I don't mean to scare you, but you are reading an essay by a ghost. Yes, I have been ghosted so often when writing to others about drugs that I believe it is now time for me to embrace the identity that my reluctant interlocutors have tacitly chosen for me. We will all be ghosts soon enough, so I suppose that there is no harm in embracing that condition proactively, as it were. Not that my phantasmal status is going to shut me up, mind. On the contrary, I consider it my first official duty as a ghost to haunt those who have saddled me with this status in the first place, and what better way to do that than by publicizing their neglect of me online? This is not really about payback, however. My real goal in calling these people on the carpet is simply to demonstrate the extent to which drug prohibition has shut down free speech in America on a wide range of important topics.
CNN reporter Lisa Ling has been ghosting me ever since May 13, 2022, when I wrote her to suggest that she should have mentioned the Drug War in her documentary about Chicago gun violence 1 .
See Open Letter to Lisa Ling. BR>
Matthew K. Nock, chair of the Harvard Psychology Department, has been ghosting me since May 11, 2025, when I wrote to suggest that his university's bio about William James should reflect James's interest in altered states.
See How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James.
Mitch Horrowitz, author of "Uncertain Places, has been ghosting me since March 2, 2025, when I wrote to suggest that facts about beneficial drug use are the most "damned" facts in the world today, in the Fortean sense of that word.
See Charles Fort Didn't Know from Damnation.
Francis Fukuyama has been ghosting me since May 20, 2022, when I wrote him to suggest that the Drug War is the problem with inner-city neighborhoods, not drugs. Liquor and drug prohibition brought gunfire to American streets, not drugs.
See Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama.
San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins has been ghosting me since November 8, 2023, when I wrote her suggesting that drug prohibition is the problem 2 , not the drug dealers whom she makes such a fuss about catching. She should do us a favor and arrest all the Drug Warriors who set up all this violence in the first place, first with liquor prohibition and then with substance prohibition.
See Prohibitionists Never Learn.
Variety Critic Owen Glieberman has been ghosting me since May 23, 2021, when I wrote him suggesting that his review of the movie "Four Good Days" was warped by Drug War presumptions and biases.
See Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman.
Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has been ghosting me since September 1, 2024, when I wrote her complaining about her use of drug law to cover up societal problems, such as a lack of affordable housing and affordable medical care, etc.
See Regulate and Educate.
The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., has been ghosting me since September 9, 2020, when I first wrote to ask them to condemn the Nazification of America via drug law.
See Why the Holocaust Museum must denounce the Drug War.
Drug-designing chemists have no expertise in deciding what constitutes a cure for depression. As Schopenhauer wrote:
"The mere study of chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher."
We should place prohibitionists on trial for destroying inner cities.
The line drawn between recreational and medical use is wishful thinking on the part of drug warriors. Recreation, according to Webster's, is "refreshment or diversion," and both have positive knock-on effects in the lives of real people.
Oregon's drug policy is incoherent and cruel. The rich and healthy spend $4,000 a week on psilocybin. The poor and chemically dependent are thrown in jail, unless they're on SSRIs, in which case they're congratulated for "taking their meds."
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.
There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.
Drug warriors have taught us that honesty about drugs encourages drug use. Nonsense! That's just their way of suppressing free speech about drugs. Americans are not babies, they can handle the truth -- or if they cannot, they need education, not prohibition.
My consciousness, my choice.
Laughing gas inspired the philosophy of William James. Outlawing N20 is outlawing academic freedom. Laughing gas should be available for the suicidal. Drug prohibition is not a victimless crime.
I don't have a problem with CBD. But I find that many people like it for the wrong reasons: they assume there is something slightly "dirty" about getting high and that all "cures" should be effected via direct materialist causes, not holistically a la time-honored tribal use.
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