Breaking News: Scientists Realize That Marijuana may not be Evil Incarnate After All!
More Glacial Progress in the war against Substance Prohibition
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
January 13, 2024
A friend of mine just forwarded me a link to a NY Times article suggesting that the penny has finally dropped for scientists on the subject of marijuana1. I responded as follows:
Thanks. Yeah, I saw the headline. Actually, the article will probably just depress me. To me it's all about the GLACIAL progress of materialist science when it comes to "drugs." We've had 100+ years of prohibition and they're only now starting to apologetically say that marijuana might not be devil spawn -- but in saying that, they're taking a swipe at heroin as being worse, thereby betraying their ongoing belief that the problem is drugs and not prohibition. Even heroin has positive uses -- and its popularity is due to the outlawing of opium. So such "reads" are depressing to me, reminding me how far away we still are from looking at these matters sensibly.
At this rate, scientists may realize that laughing gas could help the depressed in, say, 20 more years or so2!
Meanwhile, the status quo has not changed: scientists still believe in the anti-scientific doctrine that drugs can be voted up or down and that a cost-benefit analysis of prohibition need not include the hundreds of thousands of collateral deaths that this hateful policy has racked up over the years, and continues to rack up to this day in inner cities and in Latin America3. For prohibition is the entrapment of the poor: it presents that the opportunity for huge sudden profit -- then when young people jump at the bait, the feds step in to remove them from American life and take them off the voting rolls. Hateful, hateful, hateful.
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.
Psychiatrists prescribe drugs that muck about with a patient's biochemical baseline, making them chemically dependent and turning them into patients for life.
Of course, prohibitionists will immediately remind me that we're all children when it comes to drugs, and can never -- but never -- use them wisely. That's like saying that we could never ride horses wisely. Or mountain climb. Or skateboard.
For those who want to understand what's going on with the drug war from a philosophical point of view, I recommend chapter six of "Eugenics and Other Evils" by GK Chesterton.
AI is like almost every subject under the sun: it takes on a very different and ominous meaning when we view it in light of the modern world's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine.
"The Oprah Winfrey Fallacy": the idea that a statistically insignificant number of cases constitutes a crisis, provided ONLY that the villain of the piece is something that racist politicians have demonized as a "drug."
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.
Rick Strassman reportedly stopped his DMT trials because some folks had bad experiences at high doses. That is like giving up on aspirin because high doses of NSAIDs can kill.
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."
Addiction thrives BECAUSE of prohibition, which limits drug choice and discourages education about psychoactive substances and how to use them wisely.
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.