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"?)
The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.
National Geo published an article entitled "Coca: a Blessing and a Curse." Coca was never a curse. Most people used it wisely, just as most people drink wisely. Doctors demonized it because it really worked and it could put them out of business. https://abolishthedea.com/sigmund_freuds_real_breakthrough_was_not_psychoanalysis.php
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.
In "Four Good Days" the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of mother nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.
In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.
The Drug War is the most important evil to protest, precisely because almost everybody is afraid to do so. That's a clear sign that it is a cancer on the body politic.
Scientists are censored as to what they can study thanks to drug law. Instead of protesting that outrage, they lend a false scientific veneer to those laws via their materialist obsession with reductionism, which blinds them to the obvious godsend effects of outlawed substances.
The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.
We drastically limit drug choices, we refuse to teach safe use, and then we discover there's a gene to explain why some people have trouble with drugs. Science loves to find simple solutions to complex problems.
We should be encouraging certain drug use by the elderly. Many Indigenous drugs have been shown to grow new neurons and increase neural connectivity -- to refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!