They want to keep the taps flowing at their local bar while they hand out life sentences for those who choose to relax using other naturally sourced substances, many of which have been used responsibly by other cultures for thousands of years. They're so bent on making alcohol the drug of choice, that they even have the nationalistic arrogance to send troops overseas and burn plants that pose a threat to the liquor industry. And then we wonder why the US is hated overseas. Imagine an Islamic country entering the United States with the express purpose of shutting down our alcohol producers and burning the plants that constitute their raw materials. That is precisely what the US does, morally speaking, when it enters other countries to shut down plants that process the coca leaf and the poppy.
But conservatives are only half the problem. The tyrannous Drug War is fomented equally by the worried parents of America, who fret that their children will become slaves to "drugs" should the Drug War be abandoned. This fear is so misplaced that one scarcely knows where to begin in addressing it. But address it we must, since the laws that are promulgated by these Chicken Little parents have a body count: starting with the thousands killed every day in the name of a brutal Drug War overseas, and the endless stream of innocent bystanders killed in inner cities -- all because America has elevated common law over natural law and criminalized plants, a step that would have made the garden-loving Thomas Jefferson spin in his grave, just as he surely did, in fact, in 1987 when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 1 and confiscated his poppy plants.
First of all, let's be honest and use the term "psychoactive plants" for "drugs," since {^"drugs" is really just a pejorative epithet for the medicinal bounty of Mother Nature.}{
Secondly, there was no epidemic of childhood addictions prior to the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. A law against opium 2 was enacted in that year, not because it would protect youngsters, but rather because it gave racist politicians a socially acceptable way to express their disdain for the Chinese with whom they associated the poppy plant, just as they associated Mexicans with marijuana and blacks with cocaine 34 . Both of those latter two stereotypes would motivate future disingenuous hand-wringing about "drugs" by sixties and seventies racists, culminating in the creation of Richard Nixon's corrupt DEA in 1973, by a president whose drug policy was overtly designed to punish his political opponents, Timothy Leary 567 first and foremost, and then anyone who might so much as give such a rebel the time of day.
And so Americans were expelled from the psychotherapeutic Garden of Eden in the twentieth century, as the American government claimed the unprecedented right to dole out or withhold the psychoactive plant medicines of Mother Nature as it saw fit, a power grab that even God Himself had never contemplated, being happy for his own part to outlaw only one solitary tree from among the myriad plants of his worldwide nursery.
The result is that we now childishly see threats everywhere we turn in Mother Nature, failing to realize that the problem -- to the extent that there is a problem other than in the scheming minds of racists -- is behavior, not plants.
Thirdly, it is enormously selfish, and even racist, to criminalize plants based on a merely theoretical threat that they pose to young people. Why? First, because it ignores the fate of those young people who are already being killed in inner cities around the world thanks to the violence that naturally arises under prohibition. Secondly because our draconian drug laws force millions of Americans (and billions worldwide) to go without powerful psychoactive plant medicines, given that such heavy-handed legislation outlaws mere research of cancer- and depression-fighting godsends, let alone the actual use of such medicine, all out of a fear that white young people might become addicted to some plant medicine or other.
Wake up, white America: 1 out of 4 women, mainly Caucasian, are addicted to Big Pharma 89 meds even as we speak. Why not wring your hands over that grim fact and re-legalize nature's bounty, none of which is more habit-forming than the SSRIs that are being popped like candy everywhere you look.
In the name of the sick and suffering around the world, and in the name of inner city minorities and racial justice, we must return to the days when we cracked down on bad behavior alone - rather than manufacturing violence out of whole cloth by punishing Americans for the pre-crime of merely possessing plant medicines of which our scheming politicians disapprove.
Author's Follow-up:
May 25, 2025
In looking back on this essay from five years ago, I am tempted to call it shallow. I seem to be merely speaking common sense above, after all, things that everybody knows. I have to remind myself that the essay is not what is shallow: it is America's concept of "drugs" that is shallow, thanks to which, anybody who speaks common sense is a regular Solomon by contrast.
I could perhaps go more directly to the jugular today by simply stating three truths:
1) Shouting "Fentanyl 10 kills!" makes no more sense than shouting "Fire bad!" They are both attempts to inspire us to fear and demonize dangerous substances, rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humankind.
2) Drug prohibition is based on the following anti-scientific idea: that a substance that can be dangerous for white young people when used at one dose for one reason, must not be used by anyone in the world at any dose for any reason.
All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.
The Drug War is a religion. The "addict" is a sinner who has to come home to the true faith of Christian Science. In reality, neither physical nor psychological addiction need be a problem if all drugs were legal and we used them creatively to counter problematic use.
If there were no other problem with antidepressants, they would be wrong for the simple reason that they make a user dependent for life -- not as a bug (as in drugs like opium) but rather as a feature: that's how they "work," by being administered daily for a lifetime.
Aleister Crowley actually TRIED to get addicted to drugs and found he could not. These things are not inevitable. The fact that there are town drunkards does not mean that we should outlaw alcohol.
Addiction thrives BECAUSE of prohibition, which limits drug choice and discourages education about psychoactive substances and how to use them wisely.
If opium were legal, then much of the nostrums peddled by drug stores today would be irrelevant. (No wonder the drug war has staying power!)
Harm Reduction is not enough. We need Benefit Production as well. The autistic should be able to use compassion-enhancing drugs; dementia patients should be able to use the many drugs that improve and speed up mental processes.
Most enemies of inner-city gun violence refuse to protest against the drug prohibition which caused the violence in the first place.
I just asked New York Attorney General Letitia James how much she was getting paid to play Whack-a-Mole. I pointed out that the drug war created the gangs just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia.
We have a low tolerance for the downsides of drug use only. We are fine with high risk levels for any other activity on earth. If drug warriors were serious about saving lives, they'd outlaw guns, free flying, free diving, and all pleasure trips to Mars.
All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.
