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 kills. 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 today4.
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]
Drug War Ghouls
The Drug War Ghouls get busy any time a well-known figure dies prematurely, especially when the figure in question is a rock star or actor. You can just hear them whispering childishly: "Aww! Were they on any drugs? Were they on any drugs?" The presumption behind such tittering is that drugs are evil and can only lead to death and destruction. Of course, those who hold this viewpoint always forget that the Drug War does everything it can to make such outcomes of drug use a self-fulfilling prophecy by discouraging education about safe use and by ensuring corrupt and uncertain drug supply with their eternal kneejerk prohibition. This is all completely inexcusable. The Drug Warriors cause death. They are the villains. They are the criminals. Take the so-called opiate crisis. Young people were not dying en masse from opioids when such drugs were legal in the United States. It took prohibition to bring that about.
Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice. The media has played its role with movies like "Running with the DEA," "The Crisis" and "The Runner." In the first of these three, the DEA are the "good guys" for murdering a suspect in cold blood. In the second, the DEA plants evidence to cover up the murder of a drug suspect by an indignant mother. And in the third, a white detective stages a raid that kills a young Black teenager that said detective refers to as "a waste of space."
The Drug War is all about making us hate -- making us hate anybody except for the folks that brought about the violence and drug problems in the first place: the damned prohibitionists who, having failed to outlaw liquor, turned their scapegoating on every less dangerous substance in the world.
Meanwhile, the media have done all they can to support this Drug War by holding the use of outlawed substances to safety standards that are never applied to any other risky activity on earth, meanwhile ignoring the fact that prohibition encourages ignorance and leads to contaminated drug supply. Thousands of American young people die each month because of unregulated supply and ignorance, not from drugs themselves.
The media also supports the Drug War by failing to hold it accountable for all the problems that it causes. Just read any article on inner-city shootings -- today's journalists will trace the problem to a lack of jobs or to global warming, to anything but the Drug War which incentivized violence in the first place. As for violence overseas, we're told that it's caused by evil rotten drug cartels -- without any acknowledgement that it was American drug policy that created those cartels out of whole cloth, just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia here in the States.
Meanwhile, the media have a field day superstitiously blaming drugs. It used to be PCP, ICE, oxy, crack, and now it's Fentanyl... It's all part of the DEA's tried-and-true formula to stay relevant, as academic Philip Jenkins clearly demonstrates in "Synthetic Panics": Take a local drug problem and publicize it so that it goes national. Then work with a film crew at "48 Hours" to show that the drug in question threatens the white American middle class. Then go to Congress, hat in hand, and accept billions to 'solve' the latest drug problem.
And Americans fall for it every time. In fact, their gullibility seems to be increasing over time. They love to hate drugs, so much so that drugs have become the new horror trope. Recent movies have taken to personifying "evil" drugs in the forms of Crack Raccoons and Meth Gators. It's sad that America has become so superstitious and childish about drugs -- and the media can take much of the blame.
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.
A Pennsylvanian politician now wants the US Army to "fight fentanyl." The guy is anthropomorphizing a damn drug! No wonder pols don't want to spend money on education, because any educated country would laugh a superstitious guy like that right out of public office.
It is folly to put bureaucrats in charge of second-guessing drug prescriptions: what such bureaucrats are really doing is second-guessing the various philosophies of life which are presupposed by the way we use psychoactive drugs.
Mariani Wine is the real McCoy, with Bolivian coca leaves (tho' not with cocaine, as Wikipedia says). I'll be writing more about my experience with it soon. I was impressed. It's the same drink "on which" HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their stories.
All of our problems with opioids and opiates could have been avoided had the busybody Chicken Littles in America left well enough alone and let folks continue to smoke regulated opium peaceably in their own homes.
"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."
The best step we could take in harm reduction is re-legalizing everything and starting to teach safe use. Spend the DEA's billions on "go" teams that would descend on locations where drugs are being used stupidly -- not to arrest, but to educate.
It's interesting that Jamaicans call the police 'Babylon,' given that Babylon denotes a society seeking materialist pleasures. Drug use is about transcending the material world and seeking spiritual states: states that the materialist derides as meaningless.
We need a scheduling system for psychoactive drugs as much as we need a scheduling system for sports activities: i.e. NOT AT ALL. Some sports are VERY dangerous, but we do not outlaw them because we know that there are benefits both to sports and to freedom in general.
Brits have a right to die, but they do not have the right to use drugs that might make them want to live. Bad policy is indicated by absurd outcomes, and this is but one of the many absurd outcomes that the policy of prohibition foists upon the world.
The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.
A Pennsylvanian politician now wants the US Army to "fight fentanyl." The guy is anthropomorphizing a damn drug! No wonder pols don't want to spend money on education, because any educated country would laugh a superstitious guy like that right out of public office.