In the age of the opium -smoking Marco Polo, there were no such things as drugs in the evil sense in which we use the word today. "Drugs" just referred to all body-affecting substances, from sugar to opium . A Reddit on drugs could not have existed at that time, not just because the Internet did not exist, but because the topic of "drugs" would have been far too broad and open-ended to foster a meaningful discussion.
The only reason we have a "drugs" Reddit today is because racist American politicians began redefining the word "drugs" in 1914 to mean "evil psychoactive substances," this despite the fact that the substances in question have been used responsibly for millennia by other cultures and even inspired entire religions. The Vedic religion was inspired by Soma. Plato got his views of the afterlife from the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries1. And Mesoamerican religions developed entire cosmogonies based around their use of the coca plant and so-called "magic mushrooms." But the history-challenged Drug Warriors censored all such factoids, and encouraged us to do the same.
And we have done so. We have fallen for their demonization campaign, accepted their politically strategic redefinition of the word "drugs," and created popular Reddits like this one to discuss the topic of "drugs" from the unscientific and fearmongering point of view of our racist forebears.
And what was the political purpose behind the Drug Warrior's redefinition of the term "drugs" as a pejorative epithet? It was to punish and marginalize those minorities of whom the beer-swilling and tobacco-smoking Drug Warriors disapproved and to create a conservative Christian society ruled by militarized police forces.
And that strategy worked beyond their wildest dreams, as the Drug War soon became America's number-one export, as country after country gladly followed suit in outlawing godsend plant medicine. And that's not surprising, really. If the one country based on natural rights says that the citizen no longer has a right to the bounty of Mother Nature's pharmacy, then we cannot expect less-enlightened countries to stand up for such rights, especially since it's hard for any government to pass up a chance to monitor their own citizens more closely.
If anyone's searching for proof of the Drug War's hideous impact on democracy, they have only to look at the election of Donald Trump.
In 2016, there were more than five million Americans who had lost the right to vote, most of them minorities and most because of so-called drug offenses. Russian interference may have helped push Trump over the top, but the real reason for his election was the sidelining of millions of voters thanks to the Drug War, which was implemented for that very purpose: to sideline minority voters and empower law-and-order conservatives. And now this same Trump is running again, this time on a platform of executing those minorities whom his drug-warrior predecessors were content with merely disenfranchising.
That's why I'm looking forward to a day when the Drugs Reddit disappears, when the world stops demonizing psychoactive substances in lockstep with our racist forebears, and the word "drugs" once again becomes a neutral judgment-free term embracing all substances from sugar to opium , a world in which we stop demonizing substances for political purposes and start learning about them instead, with a view toward developing novel therapies and safe use guidelines for all time-honored plant medicines.
Editor's Note (Nov. 2021): Of course I was banned from the Drugs Reddit shortly after posting these comments. But that only shows you that I'm on the right track. I'd be suspicious if I wasn't banned, considering the fact that most westerners have been taught from grade school to despise plant-based psychoactive medicine, to call it "junk" and "dope," and to "just say no to Mother Nature's godsend medicines!" Why should the moderators at the Drugs Reddit be an exception to the rule? They've been taught since kindergarten to tilt at the politically created windmill of "drugs" and I expect to have no more success in changing their minds than the curate had in getting Don Quixote to stand down in his battle against his own imaginary foes.
Just be thankful that I'm not paranoid, because then I would also suspect the moderators of purposefully promoting the fearmongering status quo viz. drugs in order to curry favor with Big Pharma 23 , from whom they (the moderators) might even be taking kickbacks!
But I suppose that the principle of Occam's Razor obliges me to assume that the Drugs Reddit moderators are merely dupes of the Drug War ideology like almost everybody else these days, thoroughly bamboozled westerners who, having been successfully brainwashed in the Cult of the Drug War with its lies (about plant medicine frying brains, etc.), now hold inanimate substances responsible for all the evils of the world.
Author's Follow-up: October 3, 2022
In a way, though, the Drug War makes Reddit "drug" groups inevitable, because by outlawing all of Mother Nature's godsend psychoactive medicines, the Drug War creates problems to talk about in Reddit groups. Without the Drug War, in a land where Mother Nature was free and pharma-savvy shaman were free to use them strategically on behalf of clients, addiction would not exist, or else would be embraced in cases where it fit a person's lifestyle, as coca fit the lifestyle of HG Wells, opium fit the lifestyle of Benjamin Franklin, and coffee and beer fit the lifestyles of modern drug-war Americans.
When fully armed with Mother Nature's vast array of psychoactive medicine, a creative shaman (who is both pharmacologically and socioculturally savvy) could help a client "get off" any drug whatsoever, without making it the great moral struggle which the modern 'addiction expert' expects it to become. For the shaman's goal would be different than that of the modern 'addiction therapist,' who seeks the Christian Science outcome of making the patient 'sober' as that term is hypocritically defined by Drug Warriors. The shaman's goal would be to give the 'client' what THEY want in life, whether it be self-transcendence or merely the ability to stand up in front of a crowd without 'choking.' He would fight conditions like depression in ways that the Drug War could never even imagine, with a multitude of therapies that become obvious to us once we stop demonizing psychoactive medicine. He might have the depressive drop by for weekly DMT sessions, using cocaine 45 the next week, opium 6 the next week and so on, according to a schedule that will not addict the client but merely give them something positive to look forward to, which is the best way to beat any depression. Meanwhile, the patient's weekday life could be emotionally, spiritually and vocationally enhanced by the daily chewing of the coca leaf, a benign custom that bound the Peruvian Indian culture of happy camaraderie together for millennia, in the same way that coffee unites the westerner in their culture of grim competition.
Author's Follow-up:
June 20, 2025
I try to avoid Reddit these days entirely -- at least when it comes to the subject of drugs. Almost every one of my submissions on the topic is followed up within an hour or so by my receipt of a creepy anonymous automated reply in Gmail, advising me, in effect, that I am being censored by Reddit for having spoken the truth. That platform's reliance on ham-fisted and anonymous bots is just a real turnoff to me. The platform "out-Kafka's Kafka."
I have to laugh at those who once told me how the Internet was going to empower free speech. They wish. It seems to me rather that technology has given mainstream Americans new ways to "weed out" viewpoints that they might find unfamiliar and/or uncomfortable. Today we outlaw new ideas in advance with bots and so create online echo chambers. How? By hiring a brainwashed and philosophically clueless site coder to set the parameters for the debate in advance. Does the positive talk of drug use offend the status quo? No worries: mainstream sites just outlaw all such references.
It is consciousness which, via perception, shapes the universe into palpable forms. Otherwise it's just a chaos of particles. The very fact that you can refer to "the sun" shows that your senses have parsed the raw data into a specific meaning. "We" make this universe.
There are hundreds of things that we should outlaw before drugs (like horseback riding) if, as claimed, we are targeting dangerous activities. Besides, drugs are only dangerous BECAUSE of prohibition, which compromises product purity and refuses to teach safe use.
@HKSExecEd The use of Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace and love to the British dance floors in the 1990s. When are political scientists going to acknowledge the potential for such substances to pull our species back from the brink of nuclear annihilation?
"If England [were to] revert to pre-war conditions, when any responsible person, by signing his name in a book, could buy drugs at a fair profit on cost price... the whole underground traffic would disappear like a bad dream." -- Aleister Crowley
Kids should be taught in grade school that prohibition is wrong.
It also bothers me that gun fanatics support the drug war. If I have no rights to mother nature, then they have no rights to guns. If the Fourth Amendment can be ignored based on lies and ignorance, then so can the Second.
Anyone who has read Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin knows that the drug warriors have it exactly backwards. Drugs are our friends. We need to find safe ways to use them to improve ourselves psychologically, spiritually and mentally.
John Halpern wrote a book about opium, subtitled "the ancient flower that poisoned our world." What nonsense! Bad laws and ignorance poison our world, NOT FLOWERS!
Materialist puritans do not want to create any drug that elates. So they go on a fool's errand to find reductionist cures for "depression itself," as if the vast array of human sadness could (or should) be treated with a one-size-fits-all readjustment of brain chemicals.
If America cannot exist without outlawing drugs, then there is something wrong with America, not with drugs.
It is consciousness which, via perception, shapes the universe into palpable forms. Otherwise it's just a chaos of particles. The very fact that you can refer to "the sun" shows that your senses have parsed the raw data into a specific meaning. "We" make this universe.
