Today is National Suicide Prevention Day, but no one's talking about the 6,000-pound gorilla in the room. For the fact is that the Drug War has outlawed all the godsend psychoactive medicines that could actually help to prevent suicide.
The coca leaf has been used for millennia by the Indians of Peru to combat fatigue and keep their society together in peace and harmony. Re-legalize the leaf and the suicide crisis would disappear overnight. But Drug Warriors have tarred the leaf's reputation by conflating its effects with those of the cocaine alkaloid that the leaf contains. This is like demonizing peaches because they contain prussic acid. By re-legalizing the coca leaf, we would not only cut down on suicides, but we would end the civil wars in South America that our Drug War has caused and is causing this very minute in Mexico.
Laughing gas could end the suicide crisis overnight, by giving the depressed temporary relief from sorrow -- and, as importantly, something to look forward to in their darker moments: namely, the fact that they can use laughing gas occasionally to take a break from gloomy introspection. Yes, there are legitimate safety concerns with all substances, but that is precisely why we need to start educating people about safe use, rather than conducting the fearmongering smear campaigns that the Drug Warrior always launches against psychoactive medicine.
MDMA (aka ecstasy) brought peace, love and understanding to the dance floor. It could work wonders in preventing suicide, and is already being fast-tracked for psychotherapy. It should have been legalized 40 years ago, but the self-serving DEA ruled against its own legal council in 1985 in order to keep the drug illegal, clearly so that the DEA could keep its relevance and its workload. (Ecstasy was blamed for a handful of deaths, but these deaths were all caused by the Drug War itself, which discourages education about substances and demonizes them instead.)
And what about the shrooms that grow at my very feet? Psilocybin is a therapeutic godsend for depression, and yet the government says I cannot use this gift from Mother Nature, thus violating the natural law upon which America was founded.
And what about ayahuasca? It has spawned new religions. Surely it could help prevent suicide as part of a therapeutic regimen of some kind.
And yet the world is so bamboozled by Drug Warrior lies that we can actually have a Suicide Prevention Day in which nobody even mentions the Drug War! Why not? Because we have been fed the unscientific lie that certain substances (namely "drugs" as hypocritically defined by racist and warmongering politicians) are bad in and of themselves, without regard for how, when or why they are used. But, of course, there are no substances of that kind. Even the deadly Botox has positive uses.
The Drug War not only encourages suicide by denying godsend medicine, but it even forces children to suffer severe pain. Why? Because many countries outlaw the use of morphine in hospice because they'd rather fight a War on Drugs than to keep children from suffering intense pain.
When will this madness end? Only when America wakes up to the true evil of the anti-patient and unscientific "War on Drugs."
In short, we have no right to complain about suicide if we're not willing to complain about the Drug War.
You have no right to complain about suicide if you're not willing to complain about the War on Drugs.
1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent on Big Pharma drugs for life, drugs which cause emotional flat-lining in long-term users. They are eternal patients. And the Drug Warrior has no problem with this. For the Drug Warrior does not want us to stop using drugs, he or she wants us to start using the RIGHT drugs -- the ones that benefit Wall Street and the healthcare industry while giving jobs to law enforcement by outlawing the stuff that actually works when used wisely. Of course, the Drug Warriors make sure that there is no "wise use," since they're all about slandering drugs, not educating about them.
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
When folks banned opium, they did not just ban a drug: they banned the philosophical and artistic insights that the drug has been known to inspire in writers like Poe, Lovecraft and De Quincey.
Harm Reduction is not enough. We need Benefit Production as well. The autistic should be able to use compassion-enhancing drugs; dementia patients should be able to use the many drugs that improve and speed up mental processes.
Let's pass a constitutional amendment to remove Kansas from the Union, and any other state where the racist politicians leverage the drug war to crack down on minorities.
I hope that scientists will eventually find the prohibition gene so that we can eradicate this superstitious way of thinking from humankind. "Ug! Drugs bad! Drugs not good for anyone, anywhere, at any dose, for any reason, ever! Ug!"
America's "health" system was always screaming at me about the threat of addiction from drugs. Then what did it do? It put me on the most dependence-causing meds of all time: SSRIs and SNRIs.
The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.
When we outlaw drugs, we are outlawing far more than drugs. We are suppressing freedom of religion and academic research.
William James claimed that his constitution prevented him from having mystical experiences. The fact is that no one is prevented from having mystical experiences provided that they are willing to use psychoactive substances wisely to attain that end.
Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.
I'd like to become a guinea pig for researchers to test the ability of psychoactive drugs to make aging as psychologically healthy as possible. If such drugs cannot completely ward off decrepitude, they can surely make it more palatable. The catch? Researchers have to be free.
When folks banned opium, they did not just ban a drug: they banned the philosophical and artistic insights that the drug has been known to inspire in writers like Poe, Lovecraft and De Quincey.