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 2 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 3 . 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 4 could help the depressed in, say, 20 more years or so5!
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 America6. 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.
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda
(There would be no Hindu religion today had the drug war been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.)
I can't believe people. Somebody's telling me that "drugs" is not used problematically. It is CONSTANTLY used with a sneer in the voice when politicians want to diss somebody, as in, "Oh, they're in favor of DRUGS!!!" It's a political term as used today!
Suicidal people should be given drugs that cheer them up immediately and whose use they can look forward to. The truth is, we would rather such people die than to give them such drugs, that's just how bamboozled we are by the war against drugs.
There are a potentially vast number of non-addictive drugs that could be used strategically in therapy. They elate and "free the tongue" to help talk therapy really work. Even "addictive" drugs can be used non-addictively, prohibitionist propaganda notwithstanding.
In a free world, almost all depressed individuals could do WITHOUT doctors: these adult human beings could handle their own depression with the informed intermittent use of a wide variety of psychoactive substances.
The DEA stomped onto Thomas Jefferson's estate in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. And the TJ Foundation helped them! They sold out Jefferson.
Let's pass a constitutional amendment to remove Kansas from the Union, and any other state where the racist politicians leverage the drug war to crack down on minorities.
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.
If there were no other problem with antidepressants, they would be wrong for the simple reason that they make a user dependent for life -- not as a bug (as in drugs like opium) but rather as a feature: that's how they "work," by being administered daily for a lifetime.
Think you can handle a horse? So did Christopher Reeves. The fact is, NOBODY can handle a horse. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda
(There would be no Hindu religion today had the drug war been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.)