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.
I'm looking for a United Healthcare doctor now that I'm 66 years old. When I searched my zip code and typed "alternative medicine," I got one single solitary return... for a chiropractor, no less. Some choice. Guess everyone else wants me to "keep taking my meds."
It's disgusting that folks like Paul Stamets need a DEA license to work with mushrooms.
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.
Typical materialist protocol. Take all the "wonder" out of the drug and sell it as a one-size-fits all "reductionist" cure for anxiety. Notice that they refer to hallucinations and euphoria as "adverse effects." What next? Communion wine with the religion taken out of it?
The drug war normalizes the disdainful and self-righteous attitude that Columbus and Pizarro had about drug use in the New World.
Cocaine use is a blessing for some, just a little fun for most, and a curse for a few. Just like any other risky activity. We need to educate people about drugs rather than endlessly arresting them for attempting to improve their mental power!
Was looking for natural sleeping aids online. Everyone ignores the fact that all the stuff that REALLY works has been outlawed! We live in a pretend world wherein the outlawed stuff no longer even exists in our minds! We are blind to our lost legacy regarding plant medicines!
Anyone who has read Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin knows that the drug warriors have it exactly backwards. Drugs are our friends. We need to find safe ways to use them to improve ourselves psychologically, spiritually and mentally.
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
Most enemies of inner-city gun violence refuse to protest against the drug prohibition which caused the violence in the first place.
I'm looking for a United Healthcare doctor now that I'm 66 years old. When I searched my zip code and typed "alternative medicine," I got one single solitary return... for a chiropractor, no less. Some choice. Guess everyone else wants me to "keep taking my meds."