I think it is amazing that you equate the use of Mother Nature's psychedelic plants with child abuse. It shows how far the Drug War has gone in superstitiously turning mere physical substances into demons, into the very incarnation of evil, something to be feared and reviled rather than to be analyzed dispassionately with an eye toward their potential benefits for humankind.
If you are keeping up on world events, you surely know that psychedelics are now being shown to grow new neurons in the brains of the depressed and, when properly administered, to give new hope and mental resilience to cases that had hitherto been impervious to all other treatments. Moreover, you're surely aware that Nixon rendered psychedelics illegal, not to protect America's health, but to punish his political enemies by making them felons and thus removing them from the voting rolls - and that, at the time Nixon did this, psychedelics were showing unprecedented benefit in actually curing alcoholics. You're surely also aware that many legal antidepressant drugs are so addictive that they have to be taken for life - whereas the naturally-occurring psychedelics that you demonize are non-addictive and can sometimes facilitate mental cures in just one session!
As for the old Drug War canard that drugs "fry your brain," psychedelics have been shown to actually grow new neurons. If any drugs fry the brain1, it is modern antidepressants 2, which are increasingly implicated in causing anhedonia in long-term users.
In other words, there is no evidence that legalized psychedelics would destroy America, least of all when those substances are used in a religious setting. No doubt you could cobble together a few statistics to the contrary, but any damage you may document would be minuscule compared to that done by alcohol, cigarettes, and the legal drug therapy on which more than 1 in 10 Americans are now chemically dependent, destined to be drug users for a lifetime thanks to the "rights" of Big Pharma 34 (business rights which, as a conservative, you no doubt think are just and proper despite their catastrophic effect on actual human lives!)
It's funny that you should bring up the Christian Science attitude toward "childhood vaccination" in arguing against excessive religious rights - because the Drug War is nothing but Christian Science as applied to mental health: that is, the Drug War is based on the metaphysical premise that we should not use Mother Nature's psychedelic medicines to improve our mental health. That is a religious belief itself that cannot even in theory be proven: it is a faith, one that many Americans do not share. So you show your religious intolerance in deciding that everyone must respect your jaundiced view of Mother Nature's plants and fungi by eschewing the therapeutic use of those God-given substances. In short, if the anti-vaccination movement is ignorant, then so is the Drug War: for both argue against the use of demonstrably therapeutic substances.
You claim that the young people known as "nones" are on your side, philosophically speaking. I doubt that, but if you're right, this won't last for long. Research from the new psychedelic renaissance is proving that the guided use of Mother Nature's psychedelic bounty can increase mental resilience and clarity and help one think outside the box - which is the very definition of a psychotherapeutic godsend. The "nones" are going to be smart enough to realize that the Drug War is all about keeping them from these naturally-occurring therapies - at which point these "nones" will take the lead in denouncing the folly of criminalizing Mother Nature's therapeutic bounty.
It is my sincere hope that this pushback against the Drug War will result in new churches, in which Americans will seek transcendence together through the ritual use of Mother Nature's psychedelic plants.
This would not represent the claiming of some new exotic right as you seem to think: it would be the re-claiming of a God-given right to the therapeutic bounty that grows at our very feet, a right guaranteed by natural law until it was first unconstitutionally usurped by common law in 1914 with the Harrison Narcotics Act.
Author's Follow-up: January 1, 2025
The above was written five years ago when I was still quite young -- scarcely 60 years old. Today, I might have tried to be just a tad more diplomatic -- but I still agree with every word I said -- and even more so than before, having studied the Drug War in depth from a philosophical angle in the intervening years.
Marci's viewpoint is so repellant to me and based on so many anti-democratic, anti-scientific and anti-philosophical premises, that I hardly know where to begin in responding to it.
If kids are growing up to hate drugs these days as Marci assures us, then it is only because of Drug War propaganda which has expunged all positive news about drugs from the media, 5 meanwhile brainwashing grade schoolers in the drug-hating principles of Mary Baker-Eddy67. It has censored academia and wasted billions of dollars on police and military, meanwhile causing the senseless deaths of tens of thousands of American young people by refusing to teach safe use and refusing to regulate drug supply -- thereby leading to completely unnecessary drug overdoses8.
Americans used opium 9 peaceably at home before 1914. But anti-Chinese Drug Warriors imposed their Christian Science intolerance on America and those users became criminals overnight. Now those who want to use opiates are dying in the streets. Being a Drug Warrior, though, means never having to say you're sorry. It is the ultimate case of denial. But then the Drug War is based on two enormous lies: 1) that drugs have no positive uses and 2) that prohibition has no downsides.
If Marci is worried about our kids, it's a wonder that she's not sounding the alarm about alcohol which kills 178,000 a year10 or guns that kill 50,000 a year in America alone11. Surely, those who sell alcohol and those who sell guns are wicked in her book. But then consistency has never been the strong point of the Drug Warrior.
No, it's democracy that Drug Warriors hate. They hate freedom of religion 12 and the whole concept of probable cause. Above all, they covet power, which they know they can receive by crafting laws that arrest millions of minorities thanks to the crime-incentivizing program called prohibition. Had Marci's viewpoint reigned in the Indus Valley 3,500 years ago, there would be no Hindu religion today, as its Vedic forerunner was inspired by the use of a psychedelic plant medicine known as Soma13.
In Marci's view, moreover, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were just so many druggie criminals. She was no doubt applauding when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 14 in 1987 and confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. And now the Thomas Jefferson Foundation refuses to even mention that raid to its visitors, knowing that it would show that the foundation had betrayed Jefferson's legacy in lockstep with Drug War ideology15.
Finally, we live in a world that is on the brink of nuclear annihilation because of haters like Drug Warriors16 -- and yet these same haters want to outlaw drugs that inspire compassion. The big threat for them is peace, love and understanding. They don't mind that we're surrounded by nuclear weapons that could go off at any moment now, on purpose or accidentally, and leave humanity to die out slowly in a nuclear winter.
The Drug War is a slow-motion coup against democracy.
It has crafted laws that lock up millions of minorities and in so doing facilitated the election of America's first dictator. Thanks for nothing, Marci.
Marci's stance on drugs is an illustration of my statement that the Drug War represents a complete inversion of common sense and humanistic values. It is the triumph of stupidity. It is brainless fearmongering on a scale that the witch hunters of New England could never have imagined.
Author's Follow-up: January 2, 2025
And because the Drug War is the ultimate example of fearmongering, it should be studied and exposed as such by modern researchers in the field of witchcraft. But Drug War propaganda has gotten to them as well. And so the leaders in that field pretend that ostensibly magical "herbs" are not "drugs" -- in the same way that the rest of us pretend that "meds" are not "drugs." It has nothing to do with the drugs themselves -- drugs are drugs, after all -- but merely with how we have been taught to FEEL about them.
Saying things like "Fentanyl kills!" makes just as much sense as saying "Fire bad!"
The drug war is the ultimate case of fearmongering. And yet academics and historians fail to recognize it as such. They will protest eloquently against the outrages of the witch hunts of yore, but they are blind to the witch hunts of the present. What is a drug dealer but a modern service magician, someone who sells psychoactive medicine designed to effect personal ends for the user? They are simply providing an alternative to materialistic medicine, which ignores common sense and so ignores the glaringly obvious value of such substances.
Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
Morphine can provide a vivid appreciation of mother nature in properly disposed minds. That should be seen as a benefit. Instead, dogma tells us that we must hate morphine for any use.
"In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the peyote tells us where to find it." --Antonin Arnaud
Had the FDA been around in the Indus Valley 3,500 years ago, there would be no Hindu religion today, because they would have found some potential problem with the use of soma.
I'm told that science is completely unbiased today. I guess I'll have to go back and reassess my doubts about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
Psychedelic retreats tell us how scientific they are. But science is the problem. Science today insists that we ignore all obvious benefits of drugs. It's even illegal to suggest that psilocybin has health benefits: that's "unproven" according to the Dr. Spocks of science.
Science keeps telling us that godsends have not been "proven" to work. What? To say that psilocybin has not been proven to work is like saying that a hammer has not yet been proven to smash glass. Why not? Because the process has not yet been studied under a microscope.
Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks: J'excuse! People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took your prohibition to accomplish that! Stop arresting, start teaching safe use!
"Can I use poppies, coca, laughing gas, MDMA?" "NO," says the materialist, "We must be SCIENTIFIC! We must fry your brain and give you a lobotomy and make you a patient for life with the psychiatric pill mill! That's true SCIENCE!"
Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.