I agree with the plan1 entirely. I love the idea of the economic impact that legalization would have on neighborhoods previously penalized by drug laws. But I do have a few caveats. These are not so much criticisms as they are "riffs" on the various topics broached in the document.
1) This document is presented as a strategy in "harm reduction," which is understandable given the current accepted narrative, according to which there is no rational reason for "drug use." Therefore we have to have harm reduction strategies in place to help save users from at least the worst possible consequences of their bad decisions2. This, of course, represents a Christian Science attitude toward drug use, however; therefore I hope that we can eventually transcend this way of framing the situation and begin talking about "benefit creation" of drug use, for drug use can actually have benefits, despite the fact that we have been indoctrinated since grade school to believe the opposite. As William Brereton notes in "The Truth About Opium,"3 nightly smokers of the drug have long lives, steady jobs, and they do not beat their wives. These are benefits.
2) This brings up a corollary issue: the document also calls for educating children in non-use. Now, that's fine if we are talking about non-use by children, but I do not think that our goal should be to make sure that children grow up as abstainers. It's one thing to worry about the safety of kids; it's another to impose our philosophical and religious principles upon those kids as adults. The fact is that smoking opium can be done safely, despite the endless lies of the Drug Warrior, and that such use does have benefits, of a poetic and temperamental kind -- real benefits -- especially when compared to the opiate derivatives which were created in response to the outlawing of opium. Moreover, we are a society in which 25% of American women take one or more Big Pharma 45 meds every day of their life6. It is strange that we should think that this is fine -- indeed it is their medical duty -- while yet telling them to keep away from opium, a drug that medical men from Avicenna to Galen to Paracelsus considered to be a panacea.
3) I am also leery of the "prescription requirements for higher potency opioids," which essentially means the continued criminalization of the same. I think the take-home message of America's drug problems is that criminalization is the problem, so I see no need for this exception. This does not mean that we need to make higher potency opioids available on every street corner, but we need to finally learn the lesson that prohibition causes far more problems than it solves -- and so such an exception to the idea of legalization is going to have its own downsides, downsides that we never seem to take into account when we make such caveats.
4) This leads naturally to my next concern, that we have to consciously start thinking of all the many Drug War DOWNSIDES whenever we contemplate the subject of legalization 7 versus criminalization. We cannot simply calculate the number of white American kids whom we think will or will not be "saved" by our drug laws: we must also think of the many stakeholders that we always seem to ignore. Our current opioid policy has had a ruinous effect on healthcare in India, where most hospitals no longer carry morphine 8 . Why? Because fearmongers in the States have so demonized such drugs that hospitals have been burdened with red tape and expenses whenever they wish to use them. And so we ignore the needs of pain patients around the world when we outlaw drugs in the states9. Other stakeholders include the artists who would like to benefit from opiate insights. Another stakeholder is the philosopher, whom William James himself told us should investigate altered states. In other words, when we criminalize drugs, we think that we're just "saving junior," whereas we are actually inflicting pain and censorship on the rest of the world. But, alas, in Congress, no one can hear them scream.
5) By the way, punishing people for using drugs should be recognized as the non-sequitur that it is. We may as well harass people and remove them from the workforce for failing to follow a government approved diet.
6) We also need to limit employee drug testing 10 to the goal of finding impairment, rather than it being a fishing expedition in search of demonized substances. It will do little good to legalize opiates if we continue to deny people jobs for actually using opiates.
7) One of the best ways to stop UNNECESSARY or FRIVOLOUS use of opiates would be by providing alternatives, and so we should legalize drugs like MDMA 11 and laughing gas 12 as part of our opiate program. For if opiates are the only way available for people to achieve self-transcendence in life, we should not be surprised if a lot of those people choose opiates.
Someone needs to create a group called Drug Warriors Anonymous, a place where Americans can go to discuss their right to mind and mood medicine and to discuss the many ways in which our society trashes godsend medicines.
In a sane world, we would learn to strategically fight drugs with drugs.
"Abuse" is a funny term because it implies that there's a right way to use "drugs," which is something that the drug warriors deny. To the contrary, they make the anti-scientific claim that "drugs" are not good for anybody for any reason at any dose.
In the Atomic Age Declassified, they tell us that we needed hundreds of thermonuclear tests so that scientists could understand the effects. That's science gone mad. Just like today's scientists who need more tests before they can say that laughing gas will help the depressed. Science today is all about ignoring the obvious.
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.
Most psychoactive substance use can be judged as recreational OR medicinal OR both. The judgements are not just determined by the circumstances of use, either, but also by the biases of those doing the judging.
The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.
AI is inherently plagiaristic technology. It tells us: "Hey, guys, look what I can do!" -- when it should really be saying, "Hey, guys, look how I stole all your data and repackaged it in such a way as to make it appear that I am the genius, not you!"
Freud had the right idea: He noticed that cocaine use actually ended depression in his patients. Unfortunately, he was ambitious and was more interested in making a name for himself than in pushing back against the statistically challenged fear mongering of prohibitionists.
The DEA should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for withholding godsend medicine from the depressed. Here is just one typical drug-user report that appeared in "Pihkal": "A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like..."
Someone needs to create a group called Drug Warriors Anonymous, a place where Americans can go to discuss their right to mind and mood medicine and to discuss the many ways in which our society trashes godsend medicines.