It's amazing. When I tell friends and family members that I'm working on a website to abolish the DEA, they generally go silent. This seems a truly taboo topic for many Americans. And this is surprising to me. These are the same Americans, after all, who express themselves so vehemently about hot-button topics such as sexual harassment and global warming, ready to lay down in the streets and demand immediate justice in these areas, yet they suddenly get stage fright when the subject turns to the Drug War. Suddenly they're afraid to speak. They sometimes even look at me after I raise the topic, in a kind of mute reproach, as if to say: "Ooh, the DEA. Are we even allowed to CRITICIZE them? Better be careful there, son."
And I'm like: What happened to my big loud-mouth rebel? Which anti-democratic cat has suddenly got their tongue?
Answer: the anti-American DEA.
This is just not an agency that should exist in a free country, an agency that's armed to the teeth and ready to intimidate would-be protestors by dint of its sheer militarized existence, an agency devoted to protecting us from naturally occurring plants, an agency whose job is to enforce a harsh Christian Science sharia in a never-ending task of separating Americans from Mother Nature and separating human beings from the profit motive. Of course, neither of these tyrannies can succeed except by cruel authoritarianism, under craven leaders like Donald Trump, who are glad to take existing injustices and run with them, not simply imprisoning harmless minority Americans but executing them into the bargain.
It's about as anti-American as can be -- so much so, apparently, that Americans have learned to shut up and let the DEA have its anti-scientific (anti-patient and anti-minority) way, much as East Germans once resigned themselves to the seemingly inevitable injustices perpetrated by the Stasi.
American Stasi, stay away from me
American Stasi, mama, let me be
Don't come kicking down my door
In the name of common law
I got a right to Nature's meds
Ain't no business of the Feds
Common law can't override
The rights for which my fathers died
Plants that grow are mine by birth
Stop criminalizing Mother Earth
Thomas J was all shook up
When you dug his garden up
To steal the poppies that Nature grew
What the hell is wrong with you?
American Stasi, I said get away-ay
American Stasi, well, that's the D-E-A-A-A-A!
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
Uruguay wants to re-legalize psilocybin mushrooms -- but only for use in a psychiatrist's office. So let me get this straight: psychiatrists are the new privileged shaman? It's a mushroom, for God's sake. Just re-legalize the damn thing and stop treating us like children.
It is a truism to say that we cannot change the world and that therefore we have to change ourselves -- but the drug war outlaws even this latter option.
This is why I call the drug war 'fanatical Christian Science.' People would rather have grandpa die than to let him use laughing gas or coca or opium or MDMA, etc. etc.
People are talking about re-scheduling psilocybin, but they miss the point. We need to DE-schedule everything. It's anti-scientific to conclude in advance that any drug has no uses -- and it's a lie too, of course. End drug scheduling altogether! It's childish and wrong.
The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.
"I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.
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.
Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could disbelieve it.
Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks: J'excuse! People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took your prohibition to accomplish that! Stop arresting, start teaching safe use!
The MindMed company (makers of LSD Lite) tell us that euphoria and visions are "adverse effects": that's not science, that's an arid materialist philosophy that does not believe in spiritual transcendence.
Uruguay wants to re-legalize psilocybin mushrooms -- but only for use in a psychiatrist's office. So let me get this straight: psychiatrists are the new privileged shaman? It's a mushroom, for God's sake. Just re-legalize the damn thing and stop treating us like children.