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.
Kids should be taught in grade school that prohibition is wrong.
Drug War censorship is supported by our "science" magazines, which pretend that outlawed drugs do not exist, and so write what amount to lies about the supposed intransigence of things like depression and anxiety.
Rick Strassman reportedly stopped his DMT trials because some folks had bad experiences at high doses. That is like giving up on aspirin because high doses of NSAIDs can kill.
It's rich when Americans outlaw drugs and then insist that those drugs did not have much to offer in any case. It's like I took away your car and then told you that car ownership was overrated.
When Americans "obtain their majority" and wish to partake of drugs safely, they should be paired with older adults who have done just that. Instead, we introduce them to "drug abusers" in prerecorded morality plays to reinforce our biased notions that drug use is wrong.
"In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the peyote tells us where to find it." --Antonin Arnaud
Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful. Wrong. Substance demonization is wrong, root and branch. It always causes more suffering than freedom.
The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.
Democratic societies need to outlaw prohibition for many reasons, the first being the fact that prohibition removes millions of minorities from the voting rolls, thereby handing elections to fascists and insurrectionists.
Drug prohibition is the perfect racist crime. It brought gunfire to inner cities, yet those who seek to end the gunfire pretend that drug prohibition has nothing to do with it.
Kids should be taught in grade school that prohibition is wrong.