The University of Pennsylvania just blacklisted the words "freshman" and "sophomore." Whatever we may think of this latest politically correct gambit, it strikes me as amusing that we have this faux freedom to tweak the dictionary while we have no freedom to use the plant medicine that grows at our very feet. If the university wants to be truly progressive and take a truly courageous action, they would ban the word "drugs," which is used in the US as a Christian Science pejorative for psychoactive medicine. But that would be a real stand that might cause real pushback, and that's not the kind of "bold action" that university deans are known to favor. "Look at us, we're attacking patriarchy -- but we still grant government the right to control how much we can feel, how we can think, and how much we can think."
August 30, 2022
You see what he did there? Brian's suggesting that progressives these days are hitting easy targets while steadfastly ignoring the biggest infringement of all time, both of personal and civil rights: namely, the Drug War, which punishes us (albeit usually indirectly) for saying or doing anything that conflicts with the Drug Warrior's attitude of substance demonization. For almost 40 years now, the government's official policy about "drugs" has been to lie to us about them. Not so much by saying false things but rather by reporting only negative outcomes of substance use. Office of National Drug Control Policy actually has a charter that forbids its members from even considering any positive uses for the substances that America has criminalized. And yet we're talking about the kind of medicines that have inspired entire religions.
What Have We Learned?
August 30, 2022
Mouse over questions to read answers
What is the main point of this mini essay?
To compliment University of Pennsylvania for their new rules about forbidden speech?
To task that otherwise worthy institution for ignoring the 24,000-pound gorilla in the room, viz the Drug War, which has created endless problems out of whole cloth.
To congratulate the school for ignoring the Drug War like everybody else.
In other words, Brian is wondering, when the heck is anyone going to realize that "drugs" is the loaded term par excellence?! For the way it's used today by Drug Warriors, it means: psychoactive substances for which there is no beneficial use whatsoever: not today, not tomorrow, not at any dose whatsoever for any person whatsoever for any reason whatsoever in any country whatsoever, ever.
Of course there are no substances like that in the entire world. A scientific country (not to say one that studies history and was founded on natural law) knows that any substance can be used for good or ill. There are no evil substances. Evil is not a property of things, but of people. Evil, for instance, is being done when a government purposefully tries to scare its people from psychoactive substances rather than educating them in the ways of safe use.
Author's Follow-up: October 10, 2023
I am not seeking to opine here on any particular progressive cause célèbre. My meaning is merely this: If the far left would get as indignant about their rights to Mother Nature as they currently are about the misuse of pronouns, the world would be making far more progress in overthrowing the anti-scientific, racist and panic-driven ideology of the War on Drugs -- which, of course, is actually a war on the users of the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions.
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
Outlawing substances like laughing gas and MDMA makes no more sense than outlawing fire.
Rather than protesting prohibition as a crackdown on academic freedom, today's scientists are collaborating with the drug war by promoting shock therapy and SSRIs, thereby profiting from the monopoly that the drug war gives them in selling mind and mood medicine.
If drug war logic made sense, we would outlaw endless things in addition to drugs. Because the drug war says that it's all worth it if we can save just one life -- which is generally the life of a white suburban young person, btw.
Was looking for natural sleeping aids online. Everyone ignores the fact that all the stuff that REALLY works has been outlawed! We live in a pretend world wherein the outlawed stuff no longer even exists in our minds! We are blind to our lost legacy regarding plant medicines!
There is an absurd safety standard for "drugs." The cost/benefit analysis of the FDA & co. never takes into account the costs of NOT prescribing nor the benefits of a productive life well lived. The "users" are not considered stakeholders.
Scientists are censored as to what they can study thanks to drug law. Instead of protesting that outrage, they lend a false scientific veneer to those laws via their materialist obsession with reductionism, which blinds them to the obvious godsend effects of outlawed substances.
The so-called opiate crisis is really a drug prohibition crisis.
"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.
One merely has to look at any issue of Psychology Today to see articles in which the author reckons without the Drug War, in which they pretend that banned substances do not exist and so fail to incorporate any topic-related insights that might otherwise come from user reports.
In "Psychedelic Refugee," Rosemary Leary writes:
"Fueled by small doses of LSD, almost everything was amusing or weird." -- Rosemary Leary
In a non-brainwashed world, such testimony would suggest obvious ways to help the depressed.
I am not seeking to opine here on any particular progressive cause célèbre. My meaning is merely this: If the far left would get as indignant about their rights to Mother Nature as they currently are about the misuse of pronouns, the world would be making far more progress in overthrowing the anti-scientific, racist and panic-driven ideology of the War on Drugs -- which, of course, is actually a war on the users of the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions.
Outlawing substances like laughing gas and MDMA makes no more sense than outlawing fire.