You'd think libertarians would see through all the Drug Warrior censorship and demonization of amoral substances, but even they are unwittingly hobbled by Drug War lies. Take Christian libertarian Jake Offenhartz. He sees the Drug War as a flagrant overreach of government, however, his own argument is weakened by his tacit acknowledgement of the Drug War lie that there is no necessity for using the psychoactive substances of which politicians disapprove. Jake himself professes a kind of scorn for such substances, declaring that he would never personally use them.
But how -- and why -- would he say that? The kind of medicine that he's referring to has scarcely been examined for its therapeutic potential (how could it be with the outlawing of any plant that manifests potential useful psychopharmacological
qualities?) and the hints of their efficacy are overwhelming. There are thousands of plants out there that we are forbidden to even begin investigating for therapeutic purposes. Given this Nazi state of affairs, what sense does it make to forswear those medicines a priori, unless the libertarian who does so is actually a closet Christian Scientist, convinced that drugs are to be avoided on principle -- a standard, however, that they surely do not hold for aspirin and Pepto Bismol, let alone tobacco and alcohol.
By outlawing psychoactive medicine, the Drug War is deciding how and how much people can think. This is the great crime of the Drug War, and yet libertarians like Jake cannot confront it since they essentially agree with the Drug Warrior about the lack of necessity for what is hypocritically called "drug use." Such a limit upon thinking itself is also a violation of religion to those who believe with Plato that the unexamined life is not worth living, since freedom of thought itself is controlled by a government which (like the Christian Science libertarian) has a scorn for mental states of which they disapprove. The libertarian is thus powerless to confront the Drug War for its greatest sins against human freedom -- sins, however, which only follow after we have allowed the original sin of the Drug Warrior, which was outlawing plants in the first place, in clear violation of natural law.
That's the problem with prohibition. It is not ultimately a health question but a question about priorities and sensibilities -- and those topics are open to lively debate and should not be the province of science, especially when natural law itself says mother nature is ours.
We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!
"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."
"Users" can be kept out of the workforce by the extrajudicial process of drug testing; they can have their baby taken from them, their house, their property -- all because they do not share the intoxiphobic attitude of America.
When psychiatrists write about heroin, they characterize dependency as enslavement. When they write about antidepressants, they characterize dependency as a medical duty.
Musk vies with his fellow materialists in his attempt to diss humans as insignificant. But we are not insignificant. The very term "insignificant" is a human creation. Consciousness rules. Indeed, consciousness makes the rules. Without us, there would only be inchoate particles.
Immanuel Kant wrote that scientists are scornful about metaphysics yet they rely on it themselves without realizing it. This is a case in point, for the idea that euphoria and visions are unhelpful in life is a metaphysical viewpoint, not a scientific one.
Hollywood presents cocaine as a drug of killers. In reality, strategic cocaine use by an educated person can lead to great mental power, especially as just one part of a pharmacologically balanced diet.
A Pennsylvanian politician now wants the US Army to "fight fentanyl." The guy is anthropomorphizing a damn drug! No wonder pols don't want to spend money on education, because any educated country would laugh a superstitious guy like that right out of public office.
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.
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