I read a short story last night entitled "Tomorrow" by Eugene O'Neill. As might be expected from that author, it was touching and yet extremely depressing. The title "Tomorrow," of course, refers to the eternally renewed resolution of the drunkard to reform tomorrow, which is, of course, a tomorrow that will never come.
If Americans truly felt that laws had to be concocted to protect Americans from substances, then the story would read as a clarion call for the outlawing of liquor. But it will never be read that way by Americans today, subject as they are to the media's constant whitewashing of liquor and their constant demonization of all of liquor's many less dangerous alternatives. How? By lies, half-truths and (above all) censorship, thanks to which one never sees a demonized drug used responsibly and efficaciously on TV or in the movies 12 . Said use is always either portrayed as a dead-end street or a childish undertaking worthy of laughter and, ultimately, disdain, at least from the grown-ups of the world. Meanwhile, the very fact that drugs were used efficaciously by folks like Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius is routinely suppressed from biographies.
This negative attitude toward drugs is beginning to recede today when it comes to psychedelic substances. In fact, while I was writing this blog entry, I received a heads-up about a brand-new article in the New York Times entitled "The C.E.O.s Are Tripping. Can Psychedelics Help the C-Suite?".
But the penny still has not dropped for the western world. The real problem is prohibition itself, which advances the absurd and cruel proposition that a drug that can be used problematically by white American young people must not be used by anyone, anywhere, for any reason whatsoever. The world is full of silent and unnecessary suffering thanks to that anti-scientific postulate -- not just because of the withholding of existing protocols but because of the vast array of imaginative empathic/shamanic protocols that we dare not even imagine today thanks to the Drug War orthodoxy of substance demonization.
And so Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but the real headline is that drugs have never been evil at all, that the evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about them. And how do we talk about them today? With the superstitious and self-serving hypocrisy promoted by cynical politicians.
We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.
That's why I created the satirical Partnership for a Death Free America. It demonstrates clearly that drug warriors aren't worried about our health, otherwise they'd outlaw shopping carts, etc. The question then becomes: what are they REALLY afraid of? Answer: Free thinkers.
Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!
There are endless drugs that could help with depression. Any drug that inspires and elates is an antidepressant, partly by the effect itself and partly by the mood-elevation caused by anticipation of use (facts which are far too obvious for drug warriors to understand).
"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.
Someone needs to create a group called Drug Warriors Anonymous, a place where Americans can go to discuss their right to mind and mood medicine and to discuss the many ways in which our society trashes godsend medicines.
We won't know how hard it is to get off drugs until we legalize all drugs that could help with the change. With knowledge and safety, there will be less unwanted use. And unwanted use can be combatted creatively with a wide variety of drugs.
Someday the world will realize that Freud's real achievement was his discovery of the depression-busting power of cocaine.
The FDA is not qualified to tell us whether holistic medicines work. They hold such drugs to materialist standards and that's pharmacological colonialism.
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?
We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.