Yesterday I traveled to Blue Plate Books in Winchester, Virginia, one of the largest used bookstores in the region. My plan was to buy books that would help me flesh out my understanding of drug-related issues. This was naive of me, however. Even though the store features tens of thousands of books, the vast majority of the authors of those books ignore the fact that drug prohibition even exists. The few books that treat of demonized drugs do so from the point of view of addiction and abuse. There are no books about how opium can improve your love of nature or about how phenethylamines can make the suicidal wish to live or about how the use of laughing gas can change your views of reality -- as the use of laughing gas eroded William James's dogmatic fealty to passion-scorning materialism and behaviorism.
Visiting Blue Plate Books merely reminded me of how censored Americans are when it comes to drugs. There is almost a total censorship in America on the topic of drug benefits -- with all censorship working to ensure that we consider drugs a problem rather than a solution.
Someday, in a sane world, there will be plenty of book titles like the following:
"How I used opium wisely to improve my life."
"How I used morphine wisely to improve my love of Mother Nature."
"How I got off of cigarettes and alcohol through the safe and informed use of phenethylamines."
"How I rose from my depression with the wise use of a variety of drugs, including opium, coca, and phenethylamines."
Author's Follow-up:
June 17, 2025
The closest thing I found to drug praising was a copy of Michael Pollan's "How to Change Your Mind." It is telling, however, that even Michael does not champion drug re-legalization -- but instead frets about how the free use of Mother Nature is still just too dangerous for our poor little vulnerable young people -- you know, those young people whom we refuse "on principle" to educate about wise drug use in the first place. Indeed, with friends like Michael in the drug re-legalization debate, we scarcely need enemies. With all due respect to the talented author, I cannot understand how a botanist (amateur or otherwise) can believe in the outlawing of Mother Nature, can believe that the government has the right to tell us which plant medicines we can access and study. If drug prohibition were wrong for no other reason, it is clearly wrong for this reason: that it censors science in a supposedly free country. And yet I have to turn to Michael for my one example of a drug-friendly book in this library of 70,000 tomes? I am not exactly spoiled for choice, am I?
We are living the plot of Fahrenheit 451, in which we burn all books that speak of the positive uses of drugs -- or at least we would burn them if our bookstores ever bothered to stock them in the first place. Fortunately for the government, self-censorship is the order of the day in the age of the Drug War, so if a politically motivated Fire Brigade were to arrive on scene, they would find little use for their flame throwers. They might want to singe the corners of Michael's book, just so that they don't feel like they have traveled to the store in vain.
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against the hateful war on US
I never said that getting off SSRIs should be done without supervision. If you're on Twitter for medical advice, you're in the wrong place.
I have yet to find one psychiatrist who acknowledges the demoralizing power of being turned into a patient for life. They never list that as a potential downside of antidepressant use.
This hysterical reaction to rare negative events actually creates more rare negative events. This is why the DEA publicizes "drug problems," because by making them well known, they make the problems more prevalent and can thereby justify their huge budget.
Oregon has decided to go back to the braindead plan of treating substance use as a police matter. Might as well arrest people at home since America has already spread their drug-hating Christian Science religion all over the world.
They drive to their drug tests in pickup trucks with license plates that read "Don't tread on me." Yeah, right. "Don't tread on me: Just tell me how and how much I'm allowed to think and feel in this life. And please let me know what plants I can access."
Peyote advocates should be drug legalization advocates. Otherwise, they're involved in special pleading which is bound to result in absurd laws, such as "Plant A can be used in a religion but not plant B," or "Person A can belong to such a religion but person B cannot."
Almost all of today's magazine articles about human psychology should come with the following disclaimer:
"This article was written from the standpoint of Drug War ideology, which holds that outlawed substances can have no beneficial uses whatsoever."
People say shrooms should not be used by those with a history of "mental illness." But that's one of the greatest potential benefits of shrooms! (They cured Stamets' teenage stuttering.) Some folks place safety first, but if I did that, I'd die long before using mother nature.
This is why America is creeping toward authoritarianism -- because of the prohibitionists' ability to get away with everything by blaming "drugs." The fact that Americans still fall for this crap represents a kind of collective pathology.
Pundits have been sniffing about the "smell" of Detroit lately. Sounds racist -- especially since such comments tend to come from drug warriors, the guys who ruined Detroit in the first place (you know, with drug laws that incentivized profit-seeking violence as a means of escaping poverty).
I never said that getting off SSRIs should be done without supervision. If you're on Twitter for medical advice, you're in the wrong place.