Just a quick message to let our readership know that we are doing everything we can to fight the Drug War virus. The first and most important step is to recognize the symptoms of an infected person:
1) Pathological obstinacy. Those infected with the Drug War Virus stubbornly fail to recognize that criminalizing medicinal plants is the unconstitutional enforcement of Christian Science with respect to psychological healing.
2) Selective amnesia. Infected persons conveniently "forget" that Mother Nature's plants and fungi are the birth right of every human being under the natural law to which the American Declaration appealed in arguing against British injustice.
3) Logical confusion. The infected person also fails to realize that all the problems of drug abuse are either directly brought about or greatly exacerbated by the Drug War itself.
What can you do?
The key is to practice social distancing. Keep at least 6 feet away from every known or suspected Drug Warrior and their specious arguments. In so doing, you will underscore your contempt for the shoddy reasoning and fascist tendencies apparent in every carrier of the Drug War virus.
June 15, 2022
Not to nitpick, but there's another symptom of the Drug War virus, namely the tendency to forget that HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their best stories while drinking coca wine, that Plato's views of the afterlife were inspired by the psychedelic kykeon at Eleusis, that Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius were big fans of the opium 1 poppy, and that the entire Vedic religion was inspired by psychoactive plant medicine. Then there's the fact that the psychoactive medicine that we demonize today could be used to fight Alzheimer's disease, fight depression, increase worker productivity, increase one's love of music, increase one's appreciation of the natural world, etc.
If folks forget all this, it is a sure sign that they have contracted the Drug War virus.
In other words the Drug War virus is far more insidious than anyone has yet to fully appreciate. So remember to social distance yourself -- and to buy a mask so that you can place it over the infected person's mouth the next time these anti-nature blasphemers start demonizing psychoactive botanicals without regard for the context of use.
Author's Follow-up: August 14, 2022
A new more virulent strain of the virus has been reported in Children of the Drug War, a chilling collection of drug-war essays compiled by Damon Barrett 2 . It appears that once-civilized countries are now denying morphine 3 to children in hospice, in servile and dogmatic fealty to the drug-war ideology which says that such demonized substances can have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, for any reason whatsoever. In other words, the virus is causing severe neurological problems in those it attacks -- otherwise so-called civilized human beings would never be so heartless as to knowingly allow dying children to suffer severe ongoing pain for no good reason whatsoever.
What is the end game of the drug warrior? A world in which no one wants drugs? That's not science. It's the drug-hating religion of Christian Science. You know, the American religion that outsources its Inquisition to drug-testing labs.
So much harm could be reduced by shunting people off onto safer alternative drugs -- but they're all outlawed! Reducing harm should ultimately mean ending this prohibition that denies us endless godsends, like the phenethylamines of Alexander Shulgin.
Morphine can provide a vivid appreciation of mother nature in properly disposed minds. That should be seen as a benefit. Instead, dogma tells us that we must hate morphine for any use.
The Drug War treats doctors like potential criminals and it treats the rest of us like children. Prohibition does not end drug risks: it just outsources them to minorities and other vulnerable populations.
It's funny to hear fans of sacred plants indignantly insisting that their meds are not "drugs." They're right in a way, but actually NO substances are "drugs." Calling substances "drugs" is like referring to striking workers as "scabs." It's biased terminology.
We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (a policy which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).
Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.
In "How to Change Your Mind," Michael Pollan says psychedelic legalization would endanger young people. What? Prohibition forces users to decide for themselves which mushrooms are toxic, or to risk buying contaminated product. And that's safe, Michael?
Psychiatrists prescribe drugs that muck about with a patient's biochemical baseline, making them chemically dependent and turning them into patients for life.
The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
What is the end game of the drug warrior? A world in which no one wants drugs? That's not science. It's the drug-hating religion of Christian Science. You know, the American religion that outsources its Inquisition to drug-testing labs.