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 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, 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 which warns us that substances fry the brain 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 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 has rendered 1 in 4 American women dependent on Big Pharma 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 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 in 1987 and confiscated the ex-president's poppy plants.
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
We've got to take the fight TO the drug warriors by starting to hold them legally responsible for having spread "Big Lies" about "drugs." Anyone involved in producing the "brain frying" PSA of the 1980s should be put on trial for willfully spreading a toxic lie.
There will always be people who don't use drugs wisely, just as there are car drivers who don't drive wisely, and rock climbers who fall to their death. America needs to grow up and accept this, while ending prohibition and teaching safe use.
And so, by ignoring all "up" sides to drugs, the DEA points to potential addiction as a knock-down argument for their prohibition. This is the logic of children (and uneducated children at that). It is a cost-benefit analysis that ignores all benefits.
There are endless drugs that could help with depression. Any drug that inspires and elates is an antidepressant, partly by the effect itself and partly by the mood-elevation caused by anticipation of use (facts which are far too obvious for drug warriors to understand).
Let's arrest drug warriors, confiscate their houses, and deny them jobs in America -- until such time as they renounce their belief in the demonstrably ruinous policy of substance prohibition.
Michael Pollan is the Leona Helmsley of the Drug War. He uses outlawed drugs freely while failing to support the re-legalization of Mother Nature. Drug laws are apparently for the little people.
The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe. This is the same FDA that tells us that "shock therapy" is safe.
Why don't those politicians understand what hateful colonialism they are practicing? Psychedelics have been used for millennia by the tribes that the west has conquered -- now we won't even let folks talk honestly about such indigenous medicines.
The December Scientific American features a story called "The New Nuclear Age," about a trillion-dollar plan to add 100s of ICBM's to 5 states, which an SA editorial calls "kick me" signs. This Neanderthal plan comes from pols who think that compassion-boosting drugs are evil!
When we outlaw drugs, we are outlawing far more than drugs. We are suppressing freedom of religion and academic research.
We've got to take the fight TO the drug warriors by starting to hold them legally responsible for having spread "Big Lies" about "drugs." Anyone involved in producing the "brain frying" PSA of the 1980s should be put on trial for willfully spreading a toxic lie.