The US Holocaust Museum displays a sign on the wall titled "Early Warning Signs of Fascism," and it reads like a checklist for the War on Drugs.
1 Disdain for human rights.Check. It's no coincidence that one of the cops who killed George FLoyd shouted 'Just say no to drugs' during the crime, because the Drug War has always given them carte blanche to crack down on minorities, just as it gives the US military the green light to target Latinos in South America
2 Identification of enemies as a unifying cause.Check. Those who sell Mother Nature's plant medicine are literally considered to be vermin. In "Four Good Days," the wine-swilling housewife played by Glenn Close looks at a teenage "dealer" and says, "He should be shot!"
3 Supremacy of the military.Check. The Drug War has militarized police forces around the globe
4 Controlled mass media.Check. The media companies -- like Gannett and Hearst -- who own local papers nationwide never even mention the Drug War when discussing inner-city gun violence 1 , even though it was the Drug War that turned inner cities into armed camps.
5 Obsession with national security.Check. The Drug Warrior tells us that our national security is threatened because plant medicines are being shipped from overseas and so we're told we have to travel there and burn the plants in question. Given that reasoning, Islam should feel free to come stateside and burn our wine vineyards.
6 Religion and government intertwined. Check. The Drug War is the enforcement of Christian Science with respect to psychoactive medicine, since it tells us that such medicines are morally bad, even though such medicines have inspired entire religions.
7 Corporate power protected.Check. The Drug War protects the liquor industry, Big Pharma 23 and psychiatry from competition.
8 Labor power suppressed. Check. The Drug War humiliates and imposes unconstitutionally upon workers by forcing them to urinate for their billionaire employers, most of whom would be indignant to be required to urinate themselves, and some of whom use the very illicit substances that their drug-checking techs are looking for. Nor is the employer checking for impairment, but rather for mere traces of the substances that the Drug War tells us to hate.
9 Disdain for intellectuals and the arts. Check. Opium and coca have inspired western writers for centuries, as in the works of Lovecraft, Poe, HG Wells, Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexander Dumas and Henrik Ibsen, and yet the Drug War associates such use with "scumbags" and "vermin."
10 Obsession with crime and punishment.Check. America has the largest per capita prison population in the world, with the majority of inmates being sentenced for crimes that never existed before the War on Drugs.
11 Rampant cronyism & corruption.Check. The Drug War incentivizes corruption for the same reason that it creates gangs and cartels out of whole cloth: because it creates enormous financial incentives to violate the draconian drug laws.
12 Fraudulent elections.Check. The Drug War "gave" the 2016 election to Donald Trump by removing hundreds of thousands of minority voters from the voting rolls. How? By charging them with "felony drug offenses," typically for selling godsend plant medicine of which botanically clueless politicians disapprove.
I think the only 'signs of early fascism' that I missed were "nationalism" and "rampant sexism," but the Drug War is no slacker in these categories either. The Drug War is nationalist beyond belief, in that it legislates America's own prudish Christian Science morality to the entire world! As for "rampant sexism," it should be noted that the Drug War outlaws precisely those substances that promote the stereotypically feminine conditions of peace, love and understanding. Suppressed drugs like MDMA 4 and psilocybin could help hate-filled humanity live with its hot-headed self, but the Drug War prefers SWAT raids and prison time over peace, love and understanding. And if that's not enough machismo for you, the Drug War, even as we speak, is causing a devastating civil war in Mexico, meanwhile corrupting local and national government through and through as it does so.
The only problem with the 12 'signs of early fascism' is that the word 'early' is misplaced when it comes to the Drug War. America has been on this fascist path ever since 1914, when sinophobic politicians first criminalized a plant medicine, in violation of the natural law upon which America was founded. America long since missed its opportunity to recognize the "early" signs of this fascism, and we are now in the latter stages of this disease, in which we have been so hoodwinked by the Christian Science propaganda of the Drug War that our scientists willingly ignore forbidden substances in their research -- and worse yet, they do not even recognize this as the ideological self-censorship that it is, even though as scientists they are duty-bound to disclose their working premises in every paper that they write.
The Links Police
All right, buddy, do you know why I stopped you? That's right, because the Drug War gives me carte blanche to be a noxious busybody. But I also thought you might be interested in the following additional essays touching on fascism -- and also the need for the Holocaust Museum to speak out against the same -- at long last, be it said!!!
Author's Follow-up: October 5, 2022
The list of early signs of fascism should also include the following:
13 The reliance on newspeak.Check. The Drug War owes its staying power to the politically created pejorative term "drugs." Prior to the Drug War, "drugs" included everything from sugar to magic mushrooms, from cafe to coca. After 1914, the term was redefined to mean the following: "substances for which there are no positive uses: not for you, not for me, not in any doses, at any time, in any place, ever." Of course, there are no such substances in the real world: inanimate substances are only good or bad with respect to how they are used and why. Even the deadly Botox has positive uses. So the whole Drug War is based on this superstitious Christian Science lie, that substances that have inspired entire religions have no positive uses whatsoever. Yet Americans agree in large numbers to this proposition, that we should fear and loathe "drugs," rather than understand them -- indeed, that merely understanding such devil substances is heresy in the age of a War on Drugs.
14 The reliance on fearmongering.Check. The Drug War discourages understanding of drugs, in fact it prohibits it, based on the charter of the ONDCP, which tells us that safe and positive uses of drugs must not even be discussed. Instead of educating us about psychoactive substances, the Drug Warrior tells us: "Be afraid! Be very afraid!"
15 Indoctrination of the young.Check. The Drug War enrolls grade-schoolers in "just say no" clubs, where they are encouraged to fear and loathe the kinds of psychoactive substances that have inspired entire religions in the past. This is Christian Science indoctrination, not education.
Author's Follow-up: June 5, 2023
For these reasons and more, I have repeatedly written to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., urging them to denounce prohibition and the Drug War, not least because it has led to the election of fascists like Donald Trump by throwing Trump's opponents in jail by the hundreds of thousands.
But, of course, it's much easier to see past outrages than to criticize contemporaneous ones. That's why the Museum has not yet deemed it prudent to so much as acknowledge my messages on these topics, let alone to offer its support in protecting modern-day liberty. The motto seems to be: "never again, unless speaking up could impact me negatively in any way or make me appear to differ with the modern Christian Science Weltanschauung."
The worst form of government is not communism, socialism or even unbridled capitalism. The worst form of government is a Christian Science Theocracy, in which the government controls how much you are allowed to think and feel in life.
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.
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
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.
Prohibitionists are also responsible for the 100,000-plus killed in the US-inspired Mexican drug war
Musk and co. want to make us more robot-like with AI, when they should be trying to make us more human-like with sacred medicine. Only humans can gain creativity from plant medicine. All AI can do is harvest the knowledge that eventually results from that creativity.
Drug use is judged by different standards than any other risky activity in the western world. One death can lead to outrage, even though that death might be statistically insignificant.
This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.
There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.
We would never have even heard of Freud except for cocaine. How many geniuses is America stifling even as we speak thanks to the war on mind improving medicines?
The worst form of government is not communism, socialism or even unbridled capitalism. The worst form of government is a Christian Science Theocracy, in which the government controls how much you are allowed to think and feel in life.