There was at least one "Drug War philosopher" before me, and that was GK Chesterton, whose arguments against liquor prohibition apply with equal (if not more) force to drug prohibition today. The prolific Catholic clearly saw that liquor prohibition was based on premises that would spell the end of personal liberty. How? By putting free citizens under the thumbs of politically minded worrywarts. What follows are a few of his particularly insightful comments on this topic. For more, see his 1922 book "Eugenics and Other Evils," chapter VI, "The Eclipse of Liberty."
"But the whole ground of argument is now changed. For people do not consider what the drunkard does to others by throwing the pot, but what he does to himself by drinking the beer. The argument is based on health; and it is said that the Government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea. People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with tobacco or with twenty other things. And there is no escape for the hygienic logician except to restrain and regulate them all. If he is to control the health of the community, he must necessarily control all the habits of all the citizens...."1 -
GK Chesterton
Author's Follow-up: June 14, 2024
And his prophecy has proven all too true. Today in Alabama, you can be thrown in prison for eating certain mushrooms -- by the same politicians who think that grade-school shootings are no grounds for passing gun control laws. As Chesterton warned, any law can be "justified" once we deny the inalienability of our rights to personal liberty.
No drug causes addiction after one use. From this fact alone, it follows that even drugs like meth and crack and Fentanyl can be used wisely -- on an intermittent basis.
The war on drugs has destroyed America's faith in the power of education. In fact, it has made us think of education as WRONG in and of itself. It has made us prefer censorship and fear-filled ignorance to education!
You can get a master's degree in healthcare today and not learn a thing about the power of hundreds of outlawed drugs to inspire and elate.
Drug warriors are full of hate for "users." Many of them make it clear that they want users to die (like Gates and Bennett...). The drug war has weaponized inhumanity.
The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?
All drugs have potential positive uses for somebody, at some dose, in some circumstance, alone or in combination. To decide in advance that a drug is completely useless is an offense to reason and to human liberty.
The front page of every mycology club page should feature a protest of drug laws that make the study of mycology illegal in the case of certain shrooms. But no one protests. Their silence makes them drug war collaborators because it serves to normalize prohibition.
"Arrest made in Matthew Perry death." Oh, yeah? Did they arrest the drug warriors who prioritized propaganda over education?
America arrests people whose only crime is that they are trying to be all that they can be in life... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
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.
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