It prevents Americans from accessing the plants that grow at their very feet, in clear violation of the Natural Law upon which America was founded.
It makes "drugs" a red herring for all social problems, thereby ignoring the real social problems (including substandard education and the Drug War itself) that give rise to counterproductive substance use in the first place.
It ignores the obvious lesson from American history that prohibition leads to violence. There were almost 800 gun-related deaths in Chicago alone in 2021, all attributable to substance prohibition, which gives rise to well-armed gangs just as surely as liquor prohibition gave rise to the Mafia.
It turns Americans into arch-colonialists who hypocritically go overseas to burn plants that have been used responsibly for millennia by other cultures, all in the name of preventing addiction in the States (by which reasoning, the Islamic world should be free to come stateside and burn our grape vines).
It leaves the depressed and anxious with nothing but highly addictive Big Pharma meds to treat their condition, when hundreds of far less addictive remedies (many not addictive at all) could be harnessed from plant medicines that the Drug War has criminalized.
It turns these sufferers into eternal patients (the exact opposite of empowerment) by requiring them to visit an expensive psychiatrist in person every three months of their life in order to receive yet another expensive prescription, since the DEA has such an absurd fixation on "controlling" this thing called "drugs" that they don't even trust a patient of 40-years standing to use them wisely.
The Drug War has led to the Nazification of language, to the point that substance users and those who sell plant medicine are called "scumbags" and "filth" and other terms that used to be used by the Nazis to describe their enemies. (This is why I wrote a letter to the Holocaust Museum in September 2020 urging them to denounce the Drug War: Why the Holocaust Museum must denounce the Drug War)
It willfully ignores all inconvenient historical truths, like the fact that the Vedic religion was founded to worship a psychoactive plant and that psychedelics featured prominently in the Eleusinian mysteries1, which lasted 2,000 years until it was tellingly banned by Emperor Theodosius I as a threat to Christianity.
It willfully ignores the historical fact that "drugs" have been used responsibly by such western luminaries as HG Wells, Jules Verne, Henrik Ibsen, Ben Franklin, Aaron Burr, Marcus Aurelius, Francis Crick, Meriwether Lewis, Samuel Johnson, Frederic Chopin, Plato, Plutarch, Cicero, Aristotle... and even Thomas Jefferson, who surely flipped in his grave when the jackbooted DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants.
It seeks to make the world forget these inconvenient truths by cranking out TV shows, books, and movies in which "drugs" are always used by scumbags, and so we see a badly dressed lowlife snorting cocaine in a dimly lit backroom, instead of seeing HG Wells and Jules Verne happily writing their books while taking generous swigs of coca wine.
It unscientifically considers a solitary but well-publicized instance of drug misuse to be a knockdown rationale for sweeping drug criminalization, thereby denying godsend medicine to millions based on the uninformed actions of a few.
Despite its constant demonization of plant medicine as being dangerous -- indeed too dangerous for hapless Americans to be allowed to use them -- the Drug Warrior never engages in true, unbiased talk about drugs: to the contrary, they actually criminalize research about the substances that they demonize, to ensure that Americans fear psychoactive botanicals rather than understand them.
The Drug War creates civil wars overseas out of whole cloth, giving imperialist America a convenient excuse to invade sovereign countries at will, by charging them with the bogus crime of using plant medicine of which beer-swilling WASP American politicians disapprove, especially the coca plant, which has been part of South and Mesoamerican cultures for millennia.
The Drug War has disfranchised millions of minorities, removing them from the voting rolls, thereby stealing elections for conservative Drug Warriors, some of whom now want to execute the minorities that they have previously been content simply to marginalize.
The Drug War censors scientists, just as the Church once censored Galileo -- with the exception that westerners do not notice this modern-day censorship since they have been indoctrinated since birth in the drug-war ideology of substance demonization.
Drug testing is not about finding impairment. It is an extrajudicial fishing expedition searching for godsend botanical medicines of which politicians disapprove. Some of these "drugs" (like coca and psychedelics) have inspired entire religions. Drug testing thus adds insult to the injury of outlawing plant medicines in the first place, which was a violation of natural law. That's why Thomas Jefferson, the founder of our country, was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the garden-loving president's poppy plants.
Drug warriors blithely tolerate 95,000 deaths a year by alcohol without comment, along with almost half a million a year by tobacco, while saying nothing at all about the psychiatric pill mill that their substance prohibition has created. Thanks to the Drug War, in fact, 1 in 4 American women are dependent on the daily use of expensive and uninspiring Big Pharma meds for their entire lifetimes -- a chemical dependency many times that which Americans ever had on opium prior to the unconstitutional outlawing of the poppy plant in 1914.
The Drug War is not about getting Americans off of drugs -- rather it's about getting Americans on the "right" drugs, as judged by the needs of Big Pharma and their billionaire stockholders.
The Shipiba have learned to heal human beings physically, psychologically and spiritually with what they call "onanyati," plant allies and guides, such as Bobinsana, which "envelops seekers in a cocoon of love." You know: what the DEA would call "junk."
Aleister Crowley actually TRIED to get addicted to drugs and found he could not. These things are not inevitable. The fact that there are town drunkards does not mean that we should outlaw alcohol.
My approach to withdrawal: incrementally reduce daily doses over 6 months, or even a year, meanwhile using all the legal entheogens and psychedelics that you can find in a way likely to boost your endurance and "sense of purpose" to make withdrawal successful.
Mayo Clinic is peddling junk. They are still promoting Venlafaxine, a drug that is harder to kick than heroin. The drug is only a problem, though, because of prohibition. It would be easy to get off of with the help of other drugs!!! WAKE UP, MAYO!
Drug warriors aren't just deciding for us about drugs. They're telling us that we no longer need Coleridge poems, Lovecraft stories, Robin Williams, Sherlock Holmes, or the soma-inspired Hindu religion.
Being less than a month away from an election that, in my view, could end American democracy, I don't like to credit Musk for much. But I absolutely love it every time he does or says something that pushes back against the drug-war narrative.
This is why we would rather have a depressed person commit suicide than to use "drugs" -- because drugs, after all, are not dealing with the "real" problem. The patient may SAY that drugs make them feel good, but we need microscopes to find out if they REALLY feel good.
Many in the psychedelic renaissance fail to recognize that prohibition is the problem. They praise psychedelics but want to demonize others substances. That's ignorant however. No substance is bad in itself. All substances have some use at some dose for some reason.
Drug warriors have taught us that honest about drugs encourages drug use. Nonsense! That's just their way of suppressing free speech about drugs. Americans are not babies, they can handle the truth -- or if they cannot, they need education, not prohibition.
In 1886, coca enthusiast JJ Tschudi referred to prohibitionists as 'kickers.' He wrote: "If we were to listen to these kickers, most of us would die of hunger, for the reason that nearly everything we eat or drink has fallen under their ban."