Jeepers, would you look at these web stats! With a bounce rate like mine, I must have been a kangaroo in a former life. But then let's not forget what I am up against. The U.S. government is spending billions of dollars a year to ensure that my common sense message about drugs will be unintelligible to the hoi polloi.
"The federal drug control budget in 2020 was $35.60 billion dollars."1
They are accomplishing this, of course, through the full-court press of Drug War propaganda, and above all through the ruthless censorship of all positive reports of drug use in the conglomerate-owned media of our times.
That said, I am not going to give up.
I am going to keep trying to convince you guys that prohibition is the problem 2 , not drugs, no matter how dogmatically you turn away from my pages and seek out websites that flatter your brainwashed beliefs instead. And you know what? I don't care HOW justifiably tired I might be right now. So there! I just don't care!
Take today, for instance. Many webmasters in my position would call it a day right now, at 4 p.m. local time, having just spent the last eight hours of their life struggling with complex php code in an effort to move their site to a new hosting service -- and, of course, running into endless highly discouraging problems as they attempt to do so. But not myself. Oh, no, no, no. I make no excuses, friends. Tired as I may well be (and indeed almost certainly am), I have decided to go the extra mile. To be specific, I have decided to confront you guys with some choice quotations from my growing collection of bombshell bon mots regarding the hateful war on us -- also known as the anti-indigenous war on plant medicine, or the War on Drugs.
No need to thank me, as tired as I probably am right now. It's my pleasure. Though you might have the goodness to hang around long enough to actually read this page in its entirety, rather than to join your probably bamboozled fellows in giving me the marsupial treatment.
Enough said? (Oh, it's so gratifying to chat informally like this with apparently reasonable people like yourself. It's so apparently relaxing, so almost certainly great!)
May I have the first quotation please, preferably in an hermetically sealed envelope? Now, let's see here. And I quote...
"Over the past two years [1998 to 2000] an agency of the Clinton White House, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), has secretly worked with all of the commercial television networks to broadcast anti-drug propaganda as part of the story lines of popular, prime time programs." 3
This is disgusting. It is shameless unabashed indoctrination on the part of the U.S. government. It is bad enough that the media blocks all reports of positive drug use, but the situation is far worse than that. The media works with government to demonize precisely the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions! Just take a look at the wildly diverse substances on the DEA's mendacious Schedule 1: they have nothing in common whatsoever except that all of them have the potential to inspire and elate. This is what politicians really fear: non-White and non-western ways of "being in the world." That was why they did not like opium 4 : because they feared that Chinese and white would become friends and -- gasp! -- maybe even intermarry! Our original Drug Warriors loathed nothing so much as so-called "miscegenation."
"The DARE program began in 1983 to educate children on resisting drugs. By 2003 it cost $230 million dollars and employed 50,000 police officers, but never showed promising results in reducing illegal drug use."5
Of course, DARE should not be trying to get people to resist drugs any more than they should be trying to get people to resist penicillin and aspirin. DARE is indoctrinating our kids in the drug-hating tenets of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science religion. It is an outrage -- but like most of the outrages caused by drug prohibition, Americans are blinded to the evil that is afoot here. It makes you wonder how much more trouble the Drug War has to cause before Americans denounce it. It has already led to the election of Donald Trump by throwing over a million minorities in jail and hence removing them from the voting rolls, officially or for all practical purposes.
Next citation, please.
"There has been a significant increase in cancer patients and survivors being unable to access their opioid prescriptions since 2016, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finalized opioid prescribing guidelines."6
This brings to mind another citation, that of Thomas Szasz on page 126 of his classic 1992 book entitled Our Right to Drugs:
"One of the most tragic and publicly least understood side effects of the War on Drugs is that so many sick Americans suffering from painful illnesses are systematically deprived of adequate doses of painkilling drugs because of physicians' well-founded fears of prescribing so-called controlled substances."7
Or, as Szasz observes somewhat more succinctly on page 67 of the same book:
"The laws that deny healthy people 'recreational' drugs also deny sick people 'therapeutic' drugs."8
Yet Americans are so bamboozled by the Drug War, so fearful of their own government on this topic, that they fear even having such a book in their home library. And who can blame them? If America does not wake up and smell the fascism, our government will eventually get around to finding the people who have purchased such an insolently and defiantly titled book and arrest them in the name of our poor little white children; for the Drug War is all about protecting white American young people from themselves -- the young people whom we refuse to educate -- thereby throwing all other demographics under the bus, including the depressed, the anxious, the religious seekers, the philosophers. I say nothing here of the tens of thousands of inner-city residents whose hometowns have been turned into deadly no-go zones thanks to the absurd practices of outlawing drugs based on their supposed effect on one single demographic -- the demographic that we refuse on principle to educate.
On what principle, you ask?
Answer: The paleolithic principle that tells us the following:
namely, that if a drug can cause a problem, even in theory, when used by a white American young person at one dose for one reason and in one circumstance, then that substance must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason in any circumstance! What absolute kneejerk idiocy. This is pure caveman, folks. Saying things like "Fentanyl 9 kills" is philosophically equivalent to shouting "Fire bad!" Both statements represent an attempt to make us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.
"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence 10 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist."11
Are you not livid yet? Consider this additional citation from the Loud Cloud Health website already referenced above:
"About 80% of those incarcerated on federal drug charges are people of color and Latino."12
Eighty percent!
What's the rationale behind this outrage? Why, precisely the same rationale that is driving Trump's ongoing attempt to gerrymander voting districts across the country: the goal is to ensure that minorities, the disenfranchised and the poor have as little say in American government as possible.
The answer? We need a complete separation of corporate money and politics. As Merleau-Ponty wrote:
"We know full well the means which the powerful have at their disposal - precisely under the aegis of freedom of the press - to stir up currents of opinion and manifestations which paralyze a parliamentary majority."13
It is not enough to have a theoretically "free" press. We need a press that is free to ignore the deceptive, racist and xenophobic narratives favored by conservatives and billionaires -- in other words, a press that is free to ignore the opinions of their advertisers. One searches in vain these days for news stories that connect inner-city violence with the drug prohibition that so obviously caused it, or that connects the 60,000 disappearances in Mexico in the 21st century with the War on Drugs down there that so obviously brought those disappearances about. One likewise searches in vain for stories retailing positive uses for drugs. This is all Nazi propaganda at its worst. It has handed American elections to a would-be fascist and yet most Americans are still as bamboozled as ever.
I might have tried to be more diplomatic in concluding this essay of mine, bless me, but then the people whom I am confronting here have almost certainly paged away long ago from the inconvenient truths that I have been espousing above. Thank goodness that some of us are not dissuaded from writing such home truths merely because their views happen to be incomprehensible to the brainwashed hoi polloi. Take me, for instance. Did I tell you that I spent eight hours earlier today trying to re-code my web pages so that they function properly on a new hosting platform? (I did? Really? Are you sure about that?) I could have easily called it quits after that coding work and gone downstairs to dish up that pasta dinner that I have been looking forward to all day, but did I do so? Of course not. That's just not me.
In fact, I will not so much as rise from my swivel chair until I have completed this essay with a quotation from Allen Ginsberg that says it all.
"A materialist consciousness is attempting to preserve itself from dissolution by restriction and persecution of experience of the transcendental. One day perhaps the earth will be dominated by the illusion of separate consciousness, the bureaucrats having triumphed in seizing control of all roads of communication with the divine and restricting traffic. But sleep and death cannot evade the great dream of being and the victory of the bureaucrats of illusion is only an illusion of their separate world of consciousness."14
Ta-da! I told you so! Some of us actually follow through on things that are important to them in life, thank you very much, no matter how tough a day they may have had prior to the arrival of 4 o'clock in the afternoon, local time.
Now I can finally put on my checkered chef's apron with a good conscience and dish up that pasta meal that I have been looking forward to.
As for that high bounce rate, who cares? In fact, do you know what? Feel free to call me Captain Kangaroo. At least I am going on record here for a deprogrammed futurity, telling our descendants that at least one American in the 21st century saw through the madness: at least one person saw that the real evil in American society was drug prohibition and not drugs.
Using the billions now spent on caging users, we could end the whole phenomena of both physical and psychological addiction by using "drugs to fight drugs." But drug warriors do not want to end addiction, they want to keep using it as an excuse to ban drugs.
Amphetamines are "meds" when they help kids think more clearly but they are "drugs" when they help adults think more clearly. That shows you just how bewildered Americans are when it comes to drugs.
M. Pollan says "not so fast" when it comes to drug re-legalization. I say FAST? I've gone a whole lifetime w/o access to Mother Nature's plants. How can a botanist approve of that? Answer: By ignoring all legalization stakeholders except for the kids whom we refuse to educate.
The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.
Now drug warriors have nitrous oxide in their sights, the substance that inspired the philosophy of William James. They're using the same tired MO: focusing exclusively on potential downsides and never mentioning the benefits of use, and/or denying that any exist.
It's no wonder that folks blame drugs. Carl Hart is the first American scientist to openly say in a published book that even the so-called "hard" drugs can be used wisely. That's info that the drug warriors have always tried to keep from us.
Kids should be taught beginning in grade school that prohibition is wrong.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx
Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful. Wrong. Substance demonization is wrong, root and branch. It always causes more suffering than freedom.
When people tell us there's nothing to be gained from using mind-improving drugs, they are embarrassing themselves. Users benefit from such drugs precisely to the extent that they are educated and open-minded. Loudmouth abstainers are telling us that they lack these traits.
Using the billions now spent on caging users, we could end the whole phenomena of both physical and psychological addiction by using "drugs to fight drugs." But drug warriors do not want to end addiction, they want to keep using it as an excuse to ban drugs.