In my driver's ed class back in high school in the 1970s, we students were forced to binge-watch short films from the Ohio Department of Transportation featuring gory, uncensored scenes of real-life traffic accidents. The apparent goal was to frighten us into driving safely -- although the first message that I took away from the celluloid blood-fest was that I should never drive a car in the Buckeye State. Virginia roads seemed so amazingly peaceful by comparison!
Looking back now, fifty years later, I see an enormous irony in those classes. When high schools started having classes to quote-unquote "educate" kids about drug use, they also showed films about the gory consequences of not being safe -- and yet they wanted the kids to come away with a very different conclusion after watching those films. They wanted them to conclude that safe drug use is impossible, that it is a contradiction in terms.
Imagine if driver's education classes were conducted like drug education classes. The teacher would show all those gory films and then address the students as follows:
"You know what, kids? All these bloody dead Ohioans that you have just seen sprawled out on the asphalt had one thing in common: they all thought that THEY could drive safely. Well, guess what, cupcake: NO ONE CAN DRIVE SAFELY!!!
All right, class dismissed. Tomorrow, we will be taking an in-depth look at the aftermaths of some high-speed head-on collisions on Interstate 71 between Columbus and Cleveland, involving buses, tractor-trailers, farm vehicles... and yes, folks, even motorcycles. [class sighs] I know, right? So schedule your lunch breaks accordingly!"
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
The Drug War is the most important evil to protest, precisely because almost everybody is afraid to do so. That's a clear sign that it is a cancer on the body politic.
Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.
Americans heap hypocritical praise on Walt Whitman. What they don't realize is that many of us could be "Walt Whitman for a Day" with the wise use of psychoactive drugs. To the properly predisposed, morphine gives a DEEP appreciation of Mother Nature.
We throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.
There are definitely good scientists out there. Unfortunately, they are either limited by their materialist orthodoxy into showing only specific microscopic evidence or they abandon materialism for the nonce and talk the common psychological sense that we all understand.
The drug war normalizes the disdainful and self-righteous attitude that Columbus and Pizarro had about drug use in the New World.
I don't have a problem with CBD. But I find that many people like it for the wrong reasons: they assume there is something slightly "dirty" about getting high and that all "cures" should be effected via direct materialist causes, not holistically a la time-honored tribal use.
Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.
America never ended prohibition. It just redirected prohibition from alcohol to all of alcohol's competitors.
Our tolerance for freedom wanes in proportion as we consider "drugs" to be demonic. This is the dark side behind the new ostensibly comic genre about Cocaine Bears and such. It shows that Americans are superstitious about drugs in a way that Neanderthals would have understood.
The Drug War is the most important evil to protest, precisely because almost everybody is afraid to do so. That's a clear sign that it is a cancer on the body politic.