In the movie "JoJo Rabbit" by Taika Waititi, a Nazi school teacher turns excitedly to her young uniformed charges and shouts: "Now let's burn some books!"
That's a funny line to modern Americans, because we still recognize the obvious importance of free speech1. Therefore burning books seems downright silly to us. But before we clap ourselves on the back for our democratic enlightenment viz. the Nazi past, let's remember that we ourselves live in a country that burns plants and holds them responsible for social failings, a so-called scientific country that even bans research on such substances.
Thus the myriad plants and fungi that can improve the mind are outlawed by a superstitious belief that these substances are somehow evil in and of themselves, without regard for the way that they are used.
Let's hope that the idiocy of this drug-war zeitgeist will be apparent to the movie-goers of the future, so that the line "Let's burn some plants" will someday elicit the same howls of amused derision that Americans reserve today for the line "Let's burn some books."
{^A hundred and fifty years ago, the mob was worried about Frankenstein. Today they're worried about devil plants. That's why millions around the globe have to go without Mother Nature's godsends, to cater to the superstitious and anti-scientific fears of the masses, dutifully propagandized by politicians and lobbyists for Big Liquor, the American Psychiatric Association, law enforcement, and the corrections industry.}{
June 2, 2022
Today Brian (bless him) submitted a comment to the US federal government at regulations.gov on a "Proposed [drug-testing] Rule by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration." It is our plucky webmaster's latest attempt to elucidate the folly of demonizing plant medicine.
Drug testing should be for impairment only. It should not be an extrajudicial fishing expedition to identify Americans who use botanical medicines of which Congress disapproves. The plants and fungi that we criminalize today have inspired entire religions. Stop the witch hunt. Stop this cruel and unusual punishment whereby we remove Americans from the work force for using the freely given plants of Mother Nature. Thomas Jefferson would have agreed with me. He was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 2 and confiscated his poppy plants in violation of the natural law upon which he founded America. For as John Locke wrote, "The Earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being." As for preventing drug misuse, try education, not criminalization; try facts, not fear.
The comment period apparently closes in four days, so fingers crossed that some bureaucratic hearts will be moved by Monday next to end the Christian Science Inquisition that is modern drug testing 3 .
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda
(There would be no Hindu religion today had the drug war been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.)
A pharmacologically savvy drug dealer would have no problem getting someone off one drug because they would use the common sense practice of fighting drugs with drugs. But materialist doctors would rather that the patient suffer than to use such psychologically obvious methods.
I just can't believe... [image]
It's a category error to say that scientists can tell us if psychoactive drugs "really work." It's like asking Dr. Spock of Star Trek if hugging "really works." ("Hugging is highly illogical, Captain.")
Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.
Drug prohibition fails even on its own terms. Instead of protecting white American young people, it has exiled them to the city streets where they are sacrificed on the altar of the American religion of substance demonization.
There are definitely good scientists out there. Unfortunately, they are either limited by their materialist orthodoxy into showing only specific microscopic evidence or they abandon materialism for the nonce and talk the common psychological sense that we all understand.
Trump supports the drug war and Big Pharma: the two forces that have turned me into a patient for life with dependence-causing antidepressants. Big Pharma makes the pills, and the drug war outlaws all viable alternatives.
Attention People's magazine editorial staff:
Matthew Perry was a big boy who made his own decisions. He didn't die because of ketamine or because of evil rotten drug dealers, he died because of America's enforced ignorance about psychoactive drugs.
When psychiatrists write about heroin, they characterize dependency as enslavement. When they write about antidepressants, they characterize dependency as a medical duty.
(up)