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 .
If I beat my depression by smoking opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag subject to immediate arrest. But if I do NOT "take my meds" every day of my life, I am a bad patient.
The U.S. government created violence out of whole cloth in America's inner cities with drug prohibition -- and now it is using that violence as an excuse to kick the people that they themselves have knocked down.
NOW is the time for entheogens -- not (as Strassman and Pollan seem to think) at some future date when materialists have finally wrapped their minds around the potential usefulness of drugs that experientially teach compassion.
The Drug War is based on two HUGE lies: 1) that prohibition has no downsides, & 2) that drug use has no upsides.
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 being used as a wrecking ball to destroy democratic freedoms. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and freedom of religion and given the police the right to confiscate the property of peaceful and productive citizens.
Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.
Talking about being in denial: drug warriors blame all of the problems that they cause on "drugs" and then insist that the entire WORLD accept their jaundiced view of the natural bounty that God himself told us was good.
And we should not insist it's a problem if someone decides to use opium, for instance, daily. We certainly don't blame "patients" for using antidepressants daily. And getting off opium is easier than getting off many antidepressants -- see Julia Holland.
The FDA should have no role in approving psychoactive medicine. They evaluate them based on materialist standards rather than holistic ones. In practice, this means the FDA ignores all glaringly obvious benefits.
If I beat my depression by smoking opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag subject to immediate arrest. But if I do NOT "take my meds" every day of my life, I am a bad patient.