Welcome to 'What's My Line: Drug War Edition.' Here is your host, Blaze Thunderstone.
Today's mystery guest is Andy from Staten Island, New York. Andy, how are you doing today?
Great, Blaze, thanks.
Let's ask some questions to see if our contestants can figure out what you do for a living. Fire when ready, Mary.
Does your job have anything to do with breaking down doors and throwing grandmothers to the floor?
You might say that, yes.
Very interesting. Steve?
If I begged for mercy while you were ransacking my house, would you be likely to cut me some slack?
Ha, you wish.
I think we'll take that as a no. Harmony, your question, please.
If you broke down my door and I did not immediately get down on the floor, would you shoot me?
Of course. You would have it coming to you, in that case.
Time is up, I am afraid. Mary, what do you think that Andy here does for a living?
It's hard to say, however, I think he might be a member of the Nazi Gestapo.
Oh, close one, Mary, but that is not quite the correct answer. Steve?
Is Andy one of those mindless thugs who goes around enforcing protection rackets for the Mafia?
Oh! Once again, that's very close, but it is not the precise answer that we are looking for. Harmony, what do you think is Andy's job?
Well, if he is not in the Gestapo and he is not part of the Mob... is he one of those DEA agents who destroys houses on a whim and answers to nobody, thereby constituting an abomination in a supposedly free country?
Exactly, Harmony, well done. Yes, Andy is indeed one of those D E A agents who destroys houses on a whim and answers to nobody, thereby constituting an abomination in a supposedly free country!
You have been listening to What's My Line, Drug War edition, with your host, Blaze Thunderstone.
Comedy
The drug war is laughable -- or it would be if the drug warriors hadn't deprived us of laughing gas, the substance that William James himself used to study alternate realities.
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.
Drug Warriors rail against drugs as if they were one specific thing. They may as well rail against penicillin because cyanide can kill.
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.
The Partnership for a Death Free America is launching a campaign to celebrate the 50th year of Richard Nixon's War on Drugs. We need to give credit where credit's due for the mass arrest of minorities, the inner city gun violence and the civil wars that it's generated overseas.
Ann Lemke's case studies make the usual assumptions: getting free from addiction is a morality tale. No reference to how the drug war promotes addiction and how banned drugs could solve such problems. She does not say why daily SSRI use is acceptable while daily opium use is not. Etc.
Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful. Wrong. Substance demonization is wrong, root and branch. It always causes more suffering than freedom.
By reading "Drug Warriors and Their Prey," I begin to understand why I encounter a wall of silence when I write to authors and professors on the subject of "drugs." The mere fact that the drug war inspires such self-censorship should be grounds for its immediate termination.
Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.
The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.
Well, today's Oregon vote scuttles any ideas I might have entertained about retiring in Oregon.
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.
