My brother fell off a riding lawn mower, hit his head on a rock, and died. Ever since then, I've been working tirelessly to outlaw riding mowers and rocks.
The statement is superstitious because it blames inanimate objects - in this case mowers and rocks - for something that was caused by a lack of wisdom and education. Had the brother had the knowledge and experience to use the riding mower correctly, he would not have fallen off the mower, whether a rock had been nearby at the time or not.
?244?
Now consider the following statement:
My brother died by taking an overdose of drugs. Ever since then, I've been working tirelessly to outlaw drugs.
It's the exact same reasoning as above.
The speaker is blaming inanimate objects. But the death in question was caused by the misuse of those substances, not by the substances themselves. To blame the substances is merely a superstitious response, worthy of the pre-logical cave persons of yore.
That's why the Drug War is the ultimate case of throwing the baby out with the bath water. In order to make the world "safe," we villainize any illegal substance that we associate with a death. But because we've identified the wrong villain - the drug itself rather than the lack of education that led to its misuse - we end up making the world a far more dangerous place.
Take the case of Leah Betts in England. She died after taking an Ecstasy tablet at a rave concert. Of course, the immediate superstitious Drug Warrior response was to crack down on Ecstasy use. Everyone ignored the rational fact that the death was caused by a lack of education - a lack of education about the proper use of Ecstasy (the need for proper hydration during strenuous activities such as rave dancing).
And what was the result of the crackdown? The hitherto peaceful rave scene became a shooting gallery as dancers switched from Ecstasy to crack cocaine and Fentanyl.
That's what happens when we employ the superstitious reasoning referred to above. While it may feel good to scapegoat ecstasy, our doing so deprives millions of depressed and anxious people around the world of a godsend treatment. But that's the price we pay as a society for our superstitious outlook, which insists that criminalized substances can be labelled evil without regard for the way that they are actually used or misused.
That's why I depict the Drug Warrior as a benighted caveman on this website, because the Drug War way of thinking is superstitious. It vilifies substances in cases where the real villain is a lack of education.
The Drug War ideology is superstition. It is therefore the philosophical problem par excellence of our time. It's an ideology that could not pass the "snicker test" if the westerners who championed it understood the basics of logical reasoning, specifically the important difference between efficient and final causes as described by Aristotle over 2,000 years ago.
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
The scheduling system is a huge lie designed to give an aura of "science" to America's colonialist disdain for indigenous medicines, from opium, to coca, to shrooms.
The U.S. government created violence out of whole cloth in America's inner cities with drug prohibition -- and now it is using that violence as an excuse to kick the people that they themselves have knocked down.
Almost all of today's magazine articles about human psychology should come with the following disclaimer:
"This article was written from the standpoint of Drug War ideology, which holds that outlawed substances can have no beneficial uses whatsoever."
Let's pass a constitutional amendment to remove Kansas from the Union, and any other state where the racist politicians leverage the drug war to crack down on minorities.
Cop and detective shows are loaded with subtle drug war propaganda, including lines like, "She had a history of drug use, so..." The implication being that anyone who uses substances that politicians hate cannot be trusted.
Someday those books about weird state laws will be full of factoids like: "In Alabama, you could be jailed for 20 years for conspiring to eat a mushroom."
Politicians protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment and encourage drug testing to ensure that drug war heretics starve.
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.
Just saw a prosecutor gloating about the drug dealers she has taken down. What a joke. How much is she getting paid to play whack-a-mole? RE-LEGALIZE MIND AND MOOD MEDICINE!
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.
The scheduling system is a huge lie designed to give an aura of "science" to America's colonialist disdain for indigenous medicines, from opium, to coca, to shrooms.