The Drug War represents a substance demonization campaign that is unprecedented in human history. Yet you write as if LSD and Ecstasy can be judged to be evil merely if they cause one single problem. That's the odd standard that folks hold for psychoactive substances of which politicians disapprove. If alcohol, tobacco (or even coffee or aspirin) were held to that standard, all three would be immediately outlawed.
The fact is that LSD was successfully treating alcoholics in the 1950s, before President Richard Nixon outlawed it, NOT in order to improve public health but in order to charge his political enemies with felonies and thereby remove them from the voting rolls.
The 1990s Rave Scene in England represented the first time that groups of every race and color came together peacefully on the dance floor. It should have been seen as a way forward for world peace and a way to escape nuclear Armageddon. (Pakistan and North Korea have "the bomb," as will Iran. Does anyone really think that anything but a major inner change in human hearts is going to prevent eventual wholesale catastrophes?)
And yet the Drug Warriors hated that peaceful scene because it was induced by a substance that politicians had chosen to demonize. The fact is that MDMA is a godsend for depression and could be used to end gun massacres because it brings out a love for humanity and one's fellow creature. It has been shown to help soldiers with PTSD when nothing else works.
But Drug Warriors don't care. They'd rather have the ravers using aggression-inducing drugs like alcohol.
When they cracked down on Ecstasy, the dance scene became so violent that special forces troops were called in to keep the peace. Special Forces!
I invite you to read my article entitled: "How the Drug War Killed Leah Betts and ended the peaceful rave scene."
I ask you, Satish: Which sounds like the best way forward to you : a world in which all plants are legal and are evaluated without bias for their actual beneficial uses -- or a world in which botanically clueless politicians decide in advance which plant substances are bad and forbid science from even studying them after that -- and even send armies overseas to eradicate the hated substances from the face of the earth? Which system sounds more grown-up to you?
Benjamin Franklin enjoyed opium. Sigmund Freud thought cocaine was a godsend for his depression. Francis Crick discovered the DNA helix with the help of generous amounts of psychedelics. Thomas Jefferson rolled over in his grave when Drug Warriors confiscated his poppy plants.
If you want to see what the Drug War has accomplished, look at America's crowded prisons and the extrajudicial killings in the Philippines and the civil war in Mexico.
So, please, reconsider the Drug Warrior habit of demonizing a substance merely because it is susceptible of misuse by a teenager. Whole religions have been founded based on the psychoactive power of plants. Don't let politicians demonize plant medicine -- let's be rational and praise substances that conduce to world peace, rather than dogmatically implying that they are evil. That's the judgment of racist politicians, not science -- and it is ahistorical, since time out of mind, the substances that we banish have been used to enhance creativity and increase religiosity.
June 14, 2022
Almost all academic papers about the politically created category of "drugs" have to do with misuse, abuse and addiction. This is really a kind of Drug War propaganda in and of itself, because the collective effect of these papers is to give the layperson the impression that psychoactive substances are pure evil the moment that they have been outlawed by pharmacologically clueless politicians. In a sane world, we'd have articles that talked about morphine's ability to give the properly educated user an intense appreciation of Mother Nature, a la the morphine-fueled delights of amateur naturalist Augustus Bedloe in Poe's short story entitled "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains." We'd find articles about the ability of pedagogically employed psilocybin to heighten musical appreciation, and the power of coca to aid in focus on a wide variety of computational tasks, including everything from proofreading to creating crosswords -- or, as Jules Verne and HG Wells knew, to increase our ability to focus long enough to write coherent and powerful short stories.
Instead, researchers just crank out paper after paper about the abuse and misuse of psychoactive substances, in lockstep with the Drug Warrior lie that such demonized substances can be used for nothing but hedonistic and immoral purposes. For the Drug War ideology insists that we assume, a priori, that demonized plant medicines have no legitimate uses whatsoever, a glaring falsehood that has fried the brains of not just the public, but of American psychologists and scientists as well, almost all of whom find it more than their jobs are worth to push back against the know-nothing mendacity of the Drug War.
For more information on how academics (even many of those who denounce drug prohibition) are getting it wrong when it comes to the Drug War, check out "The Problem with Modern Drug Reform Efforts."
October 2, 2022
It's strange that Satish Chandra is blasting psychoactive medicines for statistical trifles given the fact that the Vedic-Hindu religion itself was inspired by psychedelic medicine. But it's also not surprising since it's US government policy to ignore all beneficial uses of psychoactive plant medicine. Just look at the original charter of Joe Biden's Office of National Drug Control Policy, and you find a proviso which forbids government employees from even discussing potential positive uses of "drugs" -- i.e., those medicinal godsends from Mother Nature which botanically and historically clueless politicians have decided to outlaw.
The Mayans considered 'magic mushrooms' divine, the Inca had the same idea about the coca plant. And Plato's view of the afterlife was inspired by the psychedelic fueled Eleusinian Mysteries1, and yet so-called 'scientific' America has taught the world to demonize all such substances and to turn the hypocritically defined category of "drugs" into an all-purpose scapegoat for social problems. That's a conscious move by conservatives who are determined to keep America's eye OFF the prize, so that Americans are too busy being arrested and drug-tested to demand social policies that the skin-flint 3% do not wish to help pay for.
It's hard to overstate how huge of a scandal this is. There is a prima facie case for using drugs like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA to treat Alzheimer's and autism sufferers, given the fact that said substances have been shown to create new neuronal connections and even grow new neurons in the brain. Yet our government demands that we ignore such obvious approaches to treating these modern-day scourges, because they believe that substances called "drugs" can have no good uses for anyone, anywhere, ever: an idea that would be laughable were it not productive of so much unnecessary suffering in the world.
And to their shame, scientists are willing to play ball. That's why you never see an academic paper on treating Alzheimer's or autism in which the researcher is honest with the reader and publishes a disclaimer saying that the solutions that they can entertain are limited by the US government and its laws against almost every powerful psychoactive medicine in the world. And that's, of course, another reason for the Drug War's staying power, i.e., the fact that American researchers pretend as if the Drug War does not exist, that they are working from a natural baseline when fighting mental problems, which is absolutely false.
Of course, we have scarcely touched on the injustice of the Drug War. As if censoring science, warehousing minorities, killing blacks, denying morphine to dying children, and Nazifying the English language were not enough, the Drug War is busy making Latin America safe for capitalism by fostering right-wing corruption at every level of government.
The FDA approves of brain-damaging shock therapy but will not approve MDMA for soldiers with PTSD. This is the same FDA that signs off on the psychiatric pill mill upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life. This is the same FDA that approves Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself! (Can somebody say "follow the money"?)
What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.
When Americans "obtain their majority" and wish to partake of drugs safely, they should be paired with older adults who have done just that. Instead, we introduce them to "drug abusers" in prerecorded morality plays to reinforce our biased notions that drug use is wrong.
Every video about science and psilocybin is funny. It shows nerds trying to catch up with common sense. But psychedelics work, whether the FDA thinks so or not. It's proven by what James Fadiman calls "citizen science," i.e. everyday experience.
Harm Reduction is not enough. We need Benefit Production as well. The autistic should be able to use compassion-enhancing drugs; dementia patients should be able to use the many drugs that improve and speed up mental processes.
The Drug War shows us that American democracy is fundamentally flawed. Propaganda and fearmongering has persuaded Americans to give up freedoms that are clearly enunciated in the U.S. Constitution. We need a new democracy in which a Constitution actually matters.
What is the end game of the drug warrior? A world in which no one wants drugs? That's not science. It's the drug-hating religion of Christian Science. You know, the American religion that outsources its Inquisition to drug-testing labs.
Now the US is bashing the Honduran president for working with "drug cartels." Why don't we just be honest and say why we're REALLY upset with the guy? Drugs is just the excuse, as always, now what's the real reason? Stop using the drug war to disguise American foreign policy.
Lying billboards in Philadelphia say that "Fentanyl Kills." NONSENSE! If Fentanyl kills, then so do cars, horses and alcohol. PROHIBITION IS THE REAL KILLLER.
Another problem with MindMed's LSD: every time I look it up on Google, I get a mess of links about the stock market. The drug is apparently a godsend for investors. They want to profit from LSD by neutering it and making it politically correct: no inspiration, no euphoria.
Here is a sample drug-use report from the book "Pihkal":
"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place."
Prohibition is a crime against humanity for withholding such drug experiences from the depressed (and from everybody else).
What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.