You don't have to search the novels of Philip K. Dick to find tyrannous governments that punish pre-crime. Pre-crime punishment has been a feature of American law ever since the Harrison Narcotics Act began criminalizing plants and fungi in 1914. No longer was it necessary for you to commit a crime - to play music too loudly, to rob a bank, to strip in public, to threaten neighbors with a pistol. No, you merely had to possess a politically ostracized substance, one that had been slandered with the epithet "drug," one that superstitious politicians believed (or purported to believe) had no possible effect but to render the user a threat to society. This, of course, was the lie par excellence of fascist governance, since if it were true, then the "drug" use of Benjamin Franklin, HG Wells, and Richard Feynman would make no sense. How can these men be heroes in their respective domains and yet have liberally availed themselves of opium, coca, and speed respectively?
Of course, you've probably never heard of their "drug" use because to talk about it is to embarrass the Drug Warriors with an inconvenient truth, and anyone who speaks on Oprah or The View has to toe the party line, the one that's enriching Big Pharma, psychiatry, and the movie industry, which makes a pretty penny by producing films about drug-war violence, never stopping to think that the real villain of the "piece" is not Pablo Escobar and co. but the unscientific American idiots who had the gall and fascist tendencies to criminalize Mother Nature in the first place.
(Gee, we outlawed natural substances and what do you know, an ultra-violent black market was formed to meet continuing demand: who would have thunk it? Answer: any rational person who wasn't intent on using drug laws to punish people that he or she didn't understand.)
That's why De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium Eater" remains such a radical read even today: because that author did not take drugs in order to rob a bank or to strip in public - he took "drugs" (horror of horrors) in order to better enjoy the opera! How evil is that?
No, the punishment of pre-crime is old hat, much to the cost of tens of thousands of Americans who are jailed as we speak for having dared to use substances that so palpably benefited the lives of the world's hypocritically admired heroes.
{^It's never too early to familiarize your child with the circumscribed freedoms of Drug War America. Be sure to make a big thing of their first drug test. Take plenty of photos and celebrate with a trip to the amusement park after they pass! They'll no doubt have plenty of other drug tests to come, but their first one will always be special for them. After all, it's the first time that they will fully renounce their rights to use Mother Nature's plants as they see fit.}{
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
The FDA uses reductive materialism to justify and normalize the views of Cortes and Pizarro with respect to entheogenic medicine.
The addiction gene should be called the prohibition gene: it renders one vulnerable to prohibition lies and limitations: like the lack of safe supply, the lack of choices, and the lack of information. We should pathologize the prohibitionists, not their victims.
Trump's lies about America's voting process are typical NAZI and DRUG WAR strategy: raise mendacious doubts about whatever you want to destroy and keep repeating them. It's what Joseph Goebbels called "The Big Lie."
America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own pain by making opium illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.
Richard Evans Schultes seems to have originated the harebrained idea (since used by the US Supreme Court to suppress new religions) that you have no right to use drugs in a religious ritual if you did not grow up in a society that had such practices. What tyrannical idiocy!
In his treatise on laws, Cicero reported that the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries gave the participants "not only the art of living agreeably, but of dying with a better hope."
America never ended prohibition. It just redirected prohibition from alcohol to all of alcohol's competitors.
Rick Strassman isn't sure that DMT should be legal. Really?! Does he not realize how dangerous it is to chemically extract DMT from plants? In the name of safety, prohibitionists have encouraged dangerous ignorance and turned local police into busybody Nazis.
Just think how much money bar owners in the Old West would have saved on restoration expenses if they had served MDMA instead of whiskey.
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.