ADDERALL ZOLOFT:Welcome to Rat Out Your Neighbors. I'm DEA field agent Adderall Zoloft, joined today in Washington by bureau chief Paxil Buspar. How are you today, Paxil?
PAXIL BUSPAR: I'm drug free, Adderall. How about you?
ADDERALL ZOLOFT: Drug free and proud of it.
PAXIL BUSPAR: I've made some coffee. Help yourself.
ADDERALL ZOLOFT: Fantastic!
Wait, aren't you having any?
PAXIL BUSPAR: Are you kidding me? I'm already buzzing like a top, thanks to these Red Bull Colas I've been throwing back all morning.
Oh, pardon me.
ADDERALL ZOLOFT: Sounds like an angel just got his wings.
PAXIL BUSPAR: Or a DEA agent just got his first M-4 assault rifle.
ADDERALL ZOLOFT: Primed and loaded, baby.
PAXIL BUSPAR: Kicking down America's doors since 1973.
ADDERALL ZOLOFT: Let's go straight to the phones now. The number, as always, is 1 800-RAT-BAIT. That's 1 800-RAT-BAIT. Call right now to rat out your friends and loved ones for using substances of which our government disapproves.
PAXIL BUSPAR: Wow, that was fast. Looks like we've got a caller already.
ADDERALL ZOLOFT: Hello there. You are on Rat Out Your Neighbors. Who are the scumbags that you would like to report?
CALLER: Yes, I'd like to report my creative writing teacher at college.
ADDERALL ZOLOFT: I see. And what evil substance have you seen them using? I'm guessing coca or pot, right?
CALLER: Worse yet. It's opium .
PAXIL BUSPAR: Ex-squeeze me?
ADDERALL ZOLOFT: What? You mean they're using the substance whose name must not be spoken?
CALLER: Well, I haven't yet actually caught them in the act of using opium yet, but...
PAXIL BUSPAR: Please, don't use that word.
ADDERALL ZOLOFT: Yes, caller. You see, here at the DEA, we call it "the substance whose name must not be spoken."
CALLER: But he keeps going on about how opium can be used wisely to engender creativity.
PAXIL BUSPAR: What?
CALLER: And telling us how the stories of Poe and Lovecraft, for instance, are full of so-called opiate imagery.
ADDERALL ZOLOFT: And what imagery would that be, exactly?
CALLER: You know, like in the short story "Celaphais" by HP Lovecraft, in which the protagonist, and I quote, wanders through...
"the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams."
PAXIL BUSPAR: Blasphemy.
CALLER: I know, right?
PAXIL BUSPAR: But I'm afraid that you really have to catch this professor with the goodies before we can kick down his door and scare his children and elderly grandmother to death.
ADDERALL ZOLOFT: I feel for you, caller, but it's not yet quite illegal to speak about positive uses of evil substances like... like... you know what.
ADDERALL ZOLOFT: Yes, caller, like the substance whose name must not be spoken.
CALLER: Sorry about that.
PAXIL BUSPAR: It's all good. Just keep an eye on this professor of yours and maybe even record his classes for us.
ADDERALL ZOLOFT: Yeah, then send us the tape when he incriminates himself.
CALLER: But isn't that illegal?
PAXIL BUSPAR: Illegal? That's a good one.
ADDERALL ZOLOFT: You're talking to the DEA, caller. Where there's a will, there's a way, right?
PAXIL BUSPAR: Yeah, haven't you seen those movies 23 like "Running with the Devil," where we hang suspects from meat hooks and shoot them in cold blood at point-blank range?
CALLER: Oh, right.
ADDERALL ZOLOFT: That's why we're overseen by a drug czar, baby, so that everyone will know that we're going to play fast and loose with the U.S. constitution.
The drug war is laughable -- or it would be if the drug warriors hadn't deprived us of laughing gas, the substance that William James himself used to study alternate realities.
Drug Warriors will publicize all sorts of drug use -- but they will never publicize sane and positive drug use. Drug Warrior dogma holds that such use is impossible -- and, indeed, the drug war does all it can to turn that prejudice into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Holy Trinity of the Drug War religion is Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and John Belushi. "They died so that you might fear psychoactive substances with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."
Anyone who has read Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin knows that the drug warriors have it exactly backwards. Drugs are our friends. We need to find safe ways to use them to improve ourselves psychologically, spiritually and mentally.
The drug war outlaws everything that could help both prevent addiction and treat it. And then they justify the war on drugs by scaring people with the specter of addiction. They NEED addiction to keep the drug war going.
Americans heap hypocritical praise on Walt Whitman. What they don't realize is that many of us could be "Walt Whitman for a Day" with the wise use of psychoactive drugs. To the properly predisposed, morphine gives a DEEP appreciation of Mother Nature.
When it comes to "drugs," the government plays Polonius to our Ophelia:
OPHELIA: I do not know, my lord, what I should think.
POLONIUS: Marry, I'll teach you; think yourself a baby!
Folks like Sabet accuse folks like myself of ignoring the "facts." No, it is Sabet who is ignoring the facts -- facts about dangerous horses and free climbing. He's also ignoring all the downsides of prohibition, whose laws lead to the election of tyrants.
The FDA should have no role in approving psychoactive medicine. They evaluate them based on materialist standards rather than holistic ones. In practice, this means the FDA ignores all glaringly obvious benefits.
The confusion arises because materialists insist that every psychological problem is actually a physical problem, hence the disease-mongering of the DSM. This is antithetical to the shamanic approach, which sees people holistically, as people, not patients.
Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.