As I was adding my Drug War Comic Book to Kindle marketplace today, I was prompted for a category. Naturally, I looked for a category about the Drug War, since my book is all about that abominable Christian Science war on psychoactive medicine. Much to my surprise, however, there were no such categories proposed. There were categories about LGBT rights, pornography, and feminism, but nothing about the Drug War.
You do realize what this means, don't you? It means that America takes the Drug War status quo as a sort of natural baseline. Drug War assumptions have become so mainstream that their downsides are invisible to us. It's just life. We now consider it natural that we should have to urinate in order to qualify for a job and that we can be sentenced to life in prison for possessing plant medicines that were considered godsends by other cultures for thousands of years.
This is no surprise, however. Scientific authors have been doing the same thing for the past five decades. They write apparently authoritative articles on subjects like the supposed intractability of depression, never once mentioning the fact that outlawed plant medicines have the potential of working near miracles for the chronically depressed. Meanwhile self-help authors fell whole forests worth of trees to publish their five- six- or ten-step plans to happiness, remaining absolutely silent about the ability of properly administered plant medicine to help us work through the mental cobwebs and the vicious circular mental prisons that we build for ourselves.
Why? Because the western world has been duped by bigoted politicians into demonizing plant medicines instead of learning to live with them safely and benefit from their wise use.
And we should not insist it's a problem if someone decides to use opium, for instance, daily. We certainly don't blame "patients" for using antidepressants daily. And getting off opium is easier than getting off many antidepressants -- see Julia Holland.
I don't have a problem with CBD. But I find that many people like it for the wrong reasons: they assume there is something slightly "dirty" about getting high and that all "cures" should be effected via direct materialist causes, not holistically a la time-honored tribal use.
Most psychoactive substance use can be judged as recreational OR medicinal OR both. The judgements are not just determined by the circumstances of use, either, but also by the biases of those doing the judging.
We need a scheduling system for psychoactive drugs as much as we need a scheduling system for sports activities: i.e. NOT AT ALL. Some sports are VERY dangerous, but we do not outlaw them because we know that there are benefits both to sports and to freedom in general.
How else will they scare us enough to convince us to give up all our freedoms for the purpose of fighting horrible awful evil DRUGS? DRUGS is the sledgehammer with which they are destroying American democracy.
The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.
A Pennsylvanian politician now wants the US Army to "fight fentanyl." The guy is anthropomorphizing a damn drug! No wonder pols don't want to spend money on education, because any educated country would laugh a superstitious guy like that right out of public office.
What I want to know is, who sold Christopher Reeves that horse that he fell off of? Who was peddling that junk?!
I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.