News flash: certain mushrooms can help you improve your life! It's the biggest story in the history of mycology! And yet you wouldn't know it from visiting the websites of most mushroom clubs.
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.
The main form of drug war propaganda is censorship. That's why most Americans cannot imagine any positive uses for psychoactive substances, because the media and the government won't allow that.
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.
But that's the whole problem with Robert Whitaker's otherwise wonderful critique of Big Pharma. Like almost all non-fiction authors today, he reckons without the drug war, which gave Big Pharma a monopoly in the first place.
The term "hard" is just our modern pejorative term for the kinds of medicines that doctors of yore used to call panaceas
The Drug War has turned America into the world's first "Indignocracy," where our most basic rights can be vetoed by a misinformed public. That's how scheming racist politicians put an end to the 4th amendment to the US Constitution.
Someone needs to create a group called Drug Warriors Anonymous, a place where Americans can go to discuss their right to mind and mood medicine and to discuss the many ways in which our society trashes godsend medicines.
Almost all addiction services assume that the goal should be to get off all drugs. That is not science, it is Christian Science.
Someday, the First Lady or Man will tell kids to "just say no to prohibition." Kids who refuse will be required to watch hours' worth of films depicting gun violence, banned religions, civil wars, and adults committing suicide for want of medicine that grows at their very feet.
