They've got a lot of nerve, starting their set off with "Quinn the Eskimo" like that.
[drum] [laughter]
In the DEA Lounge of all places.
[laughter]
Don't they know that the government does not allow improved thinking and expanded consciousness via plants -- the coca leaves included?
Never mind that indigenous South Americans have used them for ages to achieve mental clarity.
Never mind that Sigmund Freud himself achieved prodigious vocational output and thus self-fulfillment via cocaine .
[applause]
Uh-oh. We seem to have a Drug Warrior in our midst. You've got to realize, madam, that it's absurd to criminalize plants and thereby make a black market and generate all sorts of violence.
[applause]
All I can say is, I hope you're enjoying that Bahama Mama while you're hypocritically trash-talking Mother Nature's plants.
Freud was like, "That psychotherapy mumbo jumbo is all well and good for my patients, but I demand REAL treatment in my own life, thank you very much!"
[laughter]
But it's funny trying to argue against the fascist Drug War on line.
[gasp]
And I call it fascist advisedly, mind you, because {^the Drug War is nothing but the enforcement of Christian Science with respect to mental states.}{
[applause]
My name is Thomas de Qunicey, and I'll be here through Friday, or until the United States outlaws criticism of its disgraceful Drug War, which could happen any day, considering that the government has already had the chutzpah to outlaw the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet.
[laughter] [applause]
Yes, madam, I'm sure you're very proud of yourself for having given up the vast majority of nature's godsend medicines, but I'll thank you not to make Christian Science the state religion with your anti-scientific drug laws.
[laughter] [applause]
For more groundbreaking anti-Drug War essays and comedy, visit AbolishTheDEA.com, preferably before it's outlawed by people like motormouth here.
The drug war is laughable -- or it would be if the drug warriors hadn't deprived us of laughing gas, the substance that William James himself used to study alternate realities.
I just asked New York Attorney General Letitia James how much she was getting paid to play Whack-a-Mole. I pointed out that the drug war created the gangs just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia.
If we let "science" decide about drugs, i.e. base freedom on health concerns, then tea can be as easily outlawed as beer. The fact that horses are not illegal shows that prohibition is not about health. It's about the power to outlaw certain "ways of being in the world."
Almost every mainstream article about psychology and consciousness is nonsense these days because it ignores the way that drug prohibition has stymied our investigation of such subjects.
Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.
Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.
So he writes about the mindset of the deeply depressed, reifying the condition as if it were some great "type" inevitably to be encountered in humanity. No. It's the "type" to be found in a post-Christian society that has turned up its scientific nose at psychoactive medicine.
Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice.
Besides, why should I listen to the views of a microbe?
Here's the first step in the FDA process for evaluating a psychoactive drug:
Ignore all glaringly obvious benefits
I'd like to become a guinea pig for researchers to test the ability of psychoactive drugs to make aging as psychologically healthy as possible. If such drugs cannot completely ward off decrepitude, they can surely make it more palatable. The catch? Researchers have to be free.
I just asked New York Attorney General Letitia James how much she was getting paid to play Whack-a-Mole. I pointed out that the drug war created the gangs just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia.