Ecstasy helps humans love each other. Time to use it therapeutically on hot heads.
It's hard to end mass shootings in America, because we're not allowed to come up with any solution that involves guns in any way. So we're hobbled from the start. It's like we're being asked to solve one of those crazy logic problems that says: "Using two match sticks, make 10 triangles... but you're not allowed to touch the match sticks at any time."
But I do have one idea of how to end -- or at least to seriously decrease -- mass shootings without (heaven forbid) inconveniencing gun owners in any way, shape or form. Here's the solution:
Force all haters to undergo talk therapy while under the influence of MDMA , aka Ecstasy. That's it. Problem solved (or at least seriously dented).
Why? Because the Drug Ecstasy has a long history of promoting pro-social feelings. The drug single-handedly brought about peace, love and understanding in Britain in the 1990s, when E-using folks of every ethnic group happily joined together on the dance floor to celebrate life without regard for racial, social or ethnic distinctions, a unity never witnessed before in the British Isles. That dance floor utopia would still be going on today except that Drug Warriors blamed one single solitary death on E, and used that as an excuse to crack down on the drug. The result: dancers switched from Ecstasy to anger-facilitating drugs such as alcohol and crack cocaine , and concert producers had to hire special forces troops to police their venues.
Yet another "victory" for the Drug War.
Of course, the Drug Warriors failed to notice that the E-related death which inspired their crackdown was caused by the Drug War itself. Why? Because the Drug War suppresses research on substances like Ecstasy, making it impossible to establish guidelines for safe use. Nor did they stop to think that Ecstasy was, in fact, FANTASTICALLY SAFE compared to alcohol, which racked up 5,460 deaths in Great Britain in 2020 alone* -- deaths over which the purblind British Drug Warrior never lost a moment of sleep, let alone launched a nationwide campaign to demonize alcohol.
So the good news is that Ecstasy could drastically decrease mass shootings if we were to use it therapeutically to treat angry people.
The bad news is that America is unlikely to hear this penny drop for many decades to come. Why not? Because guns are not the only thing that Americans are hung up about. They're hung up about the politically created scapegoat called "drugs" as well, unable to wrap their minds around the fact that the substances we dogmatically demonize today could actually be used for the good of a hate-filled humanity, if not to save us from nuclear annihilation, then at least to render mass shootings fewer and farther between.
Until America ends its illogical policy of substance demonization, Americans will remain as confused about mass shootings "as the Egyptians in their fog" as Shakespeare says, vainly trying to think of solutions to this problem that do not involve either guns OR drugs... a self-created dilemma that makes the above-mentioned matchstick problem sound solvable by comparison.
Do you know why I stopped you? That's right, because the Drug War gives me carte blanche to be a noxious busybody. That, and I wanted to give you a few more links showing how drugs can help us stop mass shootings, as soon as we drop the drug-war ideology of substance demonization, that is.
May 25, 2022
By the way, MDMA is already being fast-tracked by the FDA as a treatment for PTSD and depression. Of course, "fast-tracked" is a relative term. Brian is 64 years old, and he's been waiting his whole life for the FDA to approve medicines that grow at his very feet -- so there is nothing "fast" at all about the FDA approval process. But for those who doubt the ability of MDMA (aka Ecstasy) to change hearts, check out -- or better yet watch the documentary "One Nation" by concert promoter Terry "Turbo" Smith, in which we hear the following "rave reviews" about the peace and harmony that MDMA brought to the British dance floor in the 1990s (before Drug Warriors criminalized the drug and alcohol-fueled violence ensued).
"It was the first time that black-and-white people had integrated on a level... and everybody was one." -- DJ Ray Keith.
"It was black and white, Asian, Chinese, all up in one building," -- MC GQ.
"Everyone's loving each other, man, they're not hating." - DJ Mampi Swift.
The DEA outlawed MDMA /Ecstasy in 1985, against the advice of its own legal counsel. The result: American soldiers have gone without a godsend medicine for PTSD for almost 40 years now.
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Author's Follow-up: September 22, 2022
Wow. I've just told America how to end school shootings. That's a tough act to follow, but I think I can do better yet. What if I were to tell you that there is a plant medicine that could end depression? It's been used by the Peruvian Indians for millennia, for whom it was considered divine. I'm talking about the coca leaf. You know? The so-called 'drug' that Americans have ignorantly demonized by conflating it with the cocaine alkaloid that it contains (all so that the US could keep boots on the ground in Latin America). But to ban coca because it contains cocaine 12 is like banning peaches because they contain prussic acid: i.e., it's boneheaded and wrong. See W. Golden Mortimer's book on this topic, if you value facts over fear and truth over government propaganda.
Related tweet: October 24, 2022
"Drugs are horrific," huh? Does he (Rishi Sunak) mean MDMA 3 , which could help end school shootings, or Soma, which inspired the Hindu religion, or coca, which was enjoyed by the long-lived Inca for millennia?
The FDA approves of brain-damaging shock therapy but will not approve MDMA for soldiers with PTSD. This is the same FDA that signs off on the psychiatric pill mill upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life. This is the same FDA that approves Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself! (Can somebody say "follow the money"?)
More materialist nonsense. "We" are the only reason that the universe exists as a universe rather than as inchoate particles.
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.
Yeah. That's why it's so pretentious and presumptuous of People magazine to "fight for justice" on behalf of Matthew Perry, as if Perry would have wanted that.
Researchers insult our intelligence when they tell us that drugs like MDMA and opium and laughing gas have not been proven to work. Everyone knows they work. That's precisely why drug warriors hate them.
The Drug War shows us that American democracy is fundamentally flawed. Propaganda and fearmongering has persuaded Americans to give up freedoms that are clearly enunciated in the U.S. Constitution. We need a new democracy in which a Constitution actually matters.
We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.
Psychedelics and entheogens should be freely available to all dementia patients. These medicines can increase neuronal plasticity and even grow new neurons. Besides, they can inspire and elate -- or do we puritans feel that our loved ones have no right to peace of mind?
Rather than protesting prohibition as a crackdown on academic freedom, today's scientists are collaborating with the drug war by promoting shock therapy and SSRIs, thereby profiting from the monopoly that the drug war gives them in selling mind and mood medicine.
Prohibitionists have the same M O they've had for the last 100+ years: blame drugs for everything. Being a drug warrior is never having the decency to say you're sorry -- not to Mexicans, not to inner-city crime victims, not to patients who go without adequate pain relief...
Antidepressants might be fine in a world where drugs were legal. Then it would actually be possible to get off them by using drugs that have inspired entire religions. In the age of prohibition, however, an antidepressant prescription is usually a life sentence.