by tabloid journalism and a self-interested medical establishment) has launched a propaganda campaign to paint all such users of these substances as irresponsible outlaws and hooligans.

Gun owners like to style themselves as defenders of liberty, insisting proudly with Clint Eastwood that:


“They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.”


But if these gun fanatics were truly interested in individual rights (and not just in the fetishization of this man-made object known as a “gun”), then they would transform their defiant mantra as follows:


“They can have my psilocybin mushroom when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.”







If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










June 6, 2019
Alan Schatzberg's One-Sided Views on Ketamine


The following is my reply to Mandy Erickson's article entitled 5 Questions: Alan Schatzberg urges cautious approach to ketamine use, posted on the Stanford Medicine News Center website on June 5, 2019.

1) While recreational addiction to ketamine should be taken into account, Schatzberg should distinguish between the daily use of ketamine at high abusive doses and the intermittent use of ketamine at lower therapeutic doses. To fail to do so is to ignore the basic fact of pharmacology: that any substance that is good at one level (whether it’s salt or ketamine) can be fatal at a higher level. Alan’s un-nuanced thoughts on this subject pander (albeit unwittingly) to the anti-patient mindset of the Drug Warrior, which says that if a substance can be misused by a subset of young adults, that substance must therefore be withheld from all responsible patients who are in need of that substance’s therapeutic benefits. It is dogmatic thinking like this that has withheld non-addictive antidepressant medicines from the public now for the last half-century, forcing us instead to become chemically dependent on the few remaining legal antidepressants that Schatzberg appears to champion.

2) Like most materialist scientists, Schatzberg has nothing but scorn for the dissociative state induced by ketamine, referring to it as "wigging out." There is, however, reason to believe that the dissociative state is a crucial factor in the ability of psychedelics to override the "mental default mode," thereby allowing the depressed patient to think more creatively about their condition and the world around them. For evidence of this claim, I would point Schatzberg to the detailed accounts of researchers such as Roland Griffiths and Amanda Feilding in "Psychedelic Medicine," 2017, Park Street Press, compiled by Richard Louis Miller.

3) Schatzberg speculates that esketamine may induce “a sort of dependence” because clinical studies have shown that depression returns in some folks who are taken off of the J&J spray in clinical trials. But this is just a case of putting a negative spin on a positive outcome. For if esketamine really works in a uniquely powerful way to break through the mental fog of depression, what could be more natural than that depression would return for those who stop using esketamine? If the returned depression now seems worse, it’s only because the patient is now comparing their dreary lifelong status quo to a new higher level of reality that he or she had not even known existed prior to using the spray.

4) Schatzberg seems to fear that such an efficacious but temporarily acting drug would need to be taken for a lifetime, but surely psychiatrists cannot complain about that. They routinely prescribe SSRIs ”for life” (although most of them were never originally intended as long-term cures) and some of these mass-produced anti-depressants are so chemically habituating that the patient could not cease to use them prematurely even if they wanted to. Effexor, for instance, is arguably the most chemically addicting substance on the planet. According to a recent study by the NIH, over 90% of long-term users were back on Effexor within three years after weaning themselves off of the drug.

In short, if modern psychiatrists want to argue convincingly against using ketamine to fight depression, they’ll have to do better than merely suggesting that it could cause “a sort of dependence.”





The plain historical facts are that before 1914, there was no "drug problem" in the United States; nor did we have a name for it.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz.






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










June 5, 2019
This is your brain on Effexor


In response to the article entitled Psychedelic drugs: would you accept a prescription? It depends if you’ve tried them before by Adam Winstock and Rupert McShane.

1) Let's not rush to dismiss the dissociative state as a mere "side effect" of ketamine. Recent research suggests that it is precisely this dissociative state that helps the user rise above the so-called "default mode network" in their brain, thus enabling them to see their problems in a new, more creative light.

Let's not let today's materialist bias in science bring us to rashly assume that the psychedelic aspect of the ketamine experience is something that we should try to dispense with. It may be the goose that lays the golden therapeutic eggs.

2) The negative attitudes toward psychedelics that you reference are a mere artifact of the Drug War, during which the Drug Warrior has considered hyperbole and lies to be fair game in their fanatical efforts to denounce all illegal psychoactive substances. The Partnership for a Drug Free America bamboozled a whole generation of Americans with their ad which featured an egg sizzling on a frying pan while the deep-throated voice-over warned the viewer that "This is your brain on drugs."

This was an outright lie when it comes to psychedelics. Far from frying your brain, drugs like psilocybin, ayahuasca, and even ketamine have been shown to grow new neural pathways, new neural connections, and even new neurons.

Ironically, the "frying pan ad" would make sense if its purpose were to warn us about Effexor, a standard SSRI anti-depressant which has turned out to cause chemical dependency and anhedonia in long-term users. As a long-term user myself, I actually do have the feeling that Effexor is, slowly but surely, frying my brain. It's certainly not providing me with any creative insights into my condition here on planet earth, as psychedelics have been shown to do.

3) As for those in the survey who "wouldn't touch psychedelics," let's ask them again when they are considering psychedelic therapy as an alternative to committing suicide. Hopefully at that time, they won't be so bamboozled by our Drug War superstitions as to opt for the latter of those two choices.

4) Like most articles about treating depression, this one downplays the problems with the status quo. Commonly prescribed SSRIs such as Effexor create such a chemical dependence that users literally cannot kick the habit (according to a recent report by the NIH, which shows a relapse rate of 95% in those who attempt to "kick" Effexor after long-term use).

As for Prozac, the question in the new age of psychedelic therapy will no longer be: does Prozac "work," but does Prozac help you "be all that you can be"? The answer, from my experience, is a definitive no. To the contrary, SSRIs in general prevent you from being all that you can be, since the user is debarred from using psychedelics to improve their cognitive resourcefulness.

This is because mixing most psychedelics with SSRIs causes symptoms of Serotonin Toxicity Syndrome. (Happily, ketamine is a rare exception to this rule and can be combined safely with many SSRIs.)

5) Finally, the price point for legal ketamine treatment is an outrage and points to a fundamental problem with the current healthcare system in America, if not the world. A depressed person of modest means might scrape together the 3,000 required for an initial two-week session of ketamine infusions, but only a depressed fat-cat will be able to afford the biweekly follow-ups of ketamine spray at $600 a pop. Meanwhile a street dose of the drug costs a mere $8.

Given that outrageous price disparity, can we really blame the depressed for violating our superstitious drug laws in order to access crucial treatment? It is not the safe route, of course, but it is the one that we are encouraging with our current Nixonian drug policies and their disastrous effects on drug availability and pricing.





The plain historical facts are that before 1914, there was no "drug problem" in the United States; nor did we have a name for it.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz.






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










June 2, 2019
Ketamine Bashing at UroToday.com


I submitted the following complaint/comment to UroToday.com after reading their ketamine-bashing article by Thenappan Chandrasekar (see hyperlink below).

Good morning.

I am writing to express my concern about an article entitled AUA 2019: Urological Association of Asia Lecture: Ketamine Uropathy: A Decade On by Thenappan Chandrasekar.

The article discusses urinary problems associated with ketamine abuse but says nothing about the effects of ketamine when used at rational doses, nor does the article even mention the fact that ketamine is being used successfully today to treat depression. I know your site is about urology, but your writers should not ignore the rest of the world. By doing so, they give the impression that ketamine is a terrible drug, when in reality it is a life saver for depressed patients.

As a depressed patient myself who is interested in undergoing ketamine therapy, I wanted to double-check your article’s implicit claim that ketamine was bad for everyone. So I spoke by phone to Dr. Gerald Grass, founder of the Ketamine Institute and former director of the Yale Pain Medicine Fellowship Program. He told me that he has never encountered bladder problems in patients who have used ketamine at prescribed levels. You should clarify this in your articles. (He also pointed out that many ketamine abusers are known to abuse other drugs as well, meaning that the bladder problems being reported may be exacerbated or even caused by chemical agents other than ketamine.)

Regarding Dr. Chu, the featured scientist in your article: She claims that her biggest accomplishment was making harsher penalties for ketamine use in Hong Kong. She apparently felt that these penalties were necessary because ketamine could cause bladder problems at high doses. But under the same rationale, she should be pushing to ban Tylenol in Hong Kong, too, since it can cause liver problems at high doses.

In short, her conclusions about ketamine are illogical and unscientific. Scientists and philosophers have known from the time of the Ancient Greeks that substances are neither good nor bad in the abstract: they are good or bad depending on the doses at which they are used. There’s no reason to ban salt, for instance, merely because it would kill you if you ate two pounds of it at one sitting.

Dr. Chu's illogical crusade against ketamine demonstrates what's wrong with Drug Warriors: they always want to create laws to target drug abusers; what they forget is that those same laws that they create are going to have a huge negative impact on those who wish to use the drugs in question in a responsible way and for good reasons.

I find it highly improbable that Dr. Chu’s efforts to further criminalize ketamine have wiped out ketamine abuse in Hong Kong, as she claims. But even if that were so, she has no reason to pat herself on the back. For those same efforts of hers have also ensured that thousands of depressed and suicidal residents of Hong Kong will have to wait many years, perhaps many decades, to receive those reasonable and therapeutic doses of ketamine that might have even saved their lives.





The plain historical facts are that before 1914, there was no "drug problem" in the United States; nor did we have a name for it.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz.






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










May 30, 2019
What Psychotherapists Can Learn from Drug Dealers


So, you’re hooked on the antidepressant Effexor, which you find to be increasingly ineffective and mind-numbing. You’d like to switch to the therapeutic use of psychedelics (presumably available somewhere in South America) to truly lift you above the fog of depression.

Let’s first imagine what psychotherapy can do for you, and then let’s see what a savvy drug dealer has to offer.

WHAT PSYCHOTHERAPY CAN DO

DOC: So, Brian, you want to get off of Effexor in order to try new psychedelic treatments?

BRIAN: Bingo, Doc. You got it in one.

DOC: Because psychedelics can't be used by folks taking most SSRIs.

BRIAN: That's right.

DOC: Well, I'm sorry, my man, but the latest NIH study shows that getting off of Effexor is essentially impossible.

BRIAN: WHAT?

DOC: Yes. They found there’s a 96% relapse rate within three years for those who have weaned off of it.

BRIAN: That’s horrible.

DOC: To the contrary, that shows that Effexor works!

BRIAN: What?!

DOC: It must work, since you get so damn depressed after giving it up!

BRIAN: Huh? It works??? [mumbling] Apparently my emotions never got the memo!

DOC: What’s that, Brian?

BRIAN: Never mind.

WHAT A SAVVY DRUG DEALER CAN DO

DEALER: So, Brian, you want to get off of Effexor in order to try new psychedelic treatments?

BRIAN: Bingo, dawg. You got it in one.

DEALER: No problemo.

BRIAN: Sweet.

DEALER: We’ll decrease your Effexor intake by 25mgs per week…

BRIAN: Yes, yes?

DEALER: …while occasionally giving you some unidentified “happy pills” to help you through the negative symptoms and to give you incentive for achieving your goal.

BRIAN: Cool beans.

DEALER: In other words, no matter how bad it gets on a given day, you’ll always know that you’re less than a few days away from a sweeeeet-feeling break from your withdrawal symptoms!

BRIAN: Fair enough.

DEALER: And that will keep you going, get it?

BRIAN: I got it.

DEALER: It’s just plain common psychological sense after all.

BRIAN: But what if I get addicted to the happy pills?

DEALER: Not to worry, dawg. Unlike modern-day psychiatry, I have a large enough pharmacopeia available to me that I can give you a variety of feel-good drugs, each of which works by different mechanisms, hence you will not become addicted…

BRIAN: Cool.

DEALER: …certainly not as addicted as those bastards made you to Effexor, which they now say that you can NEVER get off of!

BRIAN: Now, now, be nice.

DEALER: Then, once I’ve got you off that Big Pharma junk and kept you from freaking out…

BRIAN: Yes, yes.

DEALER: …we can switch you to that non-addictive psychedelic therapy that you hanker after.

BRIAN: You rock, dawg.

DEALER: Hey, I’m only doing my job.

BRIAN: Yeah. Now if psychiatry would only do THEIR job and actually start making people feel good – rather than serving as a mere distribution arm for Big freakin’ Pharma.

Disclaimer: Relax, I’m not suggesting that anyone visit a drug dealer to beat depression; I’m just satirically pointing out some inconvenient truths about the sorry state of psychotherapy in America, where the “pharmacopeia” for fighting depression consists of a mere handful of synthetic drugs that foster chemical dependence – and which debar the user from trying any of the new potent therapeutic psychedelics that are showing such promise in recently revived clinical trials.






Local medical research has so far indicated that these drugs [LSD], when properly used by trained personnel in a psychiatric setting, bring about the release of long-repressed thoughts and emotions, intensify early memory, and generally enhance perception in ways that promote self-understanding and personality growth in persons with mental and emotional problems.
Hawaii Medical Association, as reported in The Honolulu Advertiser, September 12, 1960






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










May 29, 2019
Drugging Our Kids on Behalf of Eli Lilly


Posted in response to When anxiety happens as early as preschool, treatments can help by Sujata Gupta in Science News magazine, April 21, 2019.

Isn't Big Pharma happy enough having 1 in 6 adult Americans on SSRIs? Now they have to go after the preschool market? This is irresponsible in the extreme (see Richard Whitaker's "Anatomy of an Epidemic" for many of the obvious reasons why this is immoral). What about the demoralizing effect of placing a child on a substance that could make them a pill popper for life? and the anhedonia that eventually results from such a regimen? Why should we trust psychiatry to treat our child when their "go to" pharmacopeia consists of a mere handful of chemically addicting drugs -- while hundreds of powerful non-addictive psychoactive medicines are growing at our very feet but are outlawed by our anti-patient drug wars? Let's not fog the kids' minds to make them manageable in the short run, only to make them chemically dependent in the long run.





Local medical research has so far indicated that these drugs [LSD], when properly used by trained personnel in a psychiatric setting, bring about the release of long-repressed thoughts and emotions, intensify early memory, and generally enhance perception in ways that promote self-understanding and personality growth in persons with mental and emotional problems.
Hawaii Medical Association, as reported in The Honolulu Advertiser, September 12, 1960






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










May 27, 2019
How Huston Smith was Bamboozled by the Drug War


The late Huston Smith ended his preface to the second edition of “The Road to Eleusis” by posing the following question:


“Can a way be found to legitimize, as the Greeks did, the creative, constructive use of entheogenic heaven and hell without aggravating our serious drug problem?”


The very wording of this question suggests that Huston was writing under the influence of Richard Nixon’s muddle-headed drug policy. Can psychedelic medicines be used without aggravating the drug problem? The question is beside the point.

The real question is:


Did government have the right to outlaw access to the freely given bounty of Mother Nature in the first place?


For those of us who insist that the answer is a loud “no,” it is superfluous to worry about any hypothetical misuse of the substances in question: psychoactive plants and fungi are both freely bestowed gifts of Mother Nature: get over it. If a minority of citizens are hellbent on misusing plants and fungi, that does not imply that our birthright to Mother Nature’s bounty should be withdrawn from everyone, any more than we should renounce jury trials, property ownership, or free speech, merely because some people are determined to abuse those rights.

When we fail to acknowledge Mother Nature’s bounty as a birthright, we fall prey to the childish Drug War assumption that any scandalous newspaper story about drug abuse presents, in and of itself, a knock-down argument in favor of drug prohibition. The hypocrisy of this assumption becomes clear when we consider that the folks who hold such a view would never want to fight drunk driving by banning liquor, even after reading a news article about the death of a dozen or more young children in a horrible drink-related accident.

Whence the double standard? It results from the fact that the Drug War propagandists have taught us to see all illegal drug use as hedonistic, as lacking any therapeutic or cognitive benefits, and thus we feel free to hold such use to a standard of safety that can never be met – since there will always be some “drug-related” scandal somewhere that’s vying for space in the local tabloid.

That’s why the DEA continues to lie to this day by denying the therapeutic value of psychoactive plants in its self-serving and anti-patient drug scheduling system; for if they actually told the truth, Americans would see that the DEA’s chief “success” over the past 50 years has been withholding valuable psychoactive cures from suffering soldiers and the millions of other victims of depression and PTSD.

Can psychedelic medicines be used without aggravating the drug problem?

One is tempted to “play ball” with Huston and answer his question by pointing out that psychedelics WERE indeed used in a safe and effective manner before the arrival of Richard Nixon’s drug war, as therapy for alcoholics and the chronically depressed. But by thus answering Huston’s question prosaically and with a straight face, the respondent “signs off” on Huston’s problematic assumption that government had a right to take naturally growing entheogens from Americans in the first place.

They didn’t – and those of us who promote the spiritual use of entheogens should go on the offensive to point that fact out loudly and clearly, that the government has stolen our God-given birthright. There is no need whatsoever to go on the defensive, as Huston’s question implies, to assure our materialist opponents that these psychoactive substances will never be misused after they regain their time-honored legal status. That would be like arguing for freedom of speech in a totalitarian country by assuring one’s fascist opponents that this particular freedom will never be abused. Not only is it impossible to give such a guarantee, but we’re under no obligation to provide it given the fundamental nature of the right that we are demanding.





[Dr. Watt declares] that the moderate use of opium is not more injurious than the moderate use of alcohol and even that its abusive use is less destructive to its victims than intemperance.
The Freeman's Journal, Dublin, Ireland, October 31, 1891






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










May 25, 2019
Too White to Use Mushrooms


In 1975, a U.S. court ruled that the Church of the Awakening could not use “magic mushrooms” in its rituals because (get this…) the congregants were white and hence came from a people that had no history of using entheogens in religious ceremonies.

First, that premise is wrong (besides being blatantly racist, of course). The Eleusinian Mysteries were celebrated in the West on a yearly basis for almost 2,000 years, and this longevity (along with the many mystical accounts of the rite) only makes sense under the supposition that a powerful entheogen was involved. You don’t continue a tradition 2,000 years, non-stop, if it’s just another convivial fad.

Second: based on this rationale, I could never convert to Islam because “my people” had no experience with that religion. Nor need we grant civil rights to African-Americans under this theory since they often came from non-democratic countries that had no history of such protections.

In other words, the 1975 ruling reveals the fundamental tyranny of the Drug War: not only does it deny Americans the pursuit of happiness (by outlawing the substances that can facilitate that happiness) but any exceptions to the rule are based on racist and anti-democratic rationales.

What could be less American than telling me that I cannot attend a given church due to the color my skin?




"With LSD as an aid," the report said, "it has been possible to reach and work with patients who are otherwise unresponsive to psychotherapy."
Kingsport News, March 4, 1960






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










May 19, 2019
My Cure for Addiction


I’m watching another one of those movies wherein the antihero is struggling with opioid addiction and is constantly tempted to relapse. Movies like this are always depressing because Hollywood (like western society itself) considers such serious addictions to be largely unbeatable. The viewer just knows that the on-screen addict is going to eventually relapse – and for the rest of the movie, the addict is behaving so damn anxiously that the viewer almost wishes they WOULD relapse at long last and get it over with! At least they’d be happy for a few more moments in their otherwise miserable lives!

But, Earth to Hollywood: there is an answer to this problem of opioid addiction, even though it’s one that our puritanical and materialist mindset has so far refused to even imagine, let alone to thoughtfully consider.

DIRECTIONS:

You set these nervous nellies up on a monthly (or even bi-monthly) schedule to visit a psychiatrist’s office, where an empathic spiritual guide administers psychedelics (anything from vision-making LSD to the pseudo-psychedelic ketamine) to a group of addicts in a set and setting that’s designed to give them peace and to facilitate self-understanding. You then proceed to wean them off of the opioids on a slow-but-steady basis.

That’s it. Cure accomplished.

Why would this work, you ask?

The simple psychological fact (always ignored by materialist psychiatry) is that an addict can easily put up with the downtimes in their life PROVIDED THAT they can see a ray of light at the end of the anxiety-spawning tunnel that they appear to inhabit. They don’t need to take the traditional addictive meds such as Valium or Xanax every day of their life to cope with their emotional downtimes, they simply need to know – for certain – that help is on the way. The reason that an addict stares so wistfully at that remaining supply of fentanyl that they’ve hidden in their dresser drawer is because they have no other relief to look forward to, no guarantee of ever regaining the peace of mind that they seek except through the use of that one particular substance to which they’ve become addicted.

But by instituting the psychedelic therapy suggested above, the addict suddenly DOES have the realistic hope of achieving peace and understanding WITHOUT the use of terribly addictive substances. And so these monthly psychedelic sessions are valuable in two separate senses: first, they foster self-insight through the psychoactive properties of the psychedelic drugs themselves; and second, they make life psychologically bearable for the addict, since he or she knows that they are never more than one month away from experiencing at least a modicum of peace and understanding that these psychedelic sessions provide, hence they have the incentive and patience to withstand the siren call of the opiates. Again, this is because the opiates no longer have a monopoly when it comes to making them feel “okay with their world.”

Why is this obvious cure for addiction never even considered by western society, let alone made available to the psychologically suffering on an ASAP basis? It’s because of our anti-patient drug laws that are created and supported by the unholy trinity of puritanism, materialism, and law-and-order conservatism. Puritans mistrust ecstasy, materialists dislike emotions, and law-and-order conservatives assume that those who use psychedelics are mere hedonists – and worse yet, they are hedonists that can be counted on to vote for the other candidate in every election (which is little wonder, really, considering the conservative’s brainless determination to rid the world of powerful non-addictive treatments for depression and addiction).

DISCLAIMER: The purpose of this article is merely to advance a philosophical rationale for treating addiction with psychedelics. Any specific therapy of this kind would, of course, require the involvement of a qualified physician to determine the relevant kinds and doses of psychedelics to achieve the desired effect given the patient’s history and the precise details of their addiction.





The constraints on the power of the federal government, as laid down in the constitution, have been eroded by a monopolistic medical profession administering a system of prescription laws that have, in effect, removed most of the drugs people want from the free market.
'Our Right to Drugs', Thomas Szasz






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










May 18, 2019
The Philosophy of Getting High


The world has been so thoroughly bamboozled by Richard Nixon’s jaundiced view of so-called “drugs” that it cannot begin to visualize anybody “getting high” for any but the most selfish and irresponsible of reasons. This is a shame, because the philosophical mindset of the Western world was chiefly established by folks who got high. In fact, these people not only got high, but they considered their moments of inebriation to be the best and (ironically) the most real moments of their lives. I’m speaking, of course, about the famous alumni of those long-running Eleusinian mysteries (circa 1600 b.c.e. to 392 c.e.), wherein a psychoactive substance (probably ergot) was used to put the participant in touch with immortality and the meaning of life.

Socrates’ belief in forms, Aristotle’s belief in catharsis, Plutarch’s belief in an afterlife: these were not just armchair philosophies based on abstract premises: these were truths that were confirmed to the ancient Greeks and Romans upon drinking the psychedelic kykeon. The fact that we modern humans disdainfully refer to such profound experiences as “getting high” betrays our puritan distaste for improving our consciousness with the help of Mother Nature’s bounty. This distaste might have originally been justified on religious grounds, perhaps under the assumption that such a psychedelic intervention was somehow an affront to the deity, but in these modern agnostic times, we have no such religious excuse for ignoring the therapeutic value of drug-induced ecstasy.

Unfortunately, our puritan biases are so ingrained that it took the disingenuous bluster of only one determined law-and-order politician, namely Richard Nixon, to revive our contempt for any pharmacologically altered state of consciousness. (Almost overnight, truth seekers became scumbags, should they attempt to fathom the world with the help of natural psychoactive substances.) And thus Richard Nixon forced us by law to “just say no” to almost 2,000 years’ worth of compelling evidence for the therapeutic value of psychedelic drugs, forcing the depressed wisdom seeker to rely instead on legal drugs that fogged the mind rather than illuminating it.

But then Nixon was not the first despot to tell us to “just say no” to drug-induced mental clarity and cosmological insight. The Eleusinian mysteries were shut down in 392 c.e., not because they were a long-running fad that had finally run its course, but because the Christian emperor Theodosius saw the popular mysteries as a challenge to Christian orthodoxy – more proof (at least to those ears that will hear) that the modern Drug War represents the establishment of a de facto religion, albeit a materialist religion that takes a dim view of Mother Nature and of its potential role in improving human consciousness.
The Philosophy of Getting High




The plain historical facts are that before 1914, there was no "drug problem" in the United States; nor did we have a name for it.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz.






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










May 15, 2019
How Americans Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Drug War


It all started in 1914 when bigoted politician Francis Burton Harrison decided that lower-class Americans could not be trusted to use opium wisely. Suddenly Mother Nature went from being a gift-giving goddess to a common drug kingpin. Enter Richard Nixon in the sixties, who decided to further blaspheme Mother Nature by criminalizing a host of additional psychoactive substances that happened to be used by his political enemies.

It’s always disappointed me that Americans have thus far hobbled together so little pushback against this denial of a birthright, this outlawing of the freely given gifts of Mother Nature, this unprecedented coup against the therapeutic goddess of humanity. The government took away our right to control our own pain and to control our own psychic condition and Americans seem to have merely sighed, asking their government, “Okay, so you want me to give up my natural birthright? Fair enough. Oh, and you want me to urinate on command to prove that I am faithful to my government? No problemo. Gee, isn’t democracy just swell?”

Nowadays, when the DEA asks us to jump, American’s simply say “How high?”

For just one obvious example, browse some mycology pages online. You’ll find that many mushroom hunters (professionals and hobbyists alike) want it to be known that they will have nothing to do with psychedelic mushrooms that they happen to come across. “Look at me,” they seem to say, “I’m a professional mushroom hunter who is obediently ignoring the most interesting part of Mother Nature at the behest of the U.S. government. So don’t expect me to write anything about your tawdry psychedelic shrooms!” Far from screaming bloody murder about their unprecedented loss of human rights, their forced separation from Mother Nature’s bounty, many online mycologists pride themselves in pointing out that they study only those plants that their government will allow them to study. Thus they recast their own political timidity as patriotism.

But America’s response to this usurpation has been even worse than that. We have rewritten history so that we do not have to confront the fact that we have criminalized Mother Nature in the first place. This can be seen by any regular viewer of the Great Courses program, a collection of videos presenting college courses taught by some of the most popular professors in the world.

Although I am a regular viewer of the Teaching Company’s courses, I’ve yet to see one of their history professors so much as acknowledge the fact that the game-changing Elusinian mysteries of ancient Greece involved the use of a naturally occurring psychoactive substance similar to LSD. I’ve yet to see one of their biology professors allude to the psychoactive power of mushrooms. I’ve yet to see one of their anthropologists discuss the crucial role of natural psychedelic medicines in early South American ritual. Nor have I ever seen one of their political science professors ever mention the infamous DEA raid on Monticello in discussing the political legacy of Thomas Jefferson.

I guess this makes sense. It would be too painful for a supposedly free people to remember what we’ve given up, so we have rewritten history to help us pretend that Mother Nature’s pharmacy was never particularly useful to us in the first place. “Humph! Mother Nature: who needs her? Let the government and Big Pharma decide what I need – and when – and at what price, too.”

The good news is: modern research is showing us today how so many of the natural substances that our politicians have outlawed are proving to be godsends in therapeutic settings. My hope is that the penny will eventually drop and we’ll draw the obvious conclusion from this research, namely that no naturally occurring plant is bad in and of itself, and that, as Terence McKenna once said, it is “ridiculous and obnoxious” to criminalize the freely offered medicines of Mother Nature. Perhaps someday we’ll learn the ultimate lesson from today’s anti-patient drug war: that it is both scientifically stupid and a violation of basic human rights to turn Mother Nature into a drug kingpin.





"With LSD as an aid," the report said, "it has been possible to reach and work with patients who are otherwise unresponsive to psychotherapy."
Kingsport News, March 4, 1960






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










May 10, 2019
Fifty Years of Bogus Articles about Creativity


I was recently moping around my local Kroger’s food store, waiting for the refill on the Effexor to which I am chemically addicted, when I noticed a colorful Time supplement entitled “The Science of Creativity” in the magazine aisle. “Great,” I thought to myself, “here’s another politically correct attempt at explaining creativity without reference to the psychoactive substances that can so obviously help one achieve it.”

Mind you, I haven’t read the supplement, and maybe Time magazine got it right, but I’m not optimistic given the plethora of timid tips on cultivating creativity that have passed for self-help in American journalism over the past 50 years of psychoactive prohibition. Authors on feel-good pieces about creativity have never been in a hurry to rock the boat by suggesting the politically incorrect fact that psychoactive substances can generate creativity out of whole cloth in a receptive mind under the right circumstances.

Why this huge omission?

It’s based on the unspoken Drug War assumption that psychoactive substances are (drumroll, please) evil ”drugs” that must be avoided at all costs (as opposed to socially blessed “medicines,” of course), and therefore the less said about these evil “drugs,” the better... when in reality, a substance is a substance is a substance – and is only good or bad as any specific use should prove it to be.

But thanks to the political manipulation of the discussion by the Richard Nixons of the world, we Americans (and our global counterparts, whom we have financially blackmailed into adopting our own jaundiced viewpoint on this matter) take a Christian Science view of psychoactive drugs and thus have the puritanical expectation that “true” creativity is that which occurs without the influence of chemical substances – as if the human mind is ever free of chemical substances in the first place. The only real question, of course, is: which chemical substances should we knowingly imbibe?

The Drug War answer is simple: “Any drugs, as long as they do not provide anything that could be remotely considered to be a ‘high’.” And so the Drug War signs off on anhedonia-causing anti-depressants that foster chemical dependency while yet reviling non-addictive psychoactive drugs which have the unseemly property of actually making the user feel good in real-time. ("How scandalous is that!" cries today's stealth puritan.) In other words, the Drug War is not based on a rational concern for human welfare; it is just the modern-day expression of the know-nothing prudery of the 17th-century puritan, from whose misogynist and myopic mindset we have inherited today’s illogical antipathy to Mother Nature’s psychoactive medicines.

And so the clever modern articles about creativity provide the reader with only the most feeble hints as to how human beings can actually achieve the creative state: “get your omega-3’s, sleep eight hours a night, eat whatever vegetable is currently at the top of science’s ever-changing healthy food list, yada yada yada.” Meanwhile, the authors on the subject of creativity willfully ignore the psychedelic gorilla in the room: namely, the fact that psychoactive drugs in the right setting can work wonders in generating the kind of free mindset that these authors are attempting to describe and recommend. It’s as though the clueless authors were sitting outdoors beside a half-dozen psilocybin mushrooms in full bloom, asking themselves, as they look up at the sky with wrinkled eyebrows: “Gee, why is it so dashed hard for we adult human beings to be creative???”

Any sensible onlooker wants to shout at them: “Hello? You’re sitting right next to a blankety-blank batch of magic mushrooms, for God’s sake!”





In B.C. [British Columbia]... LSD has produced 70 percent "cures" among 60 alcoholics at Hollywood Hosptical within the past nine months, according to medical director Dr. J. Ross MacLean.
The Vancouver Sun, August 11, 1959






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










April 29, 2019
The Drug War = Christian Science


Philosophically speaking, the Drug War is merely Christian Science as applied to psychoactive drugs. It is premised on an article of faith: namely, that the best life is one lived without the aid of psychoactive medicines. Therefore it is a violation of Church and State when government tells me I must live my life according to the Drug War ethic of prohibition. For I do not find it morally reprehensible for a man or woman to access the medicinal bounty of Mother Nature to improve his or her mind. It is not part of MY religion to repelled by such behavior. To the contrary, I find it a moral responsibility to be all that I can be in this life, and if that goal can be aided by Mother Nature's plants, herbs, and fungi, then I consider it a moral obligation to pursue that enlightenment.




In southern Mexico, the jail and prison officials experience great difficulty in trying to prevent the smuggling into their institutions of the seductive mariguana (sic). This is a kind of "loco" weed more powerful than opium.
The Iola Daily Record, Iola, Kansas, Jan 1, 1900






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










April 27, 2019
The Hypocrisy of Bhutan's Gross National Happiness


Response to the article entitled 'The Laws and Drugs' on the Kuensel website:

The country of Bhutan claims to measure success by the statistic of Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Product. This is ironic, because Bhutan also outlaws the very medicines that can help its citizens achieve that happiness. In this way, Bhutan is just like the United States, where the government guarantees the pursuit of happiness while outlawing the medicinal means to attain it. Even as I type this sentence, thousands of Americans are on the brink of suicide, yet the administration of a non-addictive substance known as ketamine or psilocybin could almost instantly give them the mental resources to carry on and even thrive in life. But governments like Bhutan continue to follow the lead of corrupt president Richard Nixon in denying these lifesaving medications to the desperate and even jailing those who dare to acquire them.

Gross national happiness, indeed. The only people made happy by Bhutan’s drug war are law enforcement officials, who see their workload increase every year as their government cracks down on their citizens’ right to freely access the medicinal output of Mother Nature.






Who barged on to Jefferson's Monticello and destroyed Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants? 1) The Mob 2) Juvenile delinquents 3) Terrorists 4) The DEA
The DEA






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










April 26, 2019
Why I'm Afraid to Get 'High'


I'm afraid to purchase the new book by David Sheff entitled 'High,' because I'm sure that the author is going to base his arguments on the usual flawed premises of the Drug War, namely that there are two types of substances in the world: medicines, which are hunky-dory and prescribed by board-certified doctors (insert harp music here), and "drugs," which are evil incarnate and are purchased and used only by hedonists and ne'er-do-wells (insert heavy metal music here). I suspect this first because of the sensational title of the book, which uses the morally charged word 'high' to describe a "drug" experience, and second, because the book's subtitle is: "Everything you want to know about drugs, alcohol and addiction." By using the term "drugs" in this negative content, it is clear that Sheff accepts the aforementioned assumption of the drug war and will therefore concern himself with illegal drugs only when warning us about substance abuse, as if the illegality of a substance makes it dangerous, not the objective health risks posed by the substance itself -- in which case Sheff should devote a whole chapter, at least, to the chemically addicting power of modern antidepressants.

The infuriating thing about this assumption (the way that the drug war distinguishes between "drugs" and "medicine") is that it helps perpetuate the drug war by disguising the evils that it perpetrates. Even if the drug war represented a mere crackdown on irresponsible youth (as some drug warriors assume), it would still be mean-spirited and wrong, but the truth is that the drug war is also a crackdown on thought -- specifically on how and how much one can be allowed to think in this world, a crackdown on how one can use and improve their consciousness. This is what makes the drug war not only wrong, but insidious. For the drug war is actually a crackdown on human consciousness and its potential. Worse yet, it seeks to stymie consciousness by taking away something that has always been a human birthright, namely one's free and unfettered to the free-growing medical bounty of Mother Nature.

Mind you, I haven't read Sheff's book yet, so hopefully he will come at the subject from a different angle.






In southern Mexico, the jail and prison officials experience great difficulty in trying to prevent the smuggling into their institutions of the seductive mariguana (sic). This is a kind of "loco" weed more powerful than opium.
The Iola Daily Record, Iola, Kansas, Jan 1, 1900






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










April 25, 2019
Bad Guy to the Rescue in the Opioid Crisis


Last night’s NewsHour featured a handsome and well-groomed DEA official gravely announcing a new crackdown on opioid distributors to pharmacies. This was a little hard to stomach because it gave the impression that the DEA was on the side of the angels in the opioid crisis, when in reality they did everything they could to cause it.

They did so by using the drug scheduling system to outlaw all natural and non-addictive means of achieving personal transcendence through the help of Mother Nature’s pharmacy. They then turn around and act indignant that entrepreneurs have rushed in to attempt to satisfy this outlawed market in a quasi-legal fashion. But not to worry, the DEA is prepared to play "whack-a-mole" with those shady entrepreneurs until the end of time. We should be grateful, right? Your tax dollars at work, right?

Wrong.

The DEA is like a despot who has outlawed all soft drinks and then announced that he has confiscated a batch of poisonous contraband soda that would have killed those who drank it. The despot expects to receive kudos for this action; after all, he prevented deaths, didn't he? But the more logical response would be to blame the despot for having outlawed soda in the first place, thereby creating a black market in which soda quality cannot be ensured.





"With LSD as an aid," the report said, "it has been possible to reach and work with patients who are otherwise unresponsive to psychotherapy."
Kingsport News, March 4, 1960






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










April 24, 2019
The Drug War as Religion


Those who support the Drug War do so based on a kind of materialist version of Christian Science. The Drug Warrior does not discount medical cures entirely, as does the Christian Scientist, but he or she insists that the medical pharmacy of Mother Nature "should not" be used to bring about psychological happiness and that such usage is somehow tawdry and unbecoming of a sane and sober American.

As a dissenter to this doctrine, I believe that there is no reason why Mother Nature's bounty cannot be justly used to improve my mind in the same way that I use Mother Nature's bounty to improve my physical health. In other words, I disagree with both the classic theology of Christian Science and its modern-day interpretation that is presupposed by the Drug Warrior. It is therefore a violation of my religious liberty to deny me access to Mother Nature's bounty on the theory that I should not require that bounty to live a happy and fulfilled life, for that is an unprovable and hence theological assumption and one that I do not share.

We talk about an aborigine's religious right to use time-honored natural substances such as peyote and ayahuasca, but this is beside the point. Indeed, to frame the issues in this way is to tacitly acknowledge the Drug Warrior's right to deny the rest of us our God-given right to access Mother Nature's bounty for the benefit of our own psyches. And how is this justified by the Drug Warrior? As stated above, it's justified based on a theological notion, a religious assumption, an article of faith: namely, that it is morally wrong to expand one's mind through the use of certain psychoactive substances.

To repeat, this is one possible way to look at life, but it is not the only way; so for the government to make me live my life according to this stealth theology is simple tyranny in the name of a government-sponsored religion.




For many, [LSD] seems to lead to self-help -- long overdue.
Dr. Keith Ditman, Semi-Weekly Spokesmen-Review (Spokane, Washington), Nov. 8, 1959






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










April 22, 2019
Americans have the right to pursue happiness -- but not to attain it


The following comment was posted in response to "Psychedelic therapy: The patients paying $2k to get high with their doctor," by Jesse Noakes, which appeared on April 22nd, 2019 on news.com.au.


Though the drug war originally targeted hippies, its real victims have been patients suffering from PTSD, depression, and anxiety. It is this latter demographic that the drug war has truly cracked down on by denying us access to powerful and time-honored psychoactive medicines over the last 50 years, thereby forcing us to rely on SSRIs: drugs that create dependence, turn the depressed person into a lifelong patient, and eventually produce the drowsy symptoms of anhedonia in the lifelong user. At best, such legal treatments make one’s life bearable, while drugs like LSD and psilocybin open the mind to possibilities to which a depressed mind was otherwise blinded. The latter drugs, in fact, empower the patient to start unlearning the damaging lessons of negative experiences by giving the user new ways to look at life: in other words such drugs are the Holy Grail of psychopharmacology – or they would be if skeptical materialists and political fascists would merely allow these drugs to do their job.

A good step in this direction would be for purportedly "free" peoples to reject the notion that government can rightfully declare Mother Nature's output to be "illegal" (a usurpation of power that Terence Mckenna rightfully called "ridiculous and obnoxious"). For if I have a birthright to anything in a free country, it is surely to the bounty of Mother Nature that grows freely at my feet. This is especially so in America, where the very constitution grants me "the pursuit of happiness" and then the government turns around and criminalizes precisely those plants that could bring me that very happiness.





By means of this drug[LSD], people can view themselves objectively and can then accept themselves which is a great step forward in the care of mental illness.
Dr. Kahan, Executive Director Mental Health Saskatchewan, The Leader-Post, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, July 20, 1961






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










April 21, 2019
How Drug Law Makes Brain-Damaging Shock Therapy Necessary


What follows is a letter to the editors of medicalexpress.com, regarding the matter-of-fact allusion to ECT in the third paragraph of a story entitled No laughing matter – nitrous oxide helps to unravel rapid antidepressant mechanisms, published March 27, 2019:

I'm always startled by the non-critical allusion to ECT in stories that discuss controversial psychoactive drugs like Ketamine, as if administering so-called “shock therapy” for depression was no more problematic, morally speaking, than prescribing aspirin for a headache. I beg to differ for the following reason.

I think it’s bizarre that doctors can bring themselves to knowingly injure the brain through ECT while failing to have explored the value of drugs like psilocybin, LSD, and ketamine, all of which have the potential of relieving long-standing depression without inflicting lasting damage to the brain. I would have no problem with ECT as a last resort, but the fact is it is not being used as a last resort for the severely depressed; instead, it is being administered by doctors who have never sufficiently advocated for the above-mentioned alternatives that would fulfill the Hippocratic oath of "first do no harm." Doctors may not be able to single—handedly change drug laws, of course, but they still have a moral obligation to speak up when drug-law restrictions oblige them to use a dangerous treatment for which safer alternatives are available.

Yes, patients may seem “happier” after ECT, but it is a sad success indeed, coming as it does thanks to a loss of brain function.

If, in the supposedly enlightened 21st century, we still are forced to use a harmful treatment such as ECT thanks to drug law, then the medical community owes it to society to make that fact loud and clear each time it throws the switch to shock a patient, saying: “American drug law is forcing us to take this potentially harmful step; American drug law is forcing us to put this patient at this unnecessary risk of having his or her brain damaged by ECT.”

Instead, the medical community remains largely silent, defending ECT while failing to admit that it’s a dangerous expedient that is only rendered necessary thanks to the fact that drug law in the U.S. is based on politics and not on public health considerations.




Who is responsible for the 24/7 moaning of millions of elderly Americans in nursing homes?
The DEA and the Drug War, based on the mind set that outlawed opium in 1914, so that now only outlaws have opium. The depressed elderly must make do with psychiatry's highly addictive and less helpful drug alternatives. Scientific materialists are terrified lest they give the elderly good dreams for a change. (Humph! How very unscientific. Let them suffer instead!)






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










April 21, 2019
Mad, and Proud of It





Introduction to AbolishTheDEA.com

Merely writing this introduction makes me mad. It makes me mad because I know that the difficulty that I’m having in composing this could be overcome in minutes – in minutes -- with the help of a variety of naturally occurring plants that my government has decided are illegal – plants that give me peace, plants that focus my mind, and plants that help me see beyond my mundane problems. Outlawing such naturally occurring remedies is not merely wrong, it is unconstitutional in a country that claims to offer its citizens “the pursuit of happiness.”

If I’m not mad enough on my own account, I have only to think of the millions of depression sufferers and veteran PTSD sufferers who have been denied meaningful cures because of government’s outlawing of Mother Nature’s bounty. Thanks largely to the legacy of Richard Nixon, these sufferers have been denied remedies for a half-century now in the form of psychoactive drugs, which showed great promise in treating sadness and obsession until Nixon criminalized them for political purposes. Just imagine the cosmological ingratitude in categorizing any part of mother nature’s bounty as illegal. And yet both Left and Right now share this blatantly superstitious view of nature, judging by the continued existence of the DEA, a group that has lied about the drugs in question in its bogus scheduling scheme ever since the agency’s founding in 1973.

And that’s yet another reason to be mad: the fact that we have a drug-enforcement agency that lies about therapeutic drug potential in order to keep itself in business. Earth to Congress: to have the DEA scheduling drugs is the mother of all conflicts of interest!

But we’ve created such a bull-dog out of the DEA that no one dares to go up against it. It’s a SWAT machine that’s just waiting for a poppy seed to inadvertently flower in your garden – and then you are history.

But someone’s got to speak truth to power – even if that power is armed with a Sig Sauer 556 Classic SWAT rifle with a 30-round magazine and laser sight.
Am I mad? Damn right.

I’m mad because the Drug War and the DEA are a threat to democracy and freedom and must go – preferably not before we try the DEA hierarchy for knowingly lying about drugs in their research-stymying scheduling protocol.

We need to learn what Friar Lawrence knew 400 years ago in Romeo and Juliet: that substances are not good or bad in themselves, as the superstitious believe, but each substance is good in specific situations, and bad in others, whether we’re talking about milk, beer, cocaine or LSD. But folks like Francis Burton Harrison and Richard Nixon have got us believing in “drugs” as a form of evil incarnate, and so we superstitiously avoid these substances even when it’s clear that they would be godsends for the suffering. Having once associated these substances with “the other” (with supposed hedonists and minorities), we have lost the ability to evaluate these substances sanely in the interest of long-suffering humanity. Thus it is that the drug war and its superstitious way of thinking about substances is not just wrong in theory, but it’s manifestly cruel in practice.

Finally, I’m mad because this introduction is probably disjointed – thanks again to the fact that I’m depressed by nature and have been unable to rise above those feelings now that America has criminalized the bounty of Mother Nature and told me “hands off.”








In southern Mexico, the jail and prison officials experience great difficulty in trying to prevent the smuggling into their institutions of the seductive mariguana (sic). This is a kind of "loco" weed more powerful than opium.
The Iola Daily Record, Iola, Kansas, Jan 1, 1900






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










April 16, 2019
Furious


A sceptic reading this site may ask: why is this guy so upset about modern drug law? What follows is the answer:

The drug warrior feels justified only because he or she assumes that the use of illegal substances is motivated by irresponsible hedonism. This conscience sop, however, is rapidly disappearing as we learn that many currently illegal substances are turning out to be godsends from a psychologically therapeutic point of view. LSD and psilocybin help users think outside the deadly box of pessimism and negative learned response. Ketamine reawakens a hopeless mind to the possibilities that life offers. Ibogaine helps one rethink their supposed need for alcohol and other addictive drugs.

Yet the hypocritically pious drug warrior stands in the way of all these treatments, by superstitiously asserting that the drugs in question are somehow bad in and of themselves, simply because they have been labelled that way by corrupt politicians, especially Richard Nixon.

This is why the drug war is insidious. It is not a war on irresponsible hedonism, it is a war on humanity’s freedom and ability to control the very way that they LOOK at life, since they deny us the right to improve and expand our minds.

Freedom-loving peoples claim to hate being told what to think by their government; how much angrier they should be when government tells us HOW – and how much – we may think.

This is why I’m righteously P.O.’d and doing my best to rouse the rest of the free world to the same all-too-justified fury.

This is, after all, the greatest tyranny possible in a supposedly free country, to tell me how much I can think -- especially in America, where I have been constitutionally guaranteed the pursuit of happiness, only to have the means to that happiness withdrawn by politically motivated laws.




[Dr. Watt declares] that the moderate use of opium is not more injurious than the moderate use of alcohol and even that its abusive use is less destructive to its victims than intemperance.
The Freeman's Journal, Dublin, Ireland, October 31, 1891






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










April 6, 2019
Put the DEA on Trial


Liberal critics of the drug war keep saying that it’s failed. But this misses the point, because it implies that the drug war was not necessarily a bad idea, but merely one that turned out to be ineffective in combating illegal drug use.

To the contrary, the drug war never had the right to succeed because it was wrong from the start to ban naturally occurring substances, the gifts of Mother Nature, the birthright of humanity, especially when these substances are banned for political motives. If Americans have any birthright, they surely have a right to the medicinal and nourishing output of Mother Nature and cannot be rightfully separated from that bounty by coercion.

But there’s one class of Drug War victim that’s rarely recognized today: that is the millions of depressed persons who have gone without effective medications for decades now thanks to Richard Nixon’s politically motivated scheduling and slandering of psychoactive substances.

Richard Nixon’s political assessment of such drugs remains on the books today, thanks to the fact that the self-dealing DEA, an agency that exists to “fight drugs,” is the same organization tasked with deciding the legal status of drugs. That’s the mother of all conflicts of interests, one that will continue to eat away at the democratic process until the DEA is excised from the body politic.

Before saying goodbye to the DEA, however, we should publicly try its leadership in court for having knowingly barred millions of depressed Americans from receiving priceless therapy. How did the DEA do this? By scheduling these drugs based on political motivations, completely ignoring to this day the well-documented benefits of drugs like LSD and psilocybin to change lives for the better in a positive and medically monitored setting.

What's the cause of depression in America?

The DEA. By denying Americans the medicines that have been shown to dramatically ease that malady.

But the DEA will only be held accountable when politicians start valuing patient outcomes over political outcomes.

Put the DEA on Trial




By means of this drug[LSD], people can view themselves objectively and can then accept themselves which is a great step forward in the care of mental illness.
Dr. Kahan, Executive Director Mental Health Saskatchewan, The Leader-Post, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, July 20, 1961






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










March 29, 2019
Prescription for Cruelty


During that dreary decade when psychiatry had me stumbling around the world on Valium, I was regularly infuriated by my psychiatrist’s refusal to help me with prescription problems during a weekend. I would repeatedly arrive at the pharmacy on Friday night or Saturday morning, only to be told by the pharmacist that there was some problem with my prescription and that I would have to contact my doctor. Of course, when I attempted to do so, I was greeted by a recording admonishing me that neither the doctor nor his minions could possibly have anything to do with me until Monday morning at 9:00 a.m.

I was infuriated and in disbelief every time this happened, the more so in that my prescription had inevitably just “run out” at such times. Was I really supposed to go “cold turkey” until the doctor got off the golf course, got his beauty sleep, and then arrived at his expensive office in his BMW at 9 a.m. sharp some 48 hours from now? Did the Hippocratic oath only apply on weekdays?

This illustrates a downside of America’s drug status quo that has gone unnoticed by the vast majority of Americans: namely, the arrogance that doctors have assumed toward their patients ever since physicians were handed the golden goose of the prescription pad in the early 1950s. Armed with this priceless monopoly to dispense addictive medications, doctors have assertively turned a deaf ear toward the needs of their patients on weekends.

Of course, these physicians often make it clear that they can’t be bothered on the weekend by posting signs to that effect, but what they never explicitly tell you is that they will gladly let you suffer “cold turkey” rather than move a finger to help you after hours. This is the default punishment for the patient who fails to “refill early,” not a monetary fine but rather the psychological punishment of medication withdrawal.

This practice continues today: the practice of forcing a patient to go “cold turkey” on a medication that they have failed to renew in a timely manner. It first happened to me 40 years ago when I was “on” Valium, and it last happened to me just two years ago when I was “on” Effexor. In the latter case, the answering service was so determined NOT to help me, that I finally had to lie by implying that I was considering suicide. Only then was I transferred to a medical supervisor who agreed to instantly refill my prescription, after getting my assurance that my suicidal references were merely a strategic ploy to gain the assistance to which I felt that I was entitled.

Of course, in some cases, the pharmacist will offer to supply the patient with a few pills to “take them through” the weekend, but this happens rarely, in my experience, and is of little use to a patient who lives many miles from the pharmacy.

Psychiatrists might argue that it’s too expensive to deal with prescriptions on the weekends, but if this is truly so, then the psychiatrist should never have gotten in the business of prescribing medications in the first place. Patients, after all, have to live their lives 24 hours a day, not just 9 to 5 on weekdays, and if psychiatrists aren’t prepared to deal with after-hour problems, then they have no business dispensing addictive medications.

But when it comes to dispensing medications, psychiatrists want to enjoy the rights of a monopoly without assuming the responsibilities.

The solution: end the physician’s monopoly on dispensing mood-altering drugs, since the faith that we have thus placed in them has been so clearly abused. Decriminalize the vast panoply of mood-altering drugs and let patients decide for themselves what they need (from the vast pharmacopeia of Mother Nature, not just from the tiny subset of addictive medications whose sales benefit Big Pharma).

The first step in achieving this goal? Re-empower patients by granting them the same rights that they possessed before the passage of the Durham-Humphrey Amendment of 1952.





Dr. T.C. Marks, a physician of experience and standing, has added another to the long list of things that can be profitably produced in the glorious climate of southern California. The particular substance this time is opium.
Los Angeles Herald, August 9, 1891






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










March 21, 2019
Puritanical Assumptions about Drug Use in the Entertainment Field


American psychology operates according to a long-standing puritanical assumption when it comes to so-called “drug users” in the entertainment field. The party line goes like this:

“They could be as good – or even better – if they were not using drugs!”

Could Jimi Hendrix have been as good – or even better – without drugs? How about Robin Williams?

No. The above citation is a mere statement of faith that belongs in a Christian Science catechism, not in a psychological textbook.

It is a statement of faith because there is no logical reason to suppose that human beings were meant to live their lives without emotional support from mood-altering substances, especially when those substances occur abundantly in nature and grow in profusion all around us, in the form of mushrooms, poppies, ibogaine, etc. In fact, we rely on such emotional support every day when we use drugs such as nicotine, caffeine and alcohol. When we puritanically declare that others be drug free, we simply want them to conform to our own self-serving notions of what the good drugs are. We don’t feel any need to expand and sharpen our minds through the use of certain illegal naturally occurring substances: why should they?

(Of course, we’re assuming here, as the Puritans do, that by “drugs,” we simply mean substances that have not been supplied by a reputable psychiatrist. In other words, we don’t so much fear drug-improved performance per se as we fear the use of illegal drugs for attaining this end.)

But the fact is that for many of us, the unmedicated personality says “no” to showing off, to “putting oneself out there,” to standing up for oneself, etc., especially before thousands or even millions of people. We are attacked by the psychological quality that Poe called “the imp of the perverse,”* whispering in our ear and telling us to fail. Is it not obvious in such cases that certain mood-altering substances could have the beneficial result of raising one beyond nagging self-doubts, such that one can access and express inner talents that our knee-jerk self-doubt would have otherwise suppressed?

True, a person can cope with this self-doubt by shunning fields like show business entirely, but if that is the field in which one’s innate talent lies, would it not be folly for such a person to “just say no” to drugs and thereby just say no to personal fulfillment in his or her life?

Seen in this realistic psychological light, drug use in the entertainment field makes perfect sense – not for all, of course, but for many. But if this statement sounds outrageous to you, let me reword it using terminology that carries less emotional baggage given today’s Drug War mentality: “Seen in this realistic psychological light, the use of performance-enhancing medication in the entertainment field makes perfect sense.”

The fact that these self-doubting entertainers are taking risks with their lives (by buying performance-enhancing medications on the street) is to be blamed on the Drug War, not on the performers themselves. (How can we blame a person for doing whatever they feel is necessary in order to succeed in their vocational dreams and thus obtain the self-actualizing pinnacle of Maslow’s hierarchy?) It is the Drug War that ensures such risky behaviour is necessary, first by spreading disinformation about mood-altering drugs (making it difficult for drug users to choose wisely) and then by rendering those drugs illegal (making it difficult for the user to guarantee the purity of the drugs that he or she purchases on the street).

To solve this problem, we have to do more than decriminalize drugs. We have to change American mental healthcare practice so that it recognizes this instinct to self-fulfillment as a (or rather THE) genuine motivating factor in the depressed and the anxious.

Had Hendrix or Williams naively attempted to seek their performance-enhancing drugs through psychiatry, they would have been immediately tagged as potential addictive types. But that is a bad diagnosis. On a fundamental level, those performers did not crave drugs, they craved self-fulfillment. Drugs (or “performance-enhancing medications," if you prefer) were merely a necessary means to that end, even if the hypocritical Drug Warrior (while smoking his cigars and swilling his whiskey) would steadfastly deny it.

Follow-up thoughts March 20, 2019

Yet psychiatry holds to the materialistic notion that the drugs we supply a patient must fix some specific underlying chemical problem, not merely allow the patient to be successful in life -- as if all things good in life (including happiness and serenity) do not follow naturally when we allow a patient to be successful (regardless of our knee-jerk abhorrence for the substances that may be employed toward that end).

To put it another way, psychiatry these days (thanks to its absurdly limited pharmacopeia of mood-altering substances) is not good at helping patients achieve their dreams; instead psychiatry's talent lies in helping patients become satisfied with falling short of their true potential in life (while the psychiatrists insist that – not to worry, Jimi – at least now we are treating the “root causes” of your problems and are therefore being truly scientific about this! So what if you’re not a rock star: at least you’re getting help from real scientists!)

Yes, Hendrix died of a drug overdose, but only because America never discussed mood-altering substances honestly. Instead, psychiatry ignored illegal substances and drug warriors demonized them. The result was that no credible information was out there by which Hendrix might have steered clear of disaster, and even if it were, Hendrix was forced by drug prohibition to rely on street drugs of uncertain potency and chemical constitution.

Yet, the drug warriors never learn. They cite each problem that they themselves create (like drug deaths in America and violence overseas) as a reason why the drug war must go on. It’s a circular argument with which they hope to deflect criticism and ignore their own culpability. And it’s an argument that psychiatry abets by failing to recognize the true motive behind much illegal drug-taking: namely, the search for self-actualization in life. By ignoring this most fundamental of human motivations, psychiatry contributes by default to the simplistic notion that drug users are rabble-rousing hedonists, a view-point that eggs on the fascist mentality that seeks to suppress illegal drugs with unconstitutional methods.

*See also the correlation that GK Chesterton draws between reason and madness in the first chapter of "Orthodoxy." Though Chesterton never remotely broaches the topic of brain-enhancing chemistry, the phenomenon of madness as he describes it cries out for the intervention of psychoactive substances to distract the mind from mere reason, insofar as there are no other known treatments that have been shown to reliably help a neurotic to think outside the box of the everyday, and thus expand their mental cosmos.




If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










March 17, 2019
Drug War Hysteria and the Opioid Crisis


I recently posted an article in which I slammed a group of six Richmond area hospitals for providing misleading information about ketamine on their website page for teenagers. The “Healthy Kids” site did its best to paint ketamine as a boogie-man despite the drug’s documented inability to cause addiction and its apparent lack of long-term negative consequences. They fretted that the drug could still cause psychological addiction and they harped on the delusions created during moments of intense intoxication. Not one hint was given that the drug has a potential positive role in legal settings as a non-habituating anti-depressant (which is odd, since depressed youth are particularly apt to drug experimentation as a form of self-medication; a little nod to ketamine’s newfound efficacy in this quarter could therefore be vastly useful information for a depressed young person to know).

But one might ask: why should I be complaining? Surely we should paint illegal drugs in as black a shade as possible so that kids get the message. Kids aren’t very good at picking up on subtle distinctions, after all.

First of all, the distinctions are not subtle in this case. Ketamine is non-habituating. Opioids are vastly so.

Secondly: This “one-size-fits-all” approach to describing illegal drugs destroys our credibility in discussing such substances with the young. When we tar all illegal drugs with the same brush, the young eventually realize that we’re gilding the lily in favour of an ideology as opposed to dispassionately providing raw facts.

Look at it this way:

If I’m a kid, and a parent tells me that both Ketamine and Opioids are drugs from hell, I have no guidelines whereby to select between the two should I be so inclined. If they’re both drugs from hell but I’m determined to use SOMETHING, I might as well choose the one that gives me the biggest kick, or better yet, use both of them. Why not, since the adults imply that they’re basically interchangeable when it comes to consequences?

The fact, of course, is that there is a huge difference between the two in terms of negative consequences, but America’s drug-abuse programs routinely obscure this fact by painting each and every illicit substance in the same dark light. We think we’re doing the kids a favour by thus preaching to them rather than providing them with full disclosure; what we’re really doing, however, is denying them the crucial information whereby they can advisedly avoid truly dangerous substances. We need to stop preaching to them and start showing them factual data about all mood-altering substances (the reported frequency of addiction, habituation, etc.), so that those who are determined to do so can “choose their poison” wisely (yes, even if that poison be alcohol!)

Solution:

Decriminalize all drugs and begin real drug education in grade school, teaching kids exactly what the real-world threats are of each and every drug in each and every setting. But no politics. No attempts to influence the students with anything but the facts. Let them develop their own philosophy of substance use as they become adults. And no pretending that opioids are “drugs,” but that Prozac and alcohol are somehow “not really drugs.”

Such full disclosure about drugs (so glaringly absent in the above-mentioned “Healthy Kids” page) will empower students to steer clear of opioids, especially in cases where they are determined to use some mind-altering substance no matter what we say. They will steer clear because 1) we have been honest with them about each and every drug’s shortcomings and benefits and 2) they trust us because we have been honest with them.

Sure, under this new paradigm, a small percentage of kids will still end up in jail over drug use -- but at least they will no longer be ending up in the morgue!




Who is responsible for the 24/7 moaning of millions of elderly Americans in nursing homes?
The DEA and the Drug War, based on the mind set that outlawed opium in 1914, so that now only outlaws have opium. The depressed elderly must make do with psychiatry's highly addictive and less helpful drug alternatives. Scientific materialists are terrified lest they give the elderly good dreams for a change. (Humph! How very unscientific. Let them suffer instead!)






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










February 27, 2019
Why Hollywood Owes Richard Nixon an Oscar


Hollywood owes Richard Nixon a posthumous Oscar. If the 37th president of the United States had not launched a paramilitary crackdown on the use of naturally-occurring substances in the early ‘70s, we would have no movies like the following:

American Gangster, Asian Connection, Bobby Z, Clockers, Cocaine Cowboys, Empire, L.A. Wars, Marked for Death, Scarface, Rush, etc. etc. – just add the “bullet-riddled” movie of your choice, especially those that focus on South American “scumbags” and their American nemeses, namely, those no-nonsense cops who openly laugh at the whole idea of due process and the other high-falutin legal protections that have been historically afforded to American citizens via the U.S. Constitution.

One typical Nixon-inspired classic is 2007’s Walking Tall: Lone Justice, starring Kevin Sorbo. It follows the usual Drug War plot in which a pious American renegade launches a Pyrrhic war against a South American drug-lord/scumbag. Of course, hero Nick Prescott never stops to think that America itself has created these drug lords by outlawing the medicinal plants of Mother Nature in the first place and then blackmailing governments around the world to do the same lest they lose America’s financial support. Instead, we get the usual morality tale based on a false narrative: righteous no-nonsense American trashes the Bill of Rights in order to give a South American scumbag what’s coming to him.

The plots of all such DEA-glorifying flicks take Nixon’s crackdown as a morally justified “given” and then proceed to vividly demonstrate all the violence that predictably results from such a crackdown, i.e., the violence to be expected when we take away a citizen's right to freely access the medicinal benefits of Mother Nature. A sane viewer of the above-mentioned agitprop can only wish that Director Tripp Reed had had an epiphany during the movie’s filming and yelled: “Cut! Guys, what are we thinking? The real villain of this piece is Richard friggin’ Nixon, not some opportunistic entrepreneur who merely took advantage of the lucrative black-market economy that that idjit of a president single-handedly created out of whole cloth!”

But say what you will, Richard Nixon created something else as well: i.e., a whole new genre of movies about foreign scumbags pursued by moral Americans. We might call it “the scumbag genre,” for want of a better term.

But before Richard Nixon’s political heirs step up to the podium to accept a posthumous Oscar on behalf of their movie-spawning forebear, let’s be sure to accompany Nixon’s Oscar with a multi-billion-dollar damage claim for all the lives that his War on Drugs has taken over the last half century. No one has yet calculated the full price tag for this carnage, but it has to be huge, since the Drug Policy Alliance reports 200,000 killed in Mexico’s U.S.-inspired drug war alone, and that figure just covers the period from 2006 to the present. Even as we speak, the fascist Duterte of the Philippines is working to beat that record, racking up 12,000 drug-war deaths in his country in the last three years alone (i.e., since 2016).

Let’s not forget the millions of lives ruined yearly by arrests for mere possession of natural substances, a sort of pre-crime punishment used by the drug warrior to enforce Christian Science orthodoxy in America.

So hats off to Richard Nixon, the unsung hero of American cinema, whose crackdown on the rights of the individual resulted in a whole new exciting movie genre about Drug War “scumbags.”

PS After the Academy gives this long-overdue recognition to Tricky Dick, they should consider awarding a second honorary Oscar to New York Congressman Francis Burton Harrison. Francis was the visionary politician who first decided that Americans could not be trusted to use naturally-occurring medicines as they saw fit. It’s thanks to his tireless work in outlawing opium in 1914 that Americans gave up their right to Mother Nature’s pharmacopeia in the first place, thus empowering anti-scientific conservatives like Richard Nixon to crack down further just a half century later, thereby creating a whole new genre of scumbag-busting movies that continue to triumph at the box office to this very day!


Why Hollywood Owes Richard Nixon an Oscar




Who is responsible for the 24/7 moaning of millions of elderly Americans in nursing homes?
The DEA and the Drug War, based on the mind set that outlawed opium in 1914, so that now only outlaws have opium. The depressed elderly must make do with psychiatry's highly addictive and less helpful drug alternatives. Scientific materialists are terrified lest they give the elderly good dreams for a change. (Humph! How very unscientific. Let them suffer instead!)






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










February 24, 2019
Fascist Drug Story Coverage in Parsipanny, New Jersey


Great. Now the police are not only making drug arrests, but they're reporting on them in the "local" newspapers, thereby taking the place of at least theoretically impartial reporters.

Case in point: the faux-local site TapInto.Net has run a story (dated February 23, 2019) entitled Drug Bust Leaving Red Roof Inn in which the byline is given to... get this... the PARSIPPANY POLICE of New Jersey, where the action supposedly went down.

I took exception by sending the following letter to TapInto.Net.com.

MY LETTER TO TAPINTO.NET

It's a little eerie that your news outlet prints stories written by the police, especially on the controversial subject of drug arrests. Your article entitled "Drug Bust Leaving Red Roof Inn" involves the arrest of individuals for manufacturing a drug (Ketamine) that is increasingly considered a godsend for depressed patients. And yet you (or rather your police informants) cover the story as if it concerns the arrest of a common criminal.

The arrestees' real crime was cutting out the middle man -- modern psychiatry -- and running afoul of Richard Nixon's anti-scientific drug war. But these issues are scarcely ever raised by newspaper coverage -- and they never will be if you continue to cover such stories on the cheap by letting the police write the articles about them. Not only is this a complete abnegation of your journalistic responsibility, but it sounds like a step toward fascism to me when our police are not only making the arrests but then writing the official news stories about them for the local press.





Who is responsible for the 24/7 moaning of millions of elderly Americans in nursing homes?
The DEA and the Drug War, based on the mind set that outlawed opium in 1914, so that now only outlaws have opium. The depressed elderly must make do with psychiatry's highly addictive and less helpful drug alternatives. Scientific materialists are terrified lest they give the elderly good dreams for a change. (Humph! How very unscientific. Let them suffer instead!)






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










February 23, 2019
Why American Drug Policy is Insane


First America takes away the citizens’ right to manage their own pain by rendering opium illegal. Then the American psychiatric field decides that it will treat the resultant epidemic of depression by damaging the patient’s brain, i.e. by treating depressed patients using electroshock therapy.

Imagine what this says about our attitude toward drugs: It means literally that we would rather damage a depressed patient’s brain than allow them to be made happy, damage-free, by the occasional use of natural-occurring medications such as opium that are not under the control of psychiatrists.

This is insanity.

I shared these thoughts online on Reddit, assuming that the point I was making was self-evident. To my horror, I found many otherwise sane-sounding individuals indignantly protesting that ECT was a valuable tool in the psychiatric arsenal, even though the therapy’s very proponents admit that it can cause brain damage. I was finally, in fact, banned from posting on the Reddit Psychedelic Studies group because I had outraged the many fans of traditional psychiatry by my heretical stand on ECT – as well as other dubious “cures,” such as addictive modern anti-depressants.

Sure, ECT and anti-depressants may sometimes be better than nothing, but surely it is unconscionable to use such damaging and addictive treatments when emphatically successful benign treatments are staring us in the face in the outdoor pharmacopeia provided by Mother Nature, in the form of opium, mushrooms, ibogaine, etc.

Doctors claim that ECT is a last resort – but what they really mean is that all better options have been rendered illegal.

If ECT is really required these days, we should at least make it clear that we are forced to that expedient by inane drug laws – rather than pretending to ourselves that this is a free treatment choice that we have selected for its own peculiar merits.

In other words, the DEA and all who believe in it should be shamed every time we are forced to damage a patient’s brain in order to relieve depression via ECT – since it is the Drug War’s know-nothing mindset that has deprived the suffering of God-given natural medicine that could give them reason to live. So the next time we bemoan the newly vapid personality of a victim of ECT, let’s remember to point fingers of blame at the self-righteous Drug Warriors.

The first step in combating the devastating Drug War is to acknowledge its inanity. If we fail to do that, then it is not just our drug policy that is crazy but Americans themselves, as witnessed by their patient acceptance of brain-damaging cures and their failure to recognize the fascist forces that have rendered such Pyrrhic treatments necessary.




The plain historical facts are that before 1914, there was no "drug problem" in the United States; nor did we have a name for it.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz.






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










February 3, 2019
Open Letter to the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (aka drugfree.org)


*The following comments were sent to the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (now drugfree.org) via their comment form:

When is the Partnership For a Drug-Free America going to stop lying about drugs? That scientifically flawed “fried egg ad” (which you still continue to feature proudly on your home page!) has caused untold suffering over the last three decades because it has scared researchers away from creating powerful new psychoactive medicines for depressed Americans. Most illegal drugs, whatever their other shortcomings, do not fry the brain. LSD, for example, actually increases brain activity by opening up neural communication between the thalamus and the cortex. This is not just my opinion, it is the conclusion of the National Academy of Sciences (see link below).

If any drug fries the brain, it is the modern antidepressant. Studies have shown that long-term users of SSRIS frequently complain of emotional flatlining and “foggy” thinking.

So please take down that fried egg image on your home page -- and apologize for making depressed Americans like myself suffer needlessly for the last three decades! Open your mind to facts instead of propaganda and let science move forward, unfettered by your uninformed libel against promising new psychoactive medicines. The drugs that you love to hate – MMDA, ketamine, psilocybin mushrooms, and LSD – are now showing great promise as psychiatric adjuncts for treating depression, soldier PTSD, grief, etc. In the name of suffering humanity, I ask you to stop standing in the way of this progress with your superstitious fear-mongering about substances that you clearly do not understand – or else do not wish to understand.

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/01/23/1815129116





How many people know that hemp, coca, and the opium poppy are ordinary plants, understand how they became transformed into dreaded 'dangerous drugs,' and realize that in losing our rights to them we have surrendered some of our most basic rights to property?
'Our Right to Drugs', Thomas Szasz






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










February 2, 2019
The Infantilization of America


No one has lopped more heads off of the hydra-headed beast of drug-related misunderstanding than Hungarian-American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, and one of his greatest insights had to do with doctors. Ever since they were empowered with the privilege of writing (or withholding) prescriptions, Szasz tells us, the sick or troubled amongst us have been encouraged to think of themselves as babies when it comes to medications. We know nothing about medicine and our medical instincts, experiences, and pharmacological desires count for little. The big question is: “What does a board-certified doctor think that we need?” Even if we are visiting the eminent physician for a simple cold (something that our great grandparents might have laughed off with a little tincture of opium), we still must appeal to the brow-wrinkling doctor if we hope to access anything more powerful than acetaminophen and cough drops.

I am not reminding the reader of this lost Eden in order to promote the dangerous solitary use of psychedelics and other substances, but rather to remind us that our caution on these topics is caused in part by our knee-jerk obedience to a healthcare paradigm that infantilizes us as patients and urges us to discount our medical instincts and experiences. We have been trained to distrust ourselves when it comes to drugs, to the point that the term “self-medicating” has become the taboo par excellence in the modern age. But let’s remember that the disdain that modern doctors hold for “self-medicating” can be explained by more than just their concerns about patient health: after all, a doctor’s bottom line is impacted precisely to the extent that their potential patients choose to “self-medicate.” Little wonder then that doctors seek to characterize such patient initiative as medical heresy.

The inconvenient truth is that the non-medical world, with its many psychoactive substances, has far more effective cures for my depression than does the medical world with its beard-stroking doctors and outrageously limited pharmacopeia (especially if I have at least one botanically minded spiritual guide to aid me in my quest for self-improvement). I therefore would consider self-medication to be the rational choice for treating what ails me, were it not for the fact that the DEA is waiting to arrest me should I have the gall to improve my life outside the healthcare system with the mere help of Mother Nature. But let’s remember that, in arresting me, the DEA is just following the medical profession’s taboo to its logical conclusion: they are essentially arresting me for self-medicating. In this way the DEA is really just the enforcement arm of the American medical establishment. The two are in cahoots. They are both working to disempower the American people when it comes to healthcare.




What has three letters and ruins the lives of people who want to maximize their potential using time-honored natural plants?
The DEA.






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










January 28, 2019
How American Drug Laws Violate the U.S. Constitution


There are three unalienable rights in the U.S. Constitution. They are: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. When the U.S. Congress outlaws natural plants, they are denying me the third of these rights, namely the pursuit of happiness.

After all, what is happiness? It is not cars, it is not boats, it is not houses, it is not money.

Happiness, rather, is that positive attitude whereby human beings are able to enjoy all those things and more – true happiness, it is said, can even help us do without any of those things.

Therefore, the pursuit of happiness necessarily involves attaining that positive attitude, and since Mother Nature provides natural substances that can help us achieve this end, it is literally unconstitutional for Congress to deny Americans such medicine. We have life and liberty, perhaps, but we are only able to pursue happiness to the extent and in the way that Congress wants us to.

So, for instance, if I have a pessimistic attitude, I am expected to become a ward of the medical state by visiting a doctor who will catechize me about my symptoms and prescribe me an addictive, expensive and government-approved antidepressant that I will be told to take for the rest of my life.

But I must never think of reaching out and grasping the therapeutic bounty that Mother Nature can place right in front of me, because Congress says that I can only pursue happiness in the narrow way that they have defined that term.

In practice then, Americans have no right to pursue happiness today, and we will not reclaim that right until our society renounces its puritanical efforts to fight vice by criminalizing Mother Nature's bounty.

We might start with a law stating what should be obvious in a democracy: that it is unlawful to criminalize a plant or fungus, since they are the handiwork of Mother Nature and as such are the botanical birth right of every human being on the planet.

But then the status quo is earning riches for psychiatry, the DEA and Big Pharma. Who cares about the personal self-fulfillment of the average American?

AUTHOR'S LATER NOTE: The liberal chicken little always stops me at this point and says: But what about those who are going to misuse Mother Nature's bounty? My answer is always the same: if someone takes away my right to free speech, I am under no obligation to tell you how that right can be restored to me without causing problems. So, as you had no right to deprive me of my birth right to the produce of Mother Nature, I am under no obligation to tell you how to restore that right without problems. Sure, we should do all we can to fight substance misuse and more power to you -- but that is a totally different question from the one at hand. The two are completely unrelated, in the same way that a kidnapper can't justify his holding you on the grounds that the world of freedom is too dangerous for you. That statement may be 100% true, but it has nothing to do with the fact that you've been illegally kidnapped and must be released at once. Sure, there's nothing wrong with trying to make your freedom less dangerous, but it is wrong to withhold your freedom from you based on someone else's fear of that danger.





For many, [LSD] seems to lead to self-help -- long overdue.
Dr. Keith Ditman, Semi-Weekly Spokesmen-Review (Spokane, Washington), Nov. 8, 1959






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










January 26, 2019
Taking Back America's Right to Drugs One State at a Time


Obama’s former drug policy advisor Kevin Sabet deplores the legalization of drugs via ballot box initiative, claiming that drug legalization should be based on hard science and not on public plebiscite.

He forgets that Americans’ right to drugs was not taken away from them by hard science but rather by what Thomas Szasz called “chemical statism” fostered by puritans and fans of Big Government, both of whom insisted that private citizens could not rationally choose for themselves when it came to medications for what ailed them. In fact, the very inventor of the Drug War, Richard Nixon, was interested in punishing his hippy enemies with Draconian drug laws, not in improving the health of his fellow Americans based on drug-related facts.

Conclusion: Our right to drugs was taken from us by politicians, to achieve political goals, not by scientists to improve America's health; it is therefore fitting that we should use political means, such as ballot box initiatives, to reclaim those usurped rights.


Hello, Kevin? The "drugs" in question were STOLEN from Americans in the first place!


Author Afterthoughts: May 12, 2012: "Drug legalization should be based on hard science," says Kevin??? Not when the "drugs" in question were stolen from the public in the first place! The government never had the right to criminalize Mother Nature. They cannot justly turn Mother Nature into a Drug Kingpin and declare it off-limits. That is fundamentally wrong in a free society. It is the denial of a birthright.




"With LSD as an aid," the report said, "it has been possible to reach and work with patients who are otherwise unresponsive to psychotherapy."
Kingsport News, March 4, 1960






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










January 25, 2019
Drug War Tyranny


I have no doubt that the occasional use of opium and psychedelics would improve my life, make me a better person, help me enjoy nature and art, and encourage me to help others. It would also entirely obviate my need to become an eternal patient, to visit a psychiatrist every three months, and I would no longer need to use their expensive and addictive drugs for my entire lifetime, as they now insist.

But if I act on this knowledge, guess what happens? The U.S. government claims the right to lock me in prison, throw away the key, and even confiscate all my personal property. In other words, I’d be better off murdering someone than to ingest the substances of my choice.

Before you start thinking “Serves you right,” guess what, my friend? You yourself could have YOUR house confiscated too if, unbeknownst to you, I happened to carry some of my “illegal substances” into YOUR house. According to the fascist drug war legal theory, your house is now a criminal. That’s the way the drug war works: It “gets tough” on Americans and the Constitution be damned.

This is outright tyranny. It’s a tyranny that will remain in force until Americans take back their right to consume the natural substances of their choice, a right that they had until the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. It's a tyranny that will remain until freedom-loving people claw back their right to the freely offered medical bounty of Mother Nature -- for the pharmacopeia of Mother Nature is my birthright as a citizen of planet Earth and cannot be justly taken from me by any government -- least of all one whose very constitution gives me the right to the pursuit of happiness.

What You Can Do:

Write your representatives and demand:

1) An end to the Drug War
2) The abolition of the DEA
3) The decriminalization of all drugs
4) The trial of top-ranking DEA officials who have impeded drug therapy for 40+ years now by lying about drug effects in their politically motivated “scheduling” system
5) The end of “drug schedules,” especially those that are created by an agency like the DEA, which has a vested interest in maintaining Draconian drug laws
6) Boycott Hollywood movies and TV dramas that glorify the trampling of the U.S. Constitution in the name of the Drug War


Drug War Tyranny




Who barged on to Jefferson's Monticello and destroyed Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants? 1) The Mob 2) Juvenile delinquents 3) Terrorists 4) The DEA
The DEA






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










January 24, 2019
The real reason for depression in America


The real reason for depression in America is the U.S. drug war.

If someone like myself had been depressed just over a century ago, they could have occasionally used opium to take the edge off of life and see beyond their problems and thus get a little perspective on their place in the world. Problem solved. No morose brooding. The sadsack in question would have had a little “somethin’ somethin’” to look forward to in their life: namely, the blissful mental relief provided by a medicinal dose of opium.

But this was before puritans (like William Jennings Bryant) and anti-Asians (like Francis Burton Harrison) decided that Americans didn’t have the right to use natural plants just any way they saw fit. Thus a crackdown was launched on opium with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, and America (and, alas, the entire copycat world) began the age of the illegal plant, an era in which Mother Nature is viewed as a dangerous drug kingpin rather than a provider of useful medicines to humankind.

Needless to say, the situation for the depressed only got worse during the presidency of know-nothing Richard Nixon, who further criminalized Mother Nature in order to prevent the use of pretty much all psychoactive substances by Americans, thus shoring up psychiatry’s monopoly on treating depression, forcing the depressed to seek second-best solutions for their ills by using “meds” that were to prove more expensive and addictive than the natural bounty that politicians had rendered illegal.

So, please, let’s not profess surprise at the epidemic of depression in America. After all, the truly effective treatments for this so-called “disease” have all been taken away from Americans by a busybody passel of puritans, politicians, and profiteers. It’s no wonder then that depression reigns now.

If we want to get rid of depression, the first step is obvious: end the war on drugs.





Dr. T.C. Marks, a physician of experience and standing, has added another to the long list of things that can be profitably produced in the glorious climate of southern California. The particular substance this time is opium.
Los Angeles Herald, August 9, 1891






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










January 19, 2019
Fabricate at Will: editors give journalists free rein to lie about psychedelics


If you’ve ever wondered why Americans are so biased against psychedelic medicine, you have only to read the latest mini-article by Jennifer Velez in Grammy.com entitled “A$AP Rocky:Hip-Hop is Oversaturated with Overdose.” Although the author makes no explicit claims about the dangers of LSD, the poorly worded artist close-up falsely implies that LSD is both addictive and causes overdoses.

In fact, Velez comes out covertly swinging against the drug in the short article’s very first sentence:

The rapper, who has been open about doing LSD in his music, says he has been sober since the New Year.

“Sober?” This statement implies that Rocky was at one time addicted to LSD, in the same way that one might be addicted to amphetamines. This would be surprising, indeed, given the fact that psychedelics simply do not cause physiological addiction. Moreover, the excessive “recreational” use of LSD would be a vain endeavor in any case since irresponsible users develop a short-term tolerance for the drug that would increasingly minimize the psychedelic effects that they could glean from the substance.

Having thus libeled LSD as addictive, Velez goes on to suggest that it causes overdoses as well:

The topic [LSD] came up after he spoke about the late rapper A$AP Yam, who died of an overdose in 2015.

Although she never specifically says that she’s referring to an LSD overdose, the reporter clearly gives that impression since LSD is the only illegal drug that she mentions in this lazily worded hatchet job. Of course, the New York Medical Examiner concluded that Yam died of an overdose of a wide variety of substances, including opiates and benzodiazepines, but apparently the names of all illegally acquired drugs may be used synonymously according to the pro-Drug War writing guidelines of Grammy.com.

CONCLUSION

I used to think that editors required their reporters to research the topics on which they wrote, but this is clearly not the case when it comes to psychedelics and drugs in general. On that topic, most reporters feel free to impute any evil that they can imagine to a substance provided that the substance in question is illegal. The resulting sensationalism sells papers after all.

But all the knee-jerk hyperbole and lies about these substances has a real-world effect: it scares away research money for psychedelic therapy and slows the already glacial bureaucratic process of getting government permission to investigate psychedelic substances. The end result of this sloppy journalism is to increase human suffering by denying desperately needed new medicines to a wide range of patients: including alcoholics, victims of PTSD, and the terminally ill.

And so I end with an appeal to the editor of Grammy.com: please consider the welfare of the latter group before publishing any more assumption-laden articles by a pharmacologically challenged reporter. Of course, if a vocal artist ever DOES achieve the nearly impossible task of OD’ing on LSD, by all means, let us know. But until then, please stop falsely implying that psychedelics are the root of all evil.





Casting a ballot is an important act, emblematic of our role as citizens. But eating and drinking are much more important acts.
'Our Right to Drugs', Thomas Szasz






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










January 17, 2019
The Award for most biased reporting on psychedelic drugs in an online newspaper goes to…


The Award for most biased reporting on psychedelic drugs in an online newspaper goes to…



“The Nation: Thailand Portal” for its woefully misinformed comments about LSD in its January 19, 2019 story entitled:

Doctors warn trippers of severe danger of using LSD-laden ‘deadly stamps’, in which a German drug dealer is arrested for selling LSD on the Thai island of Pha-Ngan.

The story would be bad enough if it reflected merely the psycho-pharmacological ignorance of a reporter (who, in any case, received no byline for the article and so cannot be properly chastised for his or her ignorance on this topic). But the sad truth is that the misinformation contained therein appears to come directly from some of the top doctors in Thailand. It is the director-general of Thailand’s so-called Medical Science Department, one Somsak Akkslip, who melodramatically refers to the apparently untainted LSD in the story as a “deadly drug.”

Deadly drug? Is Dr Akkslip unaware of the fact that LSD is one of the least toxic substances on the planet, according to no less an authority than David Nichols, PhD, who is possibly the world’s foremost authority on the pharmacology of psychedelics? Does Somsak realize that, far from being deadly, LSD is bringing new life to the anxious, the depressed, and even career alcoholics?

Not to be outdone in demonstrating his own unfamiliarity with the subject matter, the director of the Public Health Ministry’s Drug Abuse Treatment Center, one Sarawut Boonchaipanichwattana, piles on with some unsubstantiated psychedelic-bashing of his own. In so doing, he single-handedly revives nearly all of the politically-motivated stereotypes of the ‘60s, assuring the reader that LSD can lead to “psychiatric disorders, depression, paranoia and hallucination long after users stop taking the substance.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

Far from causing psychological problems, LSD is showing great potential for resolving them (as has been shown in the work of such psychedelic researchers as Amanda Feilding, Stanislav Grof, and James Fadiman).

Of course, one can haul out anecdotal cases in which any given drug has caused any given problem, but the overall safety record of responsibly used LSD is unimpeachable. To quote the above-mentioned Dr. Nichols from a 2011 interview with Dr. Richard Miller:

Under proper medical supervision, the safety of LSD [is] really not an issue. When used in a proper and appropriate medical context, the incidence of adverse effects is very small. (in Psychedelic Medicine, 2017, by Richard Louis Miller)

My fear is that this drug-related ignorance on the part of the Thai medical leadership is a kind of strategic amnesia. After all, the country is currently ruled by a military junta, and to such leaders a Drug War is a good thing. It gives the government carte blanche to kick in doors at will, thereby thinly disguising their attacks on civilians as part of a pious struggle against the hydra-headed problem of drug abuse. To downplay the dangers of illicit drugs in such a country is to weaken the power of the ruling junta and thereby risk shortening one’s career, if not one’s life. And so the safest thing for the medical professional to do might be to parrot the party line about illegal drugs -- or in other words to mimic the same ignorance and bigotry displayed by American politicians half a century ago when Nixon set a terrible and fascist precedent by creating the door-busting DEA.





For many, [LSD] seems to lead to self-help -- long overdue.
Dr. Keith Ditman, Semi-Weekly Spokesmen-Review (Spokane, Washington), Nov. 8, 1959






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










January 16, 2019
India Shocked by LSD (but not awed by it)


By dutifully following the fascist lead of America’s War on Drugs, Indians have allowed themselves to be puritanically shocked by LSD without being psychologically awed by its vast therapeutic potential. The latest case in point: this campus news article and “editor’s pick” from the “Education Medical Dialogues,” the self-described “voice of the medical profession,” in which reporter Shagufta Perween professes shock that a 27-year-old medical student would have anything to do with “deadly drugs.”

I was shocked myself by Perween’s shock (since I figured that a medical reporter would think twice before parroting the ignorant party line about potentially therapeutic substances) and so I responded with the following posted comment:

The only shocking thing is that police around the world are still following the ignorant and bigoted drug policy of U.S. president Richard Nixon, who knew absolutely nothing about psychedelic drugs except that he hated the people who used them -- because they would not fight in the Vietnam War. These drugs help expand the mind and give access to higher consciousness. They not only promote tolerance and love in the user, but they are showing great promise in alleviating mental illness without inducing the life-long drug-dependence associated with legal drugs such as SSRI antidepressants.

It's bad enough when governments tell their citizens WHAT to think, but by cracking down on psychedelics, governments are telling their citizens HOW they can think and HOW MUCH. That is, indeed, shocking because it is the ultimate form of fascism.

*Note: I'd better state the obvious here since anything an author does NOT say on Reddit can and will be used against him in the court of public opinion. Please know, then, that I am not suggesting that Indian medicine IN GENERAL is behind the times when it comes to modern medicine, let alone the potential for psychedelic therapy. I merely offer this Indian example of bureaucratically entrenched ignorance in the same spirit that I offer American examples of the same: to demonstrate the outdated attitudes that forward-thinking persons must fight in promoting a new paradigm for improving mental health and well-being.




Local medical research has so far indicated that these drugs [LSD], when properly used by trained personnel in a psychiatric setting, bring about the release of long-repressed thoughts and emotions, intensify early memory, and generally enhance perception in ways that promote self-understanding and personality growth in persons with mental and emotional problems.
Hawaii Medical Association, as reported in The Honolulu Advertiser, September 12, 1960






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










January 13, 2019
Screw You, Francis Burton Harrison


Before the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, American citizens could manage their own pain. They could make life livable with the occasional use of opium during their "down time." (Imagine that: no geriatric wards need be full of moaning seniors!) This allowed the user to make their peace with life by occasionally seeing past their own limiting mental constructs (what we today call the "default mode network") and then come back to "life" mentally refreshed and with the will and perspective to carry on. Nor did opium require increased doses over time to maintain this invigorating effect, nor were there negative physiological effects associated with the daily use of these drugs. At worst, the drug created habituation in daily users (what we now moralistically call "addiction"), but even this addiction could be conquered in one agonizing week -- one week -- whereas it is almost impossible to withdraw from many popular SSRIs (as can be clearly seen by reading addict testimony after searching the words "withdrawal" and Effexor" on Google).

After the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, American citizens could no longer manage their own pain. Instead, they had to make regular expensive pilgrimages to the doctors, where they were prescribed far more dangerous drugs than opium, drugs that were more addictive and brought no pleasant dreams by way of compensation, but rather worked to essentially tranquilize the patient into blandly accepting the status quo. Typically these drugs had to be increased over time to maintain efficacy. Nor have they ever been studied for long-term negative effects, meaning today's patients are essentially guinea pigs: guinea pigs in a test trial that is failing, given the fact that many veteran users of these "silver bullets" are reporting increased depression over time as well as an increasing unhappiness with the emotional flat-lining that is associated with daily use of SSRIs.

There is ample evidence that the Harrison Narcotics Act was a racist political stratagem directed at Asians. But even if we assume that the act was a high-minded attempt to fight addiction, consider the actual outcome:

There are more addicts in America than ever after 1914: it's just that now the addiction is being managed by the American Psychiatric Association and the pharmaceutical industry.

Patients are now worse off than ever -- not only have we deprived them of blissful occasional relief from their pain and sorrows, but we have made them wards of the state, forcing them to visit health-care clinics for a lifetime to ask permission for the relief that was theirs by right just over a hundred years ago -- to pay through the nose for medications that are less effective and far more addictive than opium ever was.

Speaking of which, if anyone manages to conjure Francis Burton Harrison via Ouija board, give him a message for me, would you? Tell him I said, "Thanks for nothing!!!"





The plain historical facts are that before 1914, there was no "drug problem" in the United States; nor did we have a name for it.
Ceremonial Chemistry, Thomas Szasz.






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










January 12, 2019
Colorado plane crash caused by milk!


Just watched an episode of Air Disasters in which two pilots flew their small passenger jet into the ground in final approach to the Durango, Colorado airport. The cause of the crash? Well, if the show's narrator is to be believed, it was cocaine.

It turns out the pilot had been up late the night before the accident, at which time he was partying with a girlfriend and "doing" cocaine -- a scene that the documentary luridly re-creates with blurred video and leering conspiratorial visages.

But was the accident really caused by cocaine?

Of course not. Had the pilot been drinking the night before, it would not have been caused by alcohol either.

The crash was caused by the pilot's lack of sleep, which was in turn caused by the pilot's irresponsible decision to stay up all night partying.

But given the sloppy thinking of the Drug War mentality, the show's writers feel justified in concluding that cocaine caused the plane crash.

This is a problem, because it tends to justify the War on Drugs. After all, if cocaine causes planes to drop out of the sky, shouldn't we ban it?

The DEA hierarchy must be smiling every time they watch such a documentary, because they know that their jobs are safe for another generation, as Americans continue to be influenced by the logically challenged conclusions of Drug Warrior America.

Of course, we might as well conclude that the plane crash was caused by milk, since it's likely that the pilot imbibed that notorious indigestion-causing substance on the very day of the accident!

But then the National Dairy Association would never let that happen. They're far too savvy when it comes to PR. Remember when it was discovered that 30% of milk drinkers experienced gastrointestinal problems when consuming that beverage? The product wasn't exactly pulled from the shelves, was it? Instead, the Dairy Association successfully blamed the problem on the milk drinkers themselves, insisting that they were lactose intolerant and that the product itself was just fine, thank you very much. Of course, if I put out a product that sickened 30% of my customers, I'd be hauled off to jail -- but not so the Dairy Association.

This may sound off-topic but it shows that who we blame for our country's ills often depends far more on politics than on a rational evaluation of the facts at hand, and nowhere is this more true than in the case of Richard Nixon's bigoted, know-nothing drug war.




By means of this drug[LSD], people can view themselves objectively and can then accept themselves which is a great step forward in the care of mental illness.
Dr. Kahan, Executive Director Mental Health Saskatchewan, The Leader-Post, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, July 20, 1961






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










January 9, 2019
The Racist and Political War on Drugs


President Obama said the war on drugs was a failure -- but he doesn't go far enough. The fact is that the war on drugs never had a RIGHT to succeed because the drug laws in the United States have always been motivated by racist and political hysteria, disguised by a thin veneer of concern about the "welfare" of the American people. Thus marijuana was criminalized by stoking fears about Mexicans, opium was criminalized by stoking fears about Asians, and crack cocaine was demonized by stoking fears about African-Americans.

But let's be honest: if the U.S. government had been truly worried about the health of the American people, it never would have launched a war on drugs in the first place: it would have launched a war on guns instead. But, of course, that would never happen. Why? Because the bigoted, hypocritical and scientifically ignorant politicians behind America's fascist drug war have a fetish about gun ownership, whereby they scream bloody murder if they can't anonymously buy all the machine-guns they want at 7-Eleven 24 hours a day.

And so the violence of the Drug War is a brutal American-generated game of good guys and bad guys, with the politicians corruptly determining who gets to wear the white hat on the basis of ignorance and sheer bigotry.

Worst of all, Americans have bought this lie hook, line and sinker.

Not only have we signed off completely on blatantly unconstitutional drug testing of anyone and everyone who wants a job, but we dutifully line up to watch butt-kicking movies about DEA agents in South America kicking down doors and shooting suspects at will. But not to worry: we can just call the bad guys "scumbags" and thus ease our consciences about mowing them down unconstitutionally.

Of course, such movies are usually set in South America since we Americans still don't like to think of law enforcement acting like Nazi storm troopers here in the States (even though we know that they do). Let them kick butt in Colombia, where we can still plausibly think of the Drug War's custom-created bad guys as less than human.

And finally, even when it's not blatantly bigoted, the Drug War is all about the anti-scientific notion that Americans have no right to control their own minds and their own pain by using natural plants. This is as fascistic as you can possibly get. It's bad enough when the government tells you what you can think, but it's even worse when the government tells you HOW you can think and HOW MUCH. And this is what the government does when it forbids your access to pain-treating and mind-expanding plants.

And why? Because in the puritanically perverse mind of America's Drug Warriors Mother Nature is a Drug Kingpin par excellence, not a bestower of natural medical wonders for the many ailments of humankind. If we want medicines, we dare not harvest it from Mother Nature herself (that's a crime!): we're required instead to get our medicines in a diluted and typically addictive formulation from Big Pharma, thus boosting the profits of pharmaceutical stocks owned by the Drug Warriors themselves.

My fear is that the Drug War is succeeding -- because that means that Americans have agreed to give up their rights to Mother Nature's bounty -- and to stop caring about the rights of minorities and foreigners, whom we now feel free to demonize as scumbags for violating bigoted and anti-scientific drug laws that never should have been written in the first place.





How many people know that hemp, coca, and the opium poppy are ordinary plants, understand how they became transformed into dreaded 'dangerous drugs,' and realize that in losing our rights to them we have surrendered some of our most basic rights to property?
'Our Right to Drugs', Thomas Szasz






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










January 7, 2019
Fallon of the DEA









The constraints on the power of the federal government, as laid down in the constitution, have been eroded by a monopolistic medical profession administering a system of prescription laws that have, in effect, removed most of the drugs people want from the free market.
'Our Right to Drugs', Thomas Szasz






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










January 3, 2019
Why Ballot Box Initiatives Make Perfect Sense Given America's War on Drugs
https://redd.it/ac7pmn


In an article on the Oregon Public Broadcasting website (Psychedelic Mushroom Supporters Push For Oregon Legalization — With Caveats), Obama’s former drug policy director says that psilocybin should not be made legal via the ballot box.

“Medicine is not up for a popular vote,” says Kevin Sabet, “it should be subject to the rigors of science.”

In a perfect world, Sabet might be right, but America’s current drug laws are about as far from perfect as they can be. Under the influence of Richard Nixon, the DEA has brazenly lied about psychedelics now for almost 50 years, placing them under the uber-restrictive schedule I category based on the false and unscientific claims that such medicines are addictive and have no therapeutic potential. Given this outrageous state of affairs – in which millions have been denied therapy thanks to lies – it makes perfect democratic sense that citizens would fight back. Sabet should be proud, not disappointed, that this fight is taking place at the ballot box, because if Americans fully grasped the extent of the injustice here, this fight might well be taking place in the streets.

If Kevin Sabet really wanted drugs evaluated according to “the rigors of science,” he would not be fretting over ballot box initiatives which attempt to remedy this vast injustice by the only means that seems to work; instead, he would be using his political clout to abolish the DEA, which has been “scheduling” drugs for half a century now based totally on political calculations rather than on scientific ones (thereby giving the door-kicking agency a full fascistic workload for decades to come). As part of this crack down on the DEA, Sabet would call for the public trial of those DEA officials who have knowingly promoted these lies over the years and thus contributed to the suffering of untold numbers of Americans, all of whom have been denied valuable medications on the basis of anti-scientific lies.




For the past half-century the American people have engaged in one of the most ruthless wars-- fought under the colors of drugs and doctors, diseases and treatments-- that the world has ever seen.
Ceremonial Chemistry: The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers. Thomas Szasz.






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










December 29, 2018
Abolish the DEA


The drug scheduling system is a scam. It rates drugs by their political danger to the establishment, not by their danger to users. If we need to schedule drugs at all, it should be done by impartial scientists, not by the DEA, which has a conflict of interest in making such determinations. The DEA exists to punish drug offenses. Their jobs depend on keeping drugs illegal. What interest do they have in making drugs easier to obtain? They've had almost 50 years now to "lighten up" on psychedelics and have refused to do so.

The DEA should be abolished. Its top officials should be hauled into court for knowingly scheduling psychedelics and other substances on the basis of lies and thereby denying therapeutic medications to millions for the last half century. It should be part of a class action lawsuit, brought by the endless list of Americans who have led lives of quiet despair over the years unnecessarily thanks to Richard Nixon's creation of this jackbooted agency that blocks valid drug research and foments drug violence around the world.




The ritual persecution of these pharmacological and human agents must be seen against the historical backdrop of the ritual persecution of other scapegoats, such as witches, Jews, and madmen.
Ceremonial Chemistry: The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers. Thomas Szasz.






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










December 29, 2018
Drug Testing Fascism


Drug testing was brought to us by the same folks who started the anti-democratic drug war in the first place. It was a fascist attempt to silence liberal dissent about drug policy by ruining the economic lives of any Americans who dared to use nature's bounty to improve their own outlook on life.

The conservatives basically said this: "Fine, you want to disagree with us about drug policy, then we'll take away your ability to earn a living."

Before drug testing, the penalty for marijuana use in a given state might have been community service at most.

With drug testing, the penalty for marijuana use suddenly became economic ruin! Now the drug user could no longer get a job!

Talk about cruel and unusual punishment! We don't have such harsh penalties even for murderers who are out on parole.

Drug testing also relies on crazed premises.

There is no scientific case for concluding that a person is impaired merely because there is a trace of a given substance in their urine. (To the contrary, the US Air Force has insisted that its pilots actually be "on speed" during certain long-range missions.) And yet the discovery of the least trace of cocaine, opium, or marijuana in one's urine is taken to be positive proof that a worker is unable to perform a given job. (To grasp the insanity of this conclusion, imagine if we denied gainful employment to anyone who had drunk a beer in the last seven days, regardless of whether they were actually "inebriated" at the work place.)

When drug testing is used on commercial airline pilots, it may be about passenger safety; but when it's used on a teenage employee at the local super mart, it's about a nosy government attempting to enforce controversial laws by turning American businesses into Grand Inquisitors.

Finally, if submitting one's urine to complete strangers is not an invasion of privacy, then what is?

*During the height of the drug war, the Bush and Reagan administrations even urged Americans to "turn in" their own parents, should they be found using natural substances that had been outlawed by the government. The fact that such supposedly freedom-loving presidents would advocate such a Stalinist anti-family practice speaks volumes about the corrupting influence of America's superstitious drug war, that war in which political agitprop is used to turn mere natural substances into the boogie-men responsible for all social ills.




Dr. T.C. Marks, a physician of experience and standing, has added another to the long list of things that can be profitably produced in the glorious climate of southern California. The particular substance this time is opium.
Los Angeles Herald, August 9, 1891






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










December 24, 2018
Merry Christmas from the DEA


It’s been another exciting year of kicking down America’s front doors and growing the nation’s prison population with a whole new batch of freshly minted scumbags. Of course, we couldn’t do it without you. So let’s make a New Year’s resolution in 2019 to report any signs that you may see of Americans attempting to treat their own pain and neuroses with the help of Schedule I plants and fungi such as poppies, mushrooms and other psychedelics. With your help, we’ll be able to ruin these junkies' lives forever while teaching them a lesson about bypassing the capitalist healthcare system. (Humph! The very idea, securing drugs in such a way as to cut out the psychiatric middle man!)

Because remember: There’s no hope in dope, friends – unless, of course, the addictive substance in question has been prescribed by a board-certified psychiatrist!

Oh, and happy drug-free Hanukah, as well, yes? (and Kwanzaa, too!)

Signed,

Your Modern DEA: proudly quashing therapeutic drug research since 1973





"With LSD as an aid," the report said, "it has been possible to reach and work with patients who are otherwise unresponsive to psychotherapy."
Kingsport News, March 4, 1960






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










December 22, 2018
Step Away from the Mushroom!


This is the city, Los Angeles California. A quiet town full of hard-working Americans who still know the meaning of the word “obey.” That said, there are always a few renegades who attempt to improve their lives through the unsanctioned use of natural substances such as poppies and mushrooms. That’s where I come in, guns a-blazin’. My name is Friday and I carry a Sig Sauer 556 Classic SWAT rifle with a 30-round magazine and laser sight.

Wednesday, June 21, 1 p.m.

FRIDAY: We had just gotten the call here at DEA HQ. It seems some octogenarian hippy from the north side was using psychoactive plants to improve her spiritual life. Claims she’s in a “blue funk” and wants to see behind the so-called “veil of Maya” before she dies.

I decided to pay grandma a visit, see if I could talk some sense into her – or better yet, catch her red-handed with the goodies and thus shut her away for life, lest young people everywhere should infer from her ongoing freedom that they too can use natural plants and fungus in just any way that they see fit. (Humph!) After all, it’s not like our Founding Fathers relied on anything more than grit and determination to make it in the world, blue funk or no blue funk.

FRANK: Say, Joe, didn’t Benjamin Franklin use opium?

FRIDAY: Just the propaganda, Frank. Just the propaganda.

1:35 p.m.

FRIDAY: I had pictured this aged flower child smoldering away in some dilapidated bungalow near the Los Angeles River Basin, annoying her low-class neighbors with the reek of her oversized bong decorated with Amazonian rain gods. To my surprise, however, I encountered the surprisingly recherche crone in the midst of high-class respectability, in her very own 6-bedroom mansion on Ivarene Avenue in the Hollywood Hills, tastefully appointed with mid-century décor and modern art, complete with private bath, solarium and even a billiard room.

“Hubba-hubba, “ I says to Frank. “Crime seems to be paying here, huh, Frank? It’s about time that we put a stop to that – the more so in that this place could easily net 6 million dollars for law enforcement when it’s put up for auction after we throw old grandma into the hoosegow.”

So thinking, I addressed the beldame as follows:

FRIDAY: You do realize, ma’am, that it’s illegal to use plants and fungi as you see fit?

WOMAN: Oh, I’m sorry, I thought I lived in a free country.

FRIDAY: Not since the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914.

FRANK: Hey, she’s got a mushroom, Joe, just to her right!

FRIDAY: Step away from the mushroom, ma’am!

WOMAN: But—

FRIDAY: All right, you asked for it, Janis Joplin! Now I have to throw you on the ground and threaten you with immediate death if you so much as move an inch!

WOMAN: WHY?

FRIDAY: Because… Because… Oh, how the hell do I know: it’s just standard DEA procedure in these cases!

WOMAN: I was just trying to improve my mind!

FRIDAY: Yeah, ma’am, well, have you ever stopped to think what it would be like if EVERYBODY were to try to improve their mind like you?

WOMAN: Um… the world would be a better place?

FRIDAY: No! The world would be full of criminals!

FRANK: Well said, Joe.

[After the trio catch their breath…]

FRIDAY: You know what, Frank?

FRANK: What’s that, Joe?

FRIDAY: If everybody had her attitude, the world would be full of broken doors.

FRANK: How’s that, Joe?

FRIDAY: Because the DEA would be obliged to perform a traditional SWAT raid on every single house in America, kicking in doors as we go.

FRANK: Hey, not a bad idea: sounds like there’d be a lot of valuable overtime in that arrangement.

FRIDAY: You took the bullets right out of my SWAT gun, Frank.

[Frank and Friday chuckle as “Janis Joplin” is violently hauled off to the already-overcrowded federal penitentiary system behind the credit roll]

On October 29, trial was held in the district court of Los Angeles County.

The old crone was found guilty of conspiring to obtain Psilocybin mushrooms for the express purpose of improving her life. The Judge sentenced her to 25 years in the slammer, as a lesson to anyone who still thinks that Mother Nature's pharmacopoeia is actually open to the public. (Humph!)




In southern Mexico, the jail and prison officials experience great difficulty in trying to prevent the smuggling into their institutions of the seductive mariguana (sic). This is a kind of "loco" weed more powerful than opium.
The Iola Daily Record, Iola, Kansas, Jan 1, 1900






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










December 19, 2018
The DEA: causing untold suffering since 1973


Richard Nixon's War on Drugs has ruined more lives than anyone has yet recognized. Besides the millions of prisoners languishing behind bars, there are the millions of depressed elderly who are denied happiness thanks to the fact that politics, not science, determines what drugs we can use. The drugs prescribed today for anxiety are far more habit-forming than opium. Moreover, opium use does not require dosage increases over time -- and it becomes addictive only when used on a daily basis. Yet the fascist bureaucrats of the DEA are determined to keep pain control out of the hands of mere citizens, so they ignore the science and crack down on those who dare to treat their own suffering. In short, they keep drugs like opium on schedule I to keep us coming back to the board-certified doctors for our addictive meds that enrich the bottom line of faceless corporations.




The ritual persecution of these pharmacological and human agents must be seen against the historical backdrop of the ritual persecution of other scapegoats, such as witches, Jews, and madmen.
Ceremonial Chemistry: The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers. Thomas Szasz.






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










December 16, 2018
Partnership for a Brain-Free Virginia


Reasons that I get infuriated when I think about “drug-free” proselytizers such as “Drug Free Virginia”:

1) Members of these groups drink alcohol and/or coffee. To be consistent, they should be denouncing both substances as addictive.

2) They exaggerate the addictive potential of illegal drugs while totally ignoring (or even denying) the addictive potential of legal drugs, especially SSRIs and benzodiazepines.

3) They champion laws that empower a police state in America and narcotics syndicates overseas.

4) The policies they support have forced me “on” to addictive drugs (namely SSRIs) as the only available psychiatric treatments for depression, while denying me the strategic use of less addictive and far more effective substances such as opium (which, despite the drug-war bluster, is a far less addictive substance than Effexor).

5) They keep me from living a fulfilled life by piously insisting against all evidence that people don’t need drugs – which, of course, they don’t even MEAN in light of the caveats stated above. What they mean is: people don’t need substances whose purchase doesn’t enrich corporate America.

6) Their anti-drug propaganda creates the mindset that allows for highly invasive drug-testing for jobs like burger slingers and cashiers, which, besides being an affront to the U.S. Constitution, is a fascist ploy to keep down dissent. Why? Because it threatens those who don’t toe the party line about drugs with the wildly disproportionate punishment of joblessness.

7) The outlook of these drug warriors is based on a tacit philosophical-religious assumption, namely that there exists a moral reason why human beings who suffer should not freely reach out to Mother Nature and its plants and fungi in order to find cures for their ailments. I do not hold that assumption and it is religious intolerance in action when I am forced to live in suffering thanks to the highly debatable moral tenets of others.

8) They have no understanding of the power and potential of human consciousness and therefore feel free to stand in the way of its perfection in others. In this way, they are like a misguided Mr. Magoo who prevents his offspring from visiting the eye doctor on the grounds that: “If God had wanted us to have better vision, we would have been born with glasses!”





By means of this drug[LSD], people can view themselves objectively and can then accept themselves which is a great step forward in the care of mental illness.
Dr. Kahan, Executive Director Mental Health Saskatchewan, The Leader-Post, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, July 20, 1961






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










December 15, 2018
DEA listed as Schedule I agency


The DEA has just been listed as a Schedule I agency. This rating means that the organization has no valid reason for existing and that it has the potential for causing harm to individuals who come into contact with it. The ranking is based on the DEA’s promotion of a police state in North America and its work in fomenting war in South America through its Quixotic plan to render plants illegal. Side effects of tolerating the DEA include government interference in medicinal research. The DEA has also been found to limit your ability to know yourself through the mind-expanding power of shamanic medicines. In some cases, these side effects may even include lengthy prison sentences, as this agency has been known to lock you up for years merely because you attempted to find a non-addictive medicinal alternative to the mind-numbing addictive drugs of modern psychiatry. Long-term support for the DEA has been shown to lead to senselessly ruined lives and overcrowded prisons, resulting in a vast waste of human potential. Continued acceptance of this agency can even render Democratic populations complacent to creeping fascism.

This Schedule I listing will remain in effect until the DEA is discarded, along with the paranoid and ignorant mind set of its fascist founder: Richard M. Nixon.




Dr. T.C. Marks, a physician of experience and standing, has added another to the long list of things that can be profitably produced in the glorious climate of southern California. The particular substance this time is opium.
Los Angeles Herald, August 9, 1891






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










December 15, 2018
Initiative 12 isn't premature; it's 50 years too late


The Corvallis Gazette-Times recently published an editorial stating that the Initiative to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms in Oregon was “premature.” This came as shocking news to those of us who have already been waiting FIFTY YEARS for the privilege of using this sort of medicine to treat our depression, especially since that waiting period wasn’t put in effect by a board of impartial scientists but rather by his royal highness, Richard M. Nixon, in his attempt to crack down on dissent during the Vietnam War.

So I submitted the following “letter to the editor” to the Gazette-Times, hoping to reassure its editorial staff that their fear is misplaced.

Regarding Initiative 12: it is 50 years too LATE. In your calculus of worry, be sure to include the fact that the Drug War has deprived wounded soldiers, alcoholics and depressed patients of powerful medicine for half a century, and on the basis of a lie, namely that psychedelics are addictive (wrong) and that they have no therapeutic value (wrong again). When evaluating potential harm, please consider the vicious anti-democratic drug cartels that the war on these drugs has empowered. Look at the overall picture, and you will see that the legal suppression of psychiatric medicines is causing a bloodbath even as we speak. Remember that psychedelics were a valuable legal medicine in the 1950s, acclaimed for curing alcoholics and reaching otherwise unreachable psychiatric patients. It was only thanks to Richard Nixon's war on hippies that we came to see these substances as evil. Whatever the Initiative’s negative impact, it can only be far below the abject desolation caused by Richard Nixon’s Drug War, which has turned America into a prison camp and fostered torture and chaos in South America. If you want to worry about something, worry about the collateral damage that the Drug War has been wreaking now for half a century by rendering therapeutic medicines illegal. It’s about time that Americans worried about that.






[Dr. Watt declares] that the moderate use of opium is not more injurious than the moderate use of alcohol and even that its abusive use is less destructive to its victims than intemperance.
The Freeman's Journal, Dublin, Ireland, October 31, 1891






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










December 14, 2018
My Drug War Alternative


Given that it's long since time to end Richard Nixon's bigoted and ignorant war on drugs, here is an easy four-step process for replacing it with a sane and humane alternative.

1) Make possession of all illegal drugs a misdemeanor. As Portugal did successfully over 15 years ago

2) Make most currently illegal drugs available via prescription. Opium, psychedelics, MDMA, etc.

3) Change the psychiatric project from "curing" so-called mental illness to treating its symptoms. (see below)

4) Rewrite the pros and cons of illegal drugs -- from a scientific rather than a political point of view.

The rationale for point number three is philosophical in nature and follows below for those who are interested.

The current psychiatric goal is to find a silver bullet for mental illness. This has led psychiatry racing toward a disastrous dead end, for their patients and for psychiatry as a profession. Psychiatry is literally running out of ideas.

Take me, for instance. As a chronically depressed patient for the last 25 years, psychiatry now has literally nothing to offer me except inadequate and ultimately mind-muddling SSRIs, and specifically the highly addictive Effexor. Out of the vast pharmacopeia on Planet Earth, this is all that psychiatry can offer me: one drug: Effexor.

Why? Because in its attempt to appear "scientific," psychiatry has insisted for the last 50+ years on curing a supposed illness rather than making a patient feel better. Meanwhile they've launched a full-court PR press with Big Pharma money to claim, falsely, that SSRIs correct a chemical imbalance in the brains of depressed patients. Although author Robert Whitaker has demonstrated this claim to be false, we have to ask ourselves: even if this WERE true, how come folks like myself are more depressed now than they were 25 years ago when they first began their SSRI use?

Meanwhile, why is psychiatry so dismissive of drugs like opium and MDMA? These substances, after all, have a clear track record of making users feel better when used wisely. In the past, I would have said that psychiatry does not want me to get addicted to such drugs and is therefore refraining to use them in a therapeutic setting, but this is clearly not the case, since Effexor is one of the most addictive drugs on the planet, notwithstanding psychiatry's condescending newspeak in which they talk about "maintenance therapy" instead of "addiction" when it comes to SSRIs. If psychiatry has no scruples about addicting me to Effexor, why are they so squeamish about the mere possibility of addicting me to opium?

Of course, the psychiatrist would say that such drugs only make me feel good by treating symptoms. But so what? It is precisely by thus feeling good that I thrive and find meaning in my life-- which in turn IS treating my depression in real-time.

But again, psychiatry's goal is NOT to make me feel good. (We might well guess this fact in light of the irrational knee-jerk revulsion that psychiatrists express for the so-called "Dr. Feelgoods" of the world.) Psychiatry cum science is dedicated instead to treating depressed human beings as chemical agglomerations in need of some rationally derivable chemical fix. So while I'm moaning in a corner, they're looking in their microscopes muttering:

"No, Brian, SSRIs are the logical way to cure you. If you still feel poorly after taking these scientific nostrums of ours, then, how can I put this: your emotions are simply making a mistake -- don't ask me how."

But once we've convinced psychiatry to see the patient as a person again, we still need to clarify our muddle-headed thinking about illegal drugs. We have been bamboozled by 50 years of politically-inspired trash talk about the various chemical substances in question here.

Mention the word "opium," for instance, and we think of drug dens and suspicious-looking Asians. But when looked at unemotionally, without the baggage of the drug war mentality, we discover that opium is LESS addictive than most SSRIs -- and that addiction can be avoided entirely merely by avoiding daily usage of opium for more than a few days at a time. (Who knew? We were too busy feeling the obligatory disgust for opium that we never bothered to check!) Nor is there evidence of long-term physiological damage from the continued use of opium. Even should addiction intervene, for all its horrors, it can be overcome far more quickly than an addiction to SSRIs (days versus months or years).

Yet the drug war mentality says: "OPIUM??? AWFUL!!!" It's simply a non-starter in a therapeutic setting.

Of course, in a sane world, the psychiatrist would be able to prescribe opium to his or her depressed patient. But to repeat: psychiatry today is not about making the patient feel good: it's about correcting supposed chemical imbalances, since only by pursuing such an approach can the psychiatrist feel themselves to be as "scientific" (read "materialistic") as their big brother sciences such as Physics and Chemistry.

Result: depressed patients like myself remain depressed in order to feed the ego and the pocket book of the psychiatrist.

RECAP of My Drug War Alternative

1) Make possession of all illegal drugs a misdemeanor.

2) Make most currently illegal drugs available via prescription.

3) Change the psychiatric project from "curing" so-called mental illness to treating its symptoms.

4) Rewrite the pros and cons of illegal drugs -- from a scientific rather than a political point of view.

*for more politically incorrect information about opium, see Jim Hogshire's courageous book entitled "Opium for the Masses"






LSD-25, a drug capable of bringing back childhood memories with the sharpness of a 3-D movie, is helping fight mental illness in persons formerly considered hopeless, two psychiatrists said today.
"Hopeless Mental Cases Given Aid By Drug Discovery," The Daily Item, Sunbury, Pennsylvania, March 24, 1960,






kick in door to return to top of page

Welcome to site! No need to kick this door in, a simple ring of the doorbell will suffice

Answers for clueless drug warriors

Browse articles about the unConstitutional drug war that is a violation of natural law

Here's how to solve the drug problem, stop inner-city violence, and empower doctors, all at the same time




AbolishTheDEA.com










November 14, 2018
Notice of Scam


You may have heard discussion of a so-called DEA, or Drug Enforcement Agency, that was purportedly created to keep America safe from harmful drugs. Be warned: This agency is a scam. It claims to protect society while it is actually blocking research on valuable health therapies based on fear-mongering and lies.

This agency has been fighting tooth and nail to keep psychedelics on their so-called list of Schedule I drugs for almost 50 years now, meaning that those drugs cannot even be investigated for therapeutic potential, unless a researcher jumps through a circus full of hoops and risks the loss of their re