When you're a preteen, the state enrolls you in "just say no" classes, in which you receive an award from the local police force for renouncing your right to godsend mind medicine. Then in your teens, you watch endless cop shows in which those who use mind medicine are depicted as scumbags and filth, shows in which you never see the positive, responsible use of such medicine. You watch movies 12 like "Running with the Devil" in which "drug suspects" are hung from meat hooks and shot at point-blank range for dealing in mind medicine, often by a DEA agent who herself is smoking the hell out of a pack of cigarettes. Then you go for your first job interview as a young adult and find that you are not even eligible for employment in America unless you show proof via urinating that you have renounced your right to godsend mind medicine. Meanwhile, the media, 3 both local and national, show you lurid stories of kids misusing psychoactive substances, but never -- no never -- report on the positive use of such substances. And the academic world dutifully follows suit, publishing thousands of papers on the abuse of psychoactive medicine but never -- no never -- reporting on the positive, responsible use of the same (which, if they'd care to look, goes back to the use of Soma which inspired the Vedic religion and psychedelics which inspired Plato's views of the afterlife).
You're primed for more such indoctrination after seeing the shamelessly mendacious ad by the Partnership for a Drug Free America 4 which warns us that substances fry the brain5 the moment that they are criminalized by racist politicians -- this despite the fact that HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their best stories on coca wine and that Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius loved their opium 6 dreams.
Well, this all gets a bit much for you. It depresses you. So you go to a psychiatrist to get some legal medication that will help you steer clear of this politically created boogieman called "drugs" that you have been taught to fear since birth. And what does the psychiatrist do? He or she starts you off on a regimen of expensive, habit-forming, and ultimately ineffective mood medicine that you will have to take every day for the rest of your life (thanks to the shamelessly hushed-up chemical dependency that it creates in users). What's more, this legal medicine doesn't inspire you the way that the outlawed medicine could, but rather deadens you to the outside world, making you a good consumer, perhaps, but not exactly a self-fulfilled human being, one able and willing to accomplish their most desired goals in life. As you reach your 60s, in fact, after 40 years of such legally sanctioned pill-popping, you can't help but think that you inadvertently signed up for a lobotomy on the installment plan when you first entrusted your happiness to psychiatrists.
The state has won: You are now another pharmalogically cowed American who acknowledges the right of the state to control how -- and how much -- you're allowed to think and feel in this life.
How? By a lifelong campaign of propaganda. By shamelessly lying to you, both explicitly and above all implicitly, about so-called "drugs", first by telling you that such substances fry the brain, and second by insisting that drugs are bad in and of themselves, without regard for the way that they are used, and that such use always lead to addiction and sorrow.
How's that for irony? The psychiatric pill mill 7 has rendered 1 in 4 American women dependent on Big Pharma 89 meds in life, and yet we're told that the real villains of the piece are godsend medicines that have been used responsibly for millennia by human beings seeking self-improvement and self-transcendence in life, drugs which are all easier to kick than SSRIs, which muck about with brain chemistry, eventually establishing new psycho-chemical baselines that the long-term user finds it hard if not impossible to shake (as, for instance, the recidivism rate of long-term Effexor 10 users who renounce the drug is 95% according to the NMIH).
Welcome to America's Drug War -- friend of the Stock Market and friend of law enforcement, but enemy of real living human beings with aspirations and hopes in life. It's the enemy of education as well, for it seeks to have us fear "drugs" rather than to understand how to use them as wisely as possible. Worse yet, it's the enemy of America, insofar as Jefferson founded this country on Natural Law, which gives us a right to the use of what Locke called "the earth and all that lies therein." That's why Thomas Jefferson was rolling in his grave when Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello 11 in 1987 and confiscated the ex-president's poppy plants.
Prohibitionists have the same M O they've had for the last 100+ years: blame drugs for everything. Being a drug warrior is never having the decency to say you're sorry -- not to Mexicans, not to inner-city crime victims, not to patients who go without adequate pain relief...
Materialists are always trying to outdo each other in describing the insignificance of humankind. Crick at least said we were "a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Musk downsizes us further to one single microbe. He wins!
Scientists cannot tell us if psychoactive drugs are worth the risk any more than they can tell us if free climbing is worth the risk, or horseback riding or target practice or parkour.
It is a violation of religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate. The Hindu religion was inspired by just such a drug.
"My faith votes and strives to outlaw religions that use substances of which politicians disapprove."
If our loved ones should experience severe depression and visit an emergency room for treatment, they will be started on a regime of dependence-causing Big Pharma drugs. They will not be given any drugs that elate and inspire.
To say that taking SSRIs daily is better than using opium daily is a value judgement, not a scientific one.
Laughing gas is the substance that gave William James his philosophy of reality. He concluded from its use that what we perceive is just a fraction of reality writ large. Yet his alma mater (Harvard) does not even MENTION laughing gas in their bio of the man.
Americans were always free to take care of their own health -- until drug warriors handed doctors a monopoly on providing mind and mood medicine.
Hollywood presents cocaine as a drug of killers. In reality, strategic cocaine use by an educated person can lead to great mental power, especially as just one part of a pharmacologically balanced diet.
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