It’s amazing how many American gun owners fiercely defend their right to firearms while gladly relinquishing their right to the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet. Talk about misplaced priorities! Any government that claims the right to criminalize naturally growing plants will not refrain from outlawing man-made firearms should the winds of political expediency happen to blow in that direction. Yet these gun owners gladly (and even proudly) support the Drug War’s efforts to keep naturally-occurring plant remedies out of the hands of those who need them most: the depressed, the lonely, the anxious, and the victims of chronic pain – all because our government (conveniently assisted by tabloid journalism and a self-interested medical establishment) has launched a propaganda campaign to paint all such users of these substances as irresponsible outlaws and hooligans.
Gun owners like to style themselves as defenders of liberty, insisting proudly with Clint Eastwood that:
“They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.”
But if these gun fanatics were truly interested in individual rights (and not just in the fetishization of this man-made object known as a “gun”), then they would transform their defiant mantra as follows:
“They can have my psilocybin mushroom when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.”
Author's Follow-up:
December 29, 2025
NOTE BENE: I indited this admittedly charming harangue seven years ago, when I was still a kid, scarcely even 60 years old yet! I have since learned that 47,000 people die in America thanks to guns every single year. 47,000! And yet these gun fanatics are worried that their young people might access substances that have been considered medical godsends in the past? Please. 47,000 people! And guess how many Americans died from using MDMA? Zero. Zilch. Nada. There are only a handful of deaths associated with the drug, and those were all caused by drug prohibition, which refuses to teach safe use (in this case about proper hydration) and refuses to regulate product as to quality and quantity.
Americans love guns and violence, but they are terrified by freedom of thought. And so they judge people, not by the content of their character, but by the content of their digestive system.
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
The drug war is a scare campaign to teach us to distrust mother nature and to rely on pharmaceuticals instead.
There are no recreational drugs. Even laughing gas has rational uses because it gives us a break from morbid introspection. There are recreational USES of drugs, but the term "recreational" is often used to express our disdain for users who go outside the healthcare system.
My impression has been that the use of cocaine over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine, 1884
I should have added to that last post: "I in no way want to glorify or condone drug demonization."
I'm told that most psychiatrists would like to receive shock therapy if they become severely depressed. That's proof of drug war insanity: they would prefer damaging their brains to using drugs that can elate and inspire.
Cocaine is not evil. Opium is not evil. Drug prohibition is evil.
What attracts me about "drug dealers" is that they are NOT interested in prying into my private life. What a relief! With psychiatry, you are probed for pathological behavior on every office visit. You are a child. To the "drug dealer," I am an adult at least.
There are endless creative ways to ward off addiction if all psychoactive medicines were at our disposal. The use of the drugs synthesized by Alexander Shulgin could combat the psychological downsides of withdrawal by providing strategic "as-needed" relief.
We've created a faux psychology to support such science: that psychology says that anything that really WORKS is just a "crutch" -- as if there is, or there even should be, a "CURE" for sadness.
Big pharma drugs are designed to be hard to get off. Doctors write glowingly of "beta blockers" for anxiety, for instance, but ignore that fact that such drugs are hard -- and even dangerous -- to get off. We have outlawed all sorts of less dependence-causing alternatives.
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