If you want to see how the Drug War has Nazified daily life in the western world, just watch a few episodes of the Canadian comedy-drama "Republic of Doyle" from the early 2010s1. The otherwise uber-tolerant protagonist, Jake Doyle, becomes Torquemada himself when it comes to drugs and he does not care who knows it. Jake refers to drug dealers as "garbage" and "turds" and even "scrot bags." And this in St. John's, Newfoundland, of all places, a town that is located in the "back of beyond," at least in the parochial minds of American homebodies such as myself. Nor does Jake limit the expression of his Christian Science disdain to mere words. In one episode, he throws a mesh wire basket over the head of a suspected drug dealer and starts beating said basket with a pub spigot in order to elicit testimony from his apparently satanic quarry. (This imaginative grilling technique reminds me of the scene in "Running with the Devil2," when the DEA agent strips a drug suspect to his Speedos and hoists him by a meat hook in order to find out where he had acquired his supply of the plant medicine that the original residents of Peru considered to be divine.)
Does nobody see what's going on here? The Drug War has normalized Nazism in the west! This is what happens to citizens who live in a country in which they are propagandized since birth in the imperialist drug-hating religion of Christian Science, above all by the media's ruthless censorship of all positive reports of drug use. (Would Jake have brought out the waste basket if the guy had been accused of robbery or murder? Of course not. Jake only feels compelled to become anti-democratic and hateful in response to Christian Science heretics. How dare they deal in the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions!)
Of course, Jake is by no means alone in his self-satisfied Hitlerian antics when it comes to so-called drugs. In the 2021 movie "The Runner3," a white detective refers to an amiable Black teenage drug dealer as a "waste of space." Yes, a "waste of space." Imagine if you had been judged definitively, once and for all, based on your own potential missteps as a young person. But then the Drug War is all about zero tolerance: zero tolerance for common sense and compassion -- and, of course, zero tolerance for the use of substances whose informed use has inspired entire religions.
Spoiler alert: The teenager in the aforementioned movie is later killed by a massively irresponsible SWAT raid on a high-school dance. That will teach the kid, right? And guess what? The detective who led that raid receives an award from his employers for having done so! An award!
I repeat: does no one see what's going on here viz the Nazification of the west?! We defeated Nazi Germany, only to turn around and use the Nazi-style propaganda of Joseph Goebbels to make westerners hate minorities and the poor.
More recently, the movie "Smile 24" began with the vigilante killing of a drug dealer whose crew had been inadvertently responsible for the death of an innocent bystander in a drive-by shooting. The gunmen rides his moral high horse right into the camp of the enemy and begins firing at will. Of course, the self-satisfied vigilante never stopped to think that drug prohibition created gun violence 5 out of whole cloth by establishing immensely remunerative markets for peddling godsend medicines -- medicines that xenophobic and racist politicians had outlawed in violation of common sense and the time-honored rights of human beings to the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet. If he felt called upon to kill anybody, it should have been the xenophobic and racist politicians who created drug prohibition in the first place, for they had no excuse. They knew perfectly well that liquor prohibition brought machine-gun-fire to America's erstwhile tranquil streets. They knew that drug prohibition would cause enormous violence and lure the pure and disenfranchised into drug dealing. Why did they proceed? It's like Gordon Liddy said: Nixon knew that he could not arrest people for being black, but he could arrest them for using and selling drugs. All one needed to do was to outlaw the sorts of drugs that the pharmacologically challenged Caucasian tipplers in the White House were generally happy to do without.
I ask again: does nobody see what's going on here? The idiotic and hugely counterproductive policy of drug prohibition has Nazified the west!
Not convinced? Read Drug Warriors and Their Prey by Richard Lawrence Miller to learn more6.
In the meantime, consider the following depressing excerpts from Miller's brave but all-too-rare expose of the Drug War's Nazification of the west:
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"Rev. Accelyne Williams, a slender 75-year-old man, spent his final moments doubled over, vomiting, his hands bound behind his back with a tight strip of plastic, totally confused about what was happening to him. ... He had literally been scared to death by shouting, storming anti-drug troops. No drugs were found."
"Regarding a forfeiture against 80 Pennsylvania acres, FBI and drug agents openly boasted that they 'couldn't wait to use the defendant's property for deer hunting and other social activities."
"If government can seize property having no link with drug use, why must seizures be limited to drug users? Why not take property from persons who abstain from illicit drug use? In fact, Drug Warriors have established legal principles allowing government to do exactly that."
"When seizing an automobile under civil forfeiture statutes, prosecutors need only demonstrate its use in transporting an illicit drug. The amount of drug is irrelevant, as is an innocent owner's lack of knowledge that the car was used in this way."
This is not legislative excess in the name of a good cause: this is Drug War Nazism! The least that we westerners can do is to acknowledge that fact. As a first step in doing so, we should send a clear message to our television and movie producers everywhere, demanding that they cease and desist when it comes to creating Drug War agitprop that teaches us to hate our fellow human beings.
For those who want to understand what's going on with the drug war from a philosophical point of view, I recommend chapter six of "Eugenics and Other Evils" by GK Chesterton.
If the depressed patient laughs, that means nothing. Materialists have to see results under a microscopic or they will never sign off on a therapy.
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
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.
Capitalism naturally results in disease-mongering by a self-interested medically establishment -- and disease-mongering requires the suppression of medicines that work holistically.
We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.
This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.
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.
If I have no right to mother nature's bounty, then I surely have no right to manmade guns. If hysterical fearmongering justifies the eradication of the Fourth Amendment, then the Second Amendment should go as well.
The drug war is a whole wrong way of looking at the world. It tells us that substances can be judged "up" or "down," which is anti-scientific and blinds us to endless beneficial uses.
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