Here's the best philosophical analysis of the War on Drugs that I have yet to discover:
"A materialist consciousness is attempting to preserve itself from dissolution by restriction and persecution of experience of the transcendental. One day perhaps the earth will be dominated by the illusion of separate consciousness, the bureaucrats having triumphed in seizing control of all roads of communication with the divine and restricting traffic. But sleep and death cannot evade the great dream of being and the victory of the bureaucrats of illusion is only an illusion of their separate world of consciousness."
--Allen Ginsberg, as quoted by Oliver Harris, editor of "The Yage Letters Redux"
We have a low tolerance for the downsides of drug use only. We are fine with high risk levels for any other activity on earth. If drug warriors were serious about saving lives, they'd outlaw guns, free flying, free diving, and all pleasure trips to Mars.
The DEA should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for withholding godsend medicine from the depressed. Here is just one typical drug-user report that appeared in "Pihkal": "A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like..."
Did the Vedic People have a substance disorder because they wanted to drink enough soma to see religious realities?
When psychiatrists write about heroin, they characterize dependency as enslavement. When they write about antidepressants, they characterize dependency as a medical duty.
And where did politicians get the idea that irresponsible white American young people are the only stakeholders when it comes to the question of re-legalizing drugs??? There are hundreds of millions of other stakeholders: philosophers, pain patients, the depressed.
If Americans cannot handle the truth about drugs, then there is something wrong with Americans, not with drugs.
I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.
There are hundreds of things that we should outlaw before drugs (like horseback riding) if, as claimed, we are targeting dangerous activities. Besides, drugs are only dangerous BECAUSE of prohibition, which compromises product purity and refuses to teach safe use.
Ug! Fire bad!
There were 4,731 fire-related deaths in America in 2023.
Learn more at the Partnership for a Death Free America.
Kids should be taught beginning in grade school that prohibition is wrong.
We have a low tolerance for the downsides of drug use only. We are fine with high risk levels for any other activity on earth. If drug warriors were serious about saving lives, they'd outlaw guns, free flying, free diving, and all pleasure trips to Mars.