The poppy was the first plant that America effectively outlawed in its unprecedented war against Mother Nature's medicines. The crackdown came in the early 1900s and grew out of a racist contempt for the Chinese, not out of a concern for their health, which opium was never shown conclusively to injure in any case. It was an aesthetic racism, so to speak. Americans of the time hated everything about the Chinese lifestyle, and opium was just the whipping boy for our xenophobic hang-ups. Of course, no one noticed at the time that the criminalization of a plant was a violation of the Natural Law upon which America was founded, for as John Locke himself wrote in his Second Treatise on Government: "The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being."
Ronald Reagan essentially acknowledged this coup against Natural Law when he ordered the DEA to raid Thomas Jefferson's estate in 1987 and confiscate the founding father's poppy plants, thereby giving the finger to the hard-earned and hitherto inviolable freedoms on which the republic was founded. Even conservatives should have blanched at this coup, since a government that can stomp onto your property to confiscate plants can pretty much do anything that it wants to do, provided only that it first works the public up into a lather with the help of fearmongering from unprincipled demagogues. Conservatives at least should have worried about the implication of this raid for property rights, even if they saw no need to calm and focus their busybody minds with a time-honored drug which, as Hogshire points out, has been considered divine by many of the world's most famous physicians, including Avicenna, Paracelsus and Galen.
It is against this backdrop of Machiavellian substance demonization that I welcome those few books on this topic that do not seek to paint the poppy as pure evil: books like "The Truth about Opium" by William Brereton and "Confessions of an English Opium Eater" by Thomas De Quincey (in which latter book, by the way, the term "confessions" was not meant to connote wrongdoing on the author's part, as Drug Warriors like to assume). Hogshire's book is a welcome addition to this small but hopefully growing category of books that view drugs absent the blinders of the drug-hating theology of Mary Baker Eddy, upon which the Drug War is philosophically based.
It represents a long-overdue departure from the usual fearmongering literature of the Drug War: books like "The Opium Habit" by Horace B. Day, which features a bottle labeled "heroin 1" on its deceptive cover page; "Drugging a Nation" by Samuel Merwin, in whose subtitle opium is declared to be "a curse"; and John Halpern's "Opium," featuring the equally absurd subtitle: "How a flower shaped and poisoned the world," as if evil could be ascribed to a flower. The sentiment in question is not merely Christian heresy (for God claimed that his creation was good after all), but it is anti-scientific, insofar as any scientist knows (or at least used to know) that no substances are good or bad in and of themselves. Goodness and badness reside only in human beings and their actions. Failure to recognize this fact has empowered a prohibition that has blinded us to godsend uses for a vast array of psychoactive medicines, including not just opium , but coca, MDMA 2 and psychedelics, to say nothing of the many non-addictive but elating synthetic creations of American chemist Alexander Shulgin.
"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau
Most authors today reckon without the drug war -- unless they are writing specifically about "drugs" -- and even then they tend to approach the subject in a way that clearly demonstrates that they have been brainwashed by drug war orthodoxy, even if they do not realize it themselves. That's why I write my philosophical book reviews, to point out this hypocrisy which no other philosopher in the world is pointing out.
We've got to take the fight TO the drug warriors by starting to hold them legally responsible for having spread "Big Lies" about "drugs." Anyone involved in producing the "brain frying" PSA of the 1980s should be put on trial for willfully spreading a toxic lie.
Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.
The sad fact is that America regularly arrests people whose only crime is that they are keeping performance anxiety at bay... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
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..."
If there is an epidemic of "self-harm," prohibitionists never think of outlawing razor blades. They ask: "Why the self-harm?" But if there is an epidemic of drug use which they CLAIM is self-harm, they never ask "Why the self-harm?" They say: "Let's prohibit and punish!"
"Just ONE HORSE took the life of my daughter." This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
There are a potentially vast number of non-addictive drugs that could be used strategically in therapy. They elate and "free the tongue" to help talk therapy really work. Even "addictive" drugs can be used non-addictively, prohibitionist propaganda notwithstanding.
This is why I call the drug war 'fanatical Christian Science.' People would rather have grandpa die than to let him use laughing gas or coca or opium or MDMA, etc. etc.
Drug warriors abuse the English language.
Materialists are always trying to outdo each other in describing the insignificance of humankind. Crick at least said we were "a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Musk downsizes us further to one single microbe. He wins!
We've got to take the fight TO the drug warriors by starting to hold them legally responsible for having spread "Big Lies" about "drugs." Anyone involved in producing the "brain frying" PSA of the 1980s should be put on trial for willfully spreading a toxic lie.
