I wanted to ask your editors to please stop supporting the War on Drugs. Your piece about Matthew Perry was a typical hatchet job designed to blame drugs rather than drug law. How dare you "fight for justice" on behalf of Perry when you yourselves are the problem!!! You Drug Warriors are the ones who are causing thousands of Americans to die in the streets because you refuse to regulate the drug supply and you refuse to teach safe use. Then you get all self-righteous about the death of Matthew Perry, who would never have wanted your help!!!! You are ghouls!!!! You are the ones who killed him!!!
Wake up! The Drug War has already destroyed the 4th amendment and handed elections to racists by imprisoning millions of minorities.
Start fighting for safe supply and education -- and stop your self-righteous "fight for justice" and look in the mirror instead. You Drug Warriors are the MURDERERS!
Author's Follow-up:
May 01, 2025
It galls me to think that these drug-war editors throw back cold ones at the bar -- thereby consuming a drug that kills 178,000 a year1 -- and yet they are on no high horses whatsoever when they hear that their loved ones and neighbors are dying from kidney damage due to alcohol or due to drunk-driving accidents. These editors know that they are only supposed to fret about psychoactive downsides when they are writing about alcohol's many less-dangerous competitors.
Who makes psychoactive drugs dangerous? The Drug Warrior by refusing to teach safe use, by refusing to regulate product, and refusing to legalize alternatives. And they have no excuse whatsoever. Liquor prohibition brought machine-gun-fire to America's erstwhile tranquil streets. The prohibitionists know this. And yet they continue to champion drug prohibition today. They are responsible for drug-related deaths because they have done everything they can to make drug use as dangerous as possible.
American Drug Warriors are insane. They give pride of place to alcohol, the most dangerous psychoactive drug in the country, and then they outlaw all of liquors less dangerous competitors. They refuse to teach safe use or to regulate product, and then they get on a high horse about the very deaths that they themselves have caused with their drug policies.
This is why it is so galling that folks like Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman quietly support drug prohibition -- despite the fact that they make a living tantalizing Americans about upbeat drug effects. They claim to be interested in safety. Yes, but whose safety? In case anyone noticed, Matthew Perry died on THEIR WATCH, while THEIR laws were in effect. Who are Mike and Rick saving, after all? The 60,000 who have been disappeared in Mexico over the last two decades thanks to the War on Drugs2? The 67,000 who have been shot in inner cities over the last ten years due to the War on Drugs3? The young opiate users who have died totally unnecessarily on American streets because we refuse to regulate product and to teach safe use? They may think they are saving their young white loved ones, but even if that were true, they are only doing so by outsourcing the dangers of drug prohibitions to minorities and foreigners -- meanwhile destroying the rule of law in Latin America and now in the United States -- based on the insane idea that we have to end constitutional protections to protect Americans from themselves.
Prohibition kills4. They know this. This is why prohibitionists are murderers. This is why it sickens me when they get on a high-horse and sate their hypocritical indignation on the dealers and drug providers that their inhumane drug policies have created out of whole cloth. The drug dealers and providers are no more evil than Matthew Perry -- they both were set up to fail by inhumane drug law that tries to tell Americans how and how much they can think and feel in this life. Had this drug ideology been in effect in 1500BCE in the Punjab, there would be no Hindu religion today5.
Rick has the typical Drug War attitude about DMT: If a drug can be a problem at one dose for one demographic when used for one reason, it must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.
It is hard to imagine a more idiotic and cruel dictum.
Does Rick think that dogmatic ignorance and prohibition is the answer? Does he not realize prohibition forces those who seek transcendence to use highly dangerous chemicals to extract the DMT themselves from organic matter? And these are the people whom we refuse to educate about safe use in fealty to the bizarre and anti-democratic Drug War notion that ignorance is the best policy. Where is the concern for THEIR safety?
As for Mike, it is astonishing that a well-educated botanist living in a presumably freedom-loving country would have no problem with the government telling him what mushrooms he can legally study, for God's sake. If I ran a botany club, I would not admit any members who believed that government had a right to run interference between myself and the plants and fungi that I study. Yet I seem to be in the minority, judging by the fact that most mycologist websites either ignore psychoactive mushrooms or make it indignantly clear that they will have nothing to do with the same, making it clear that they believe that Mother Nature is a drug kingpin rather than a beneficent goddess. Moreover, they seem to have never read the book of Genesis, in which God himself assured us that his creation was good.
But then I suppose that racist beer-guzzling politicians know best. [sigh]
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
Americans love to hate heroin. But there is no rational reason why folks should not use heroin daily in a world in which we consider it their medical duty to use antidepressants daily.
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.
Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.
Scientists are censored as to what they can study thanks to drug law. Instead of protesting that outrage, they lend a false scientific veneer to those laws via their materialist obsession with reductionism, which blinds them to the obvious godsend effects of outlawed substances.
Pundits tell us that there are medical reasons not to "snort" cocaine. So what? There are medical reasons not to drive a car: you may have an accident. The question is: does cocaine use or car driving make sense in a given case! Details matter!
The DEA is a Schedule I agency. It has no known positive uses and is known to cause death and destruction.
Pundits have been sniffing about the "smell" of Detroit lately. Sounds racist -- especially since such comments tend to come from drug warriors, the guys who ruined Detroit in the first place (you know, with drug laws that incentivized profit-seeking violence as a means of escaping poverty).
If we cared about the elderly in 'homes', we would be bringing in shamanic empaths and curanderos from Latin America to help cheer them up and expand their mental abilities. We would also immediately decriminalize the many drugs that could help safely when used wisely.
If Americans cannot handle the truth about drugs, then there is something wrong with Americans, not with drugs.
My impression has been that the use of cocaine over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine, 1884
Americans love to hate heroin. But there is no rational reason why folks should not use heroin daily in a world in which we consider it their medical duty to use antidepressants daily.
