In 1980, the Air Force almost blew up 1/3 of the country with a thermonuclear weapon, a weapon created because the US and Russia were committed to hating each other. Today, the US nuclear weapon stockpile still contains 7,000 warheads, many of them insufficiently monitored according to Eric Schlosser, author of "Command and Control 1 ." Yet this same country outlaws all entheogenic medicines, psychoactive substances such as MDMA and psilocybin, that could bring the world together in universal love.
Something is wrong with this picture.
Will it take a thermonuclear bomb blast in America, accidental or otherwise, to teach us that psychoactive medicine should not be feared but rather used to take the world off its one-way trip to armageddon 2 ? In a sane world, we would not be outlawing drugs like MDMA 3 but rather prescribing them for leaders of countries in advance of summit meetings -- and using them as therapy to treat all the crazed hot-heads of the world who might otherwise shoot up a grade-school.
The Links Police
Do you know why I pulled you over? That's right, because the Drug War gives me carte blanche to be a noxious busybody. That, and I wanted to apprise you of another link adverting to the power of empathogens to prevent Armageddon:
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.
America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own pain by making opium illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"
We westerners have "just said no" to pain relief, mood elevation and religious insight.
Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.
FDA drug approval is a farce when it comes to psychoactive medicine. The FDA ignores all the obvious benefits and pretends that to prove efficacy, they need "scientific" evidence. That's scientism, not science.
The Partnership for a Death Free America is launching a campaign to celebrate the 50th year of Richard Nixon's War on Drugs. We need to give credit where credit's due for the mass arrest of minorities, the inner city gun violence and the civil wars that it's generated overseas.