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." 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? In a sane world, we would not be outlawing drugs like MDMA 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.
People talk about how dangerous Jamaica is -- but no one reminds us that it is all due to America's Drug War. Yes, cannabis and psilocybin are legal there, but plenty of drugs are not, and even if they were, their illegality elsewhere would lead to fierce dealer rivalry.
Chesterton might as well have been speaking about the word 'addiction' when he wrote the following: "It is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase."
John Halpern wrote a book about opium, subtitled "the ancient flower that poisoned our world." What nonsense! Bad laws and ignorance poison our world, NOT FLOWERS!
Prohibition is wrong root and branch. It seeks to justify the colonial disdain for indigenous healing practices through fearmongering.
Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.
Google founders used to enthuse about the power of free speech, but Google is actively shutting down videos that tell us how to grow mushrooms -- MUSHROOMS, for God's sake. End the drug war and this hateful censorship of a free people.
Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could disbelieve it.
We westerners have "just said no" to pain relief, mood elevation and religious insight.
M. Pollan says "not so fast" when it comes to drug re-legalization. I say FAST? I've gone a whole lifetime w/o access to Mother Nature's plants. How can a botanist approve of that? Answer: By ignoring all legalization stakeholders except for the kids whom we refuse to educate.
No substance is bad in and of itself. Fentanyl has positive uses, at specific doses, for specific people, in specific situations. But the drug war votes substance up or down. That is hugely anti-scientific and it blocks human progress.