A Harvard psychiatrist recently tweeted that "Drugs are not the answer" when it comes to preventing school shootings.
This is a commonplace admonition that is often voiced not just by prohibitionists, but by opponents of the Drug War, as I take this professor to be. In fact, if divided Americans agree on one thing, it's that "Drugs are not the answer."
But does that statement make sense?
Should we tell Americans that they should not get vaccinated against Covid because drugs are not the answer? Should we tell them to forego their "heart pills" because drugs are not the answer?
Why then would we tell a hateful hothead not to use a love-inducing drug like MDMA -- or any of the hundreds of other empathogens in the world, including the 200+ psychedelics synthesized by Alexander Shulgin -- because drugs are not the answer? After all, a prima facie case can be made that a hothead's chances of shooting up a grade school will decrease in proportion as he or she is under the influence of empathogenic medicine.
Sure, MDMA is unlikely to provide a full answer to the problem of school shootings -- but neither will antiviral medicine provide a full answer to the Covid crisis.
The fact is that we have a double standard about drugs. An instinctive fear of psychoactive "drugs" has been instilled in us from childhood as part of the very air that we breathe. Drug-hating is part of the modern weltanschauung of the west. How did we get here? With 100+ years of Christian Science indoctrination, that's how, spread by schools, TV shows 1 , movies 23 , academia, and the workplace.
DARE tells school kids as young as six years old that drugs have no positive uses for anybody, ever (which, of course, is true of no substance on earth and is thus a mere superstition). The high schooler turns to academia and finds only articles concerning the misuse and abuse of psychoactive drugs, almost none about positive uses for drugs (like, say, inspiring entire religions). By adulthood, they will have seen thousands of hours' worth of shows (some of them subsidized by the US government's Office on National Drug Control Policy) whose plot revolves around the misuse and abuse of drugs. In the workforce, they find that they can't even get a job flipping hamburgers if they are found to have used a substance that politicians have demonized, even if said substance was used daily by the likes of HG Wells, Jules Verne, Marcus Aurelius or Benjamin Franklin.
True, "drugs are not THE answer," but that's a truism with which any sensible person would agree. The problem is that most people who speak those words mean more than that; they mean something like the following: "Drugs are part of the problem. The REAL answers are [fill in the blank with the non-drug-related answer(s) of which the speaker approves]."
The problem with this attitude is that it prevents us from seeing what would be obvious to us in the absence of the Drug War weltanschauung in which we've been raised. If we lived in a society that promoted the positive use of psychoactive medicines for the benefit of humans and humanity, we would immediately be struck with the idea of using empathogens like MDMA and psilocybin to treat hotheads and teach them to love their fellows. Now, such a protocol may not prove to be a silver bullet; nevertheless, it would be a no-brainer to try such an approach absent the drug-war ideology of substance demonization in which all westerners have been indoctrinated since their birth. We would also be quick to try psychedelics for treating Alzheimer's, given that the latter class of drugs have been known to grow new neurons in the brain -- but drug propaganda keeps such prima facie protocols off the radar of modern science -- which, incidentally, is an inexcusable blind spot for which a deprogrammed futurity is sure to judge us harshly.
No, "drugs are not THE answer," but they are certainly PART of the answer, if we value peace, love and understanding over war -- which, let's face it, many Americans do not, especially if they hold stock in Halliburton or similar companies that thrive by signing lucrative nation rebuilding contracts with stockholding warmongers. As for the Brits, they are so sure that drugs are not the answer that they cracked down on the incredibly safe drug known as MDMA , which was creating unprecedented peace, love and understanding on the dance floor in the 1990's. The result of the crackdown? Concert promoters had to hire special forces troops to keep the peace as dancers switched from MDMA to violence-promoting alcohol.
This is why I wince when I read tropes like "Drugs are not the answer," because they imply the acceptance of many Drug War assumptions that do not survive philosophical scrutiny and whose influence on modern social policies is disastrous.
That said, I myself am tempted to use the phrase "Drugs are not the answer," but when I do so, I am always thinking of the dependence-causing SSRIs that have turned me into a patient for life. Such drugs are neither the answer, nor even part of the answer. They are part of an enormously expensive and disempowering treatment protocol that makes zero sense in a world in which we outlaw Mother Nature's godsends, which God himself told us were good.
Author's Follow-up: April 27, 2023
Why do Americans think that "drugs are not the answer"? Because fearmongers have taught us to believe that vulnerable young people are the only stakeholders in the drug game. That's false. There are millions, perhaps billions, who could benefit from drugs like MDMA 4 , coca and nitrous oxide, but the masses of the depressed and anxious are not considered stakeholders in discussions about drugs, neither are the elderly, folks in hospice, soldiers with PTSD, etc. I take this personally because this is the reason that I have had to go a lifetime without godsends that grow at my feet: all because we limit our considerations about drugs to the effects they might have (in our most lurid puritan imaginations) on reckless young people -- and reckless white young people at that. We never think of the young people who are killed and who lose parents to the vicious Drug War in Central and South America that is forever waged on our behalf, or the black kids who are killed in drive-bys in the inner-city "no go zones" that we have created with our prohibition, thanks to the financial incentives that this policy creates for gun violence 5 .
This purblind focus on young people is doubly absurd: not only does it keep godsends from millions, it also puts the young people in danger by persuading us to criminalize rather than teach. We thereby perpetuate a prohibition which causes all of the problems that we dread. How? By subjecting our uninformed youth to an unregulated drug supply. Until we stop fearmongering about drugs and start teaching about safe use, this madness will continue in a vicious cycle, in which we keep blaming drugs for all of the negative consequences that we ourselves are causing with drug prohibition.
Author's Follow-up: May 22, 2023
The Drug Warriors have always known this, of course. Here's what Nixon staffer John Ehrlichman told CNN about the Drug War: "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin 6. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities."
Author's Follow-up: May 29, 2023
When Americans tell us that "drugs are not the answer," we should just shake our heads sadly and tell ourselves: "Poor brainwashed wretches. They've been indoctrinated since childhood in the cult of the Drug War, according to which there are exactly ZERO positive uses for so-called 'drugs'. How could they have any other thought except that big bad evil 'drugs' are not the answer. They have been taught their entire lives -- including in med school -- to hate psychoactive medicine. As Ali would tell us, we should 'pity the fool!' -- and then send them off to a deprogramming camp!"
In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.
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.
Attempts to improve one's mind and mood are not crimes. The attempt to stop people from doing so is the crime.
What attracts me about "drug dealers" is that they are NOT interested in prying into my private life. What a relief! With psychiatry, you are probed for pathological behavior on every office visit. You are a child. To the "drug dealer," I am an adult at least.
In "Psychedelic Refugee," Rosemary Leary writes:
"Fueled by small doses of LSD, almost everything was amusing or weird." -- Rosemary Leary
In a non-brainwashed world, such testimony would suggest obvious ways to help the depressed.
I wonder if Nixon knew what a favor he was doing medical capitalism when he outlawed psychedelics. Those drugs can actually cure things, and there's no money in that.
When is the Holocaust Museum going to recognize that the Drug War has Nazified American life? Probably, on the same day that the Jefferson Foundation finally admits to having sold out Jefferson by inviting the DEA onto his estate in 1987 to confiscate his poppy plants.
Oregon's drug policy is incoherent and cruel. The rich and healthy spend $4,000 a week on psilocybin. The poor and chemically dependent are thrown in jail, unless they're on SSRIs, in which case they're congratulated for "taking their meds."
Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.
In 2017 alone, 1,632,921 drug arrests were made with 85.5 percent of those solely for possession. -- War On Us
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