Here's the best philosophical analysis of the War on Drugs that I have yet to discover:
"A materialist consciousness is attempting to preserve itself from dissolution by restriction and persecution of experience of the transcendental. One day perhaps the earth will be dominated by the illusion of separate consciousness, the bureaucrats having triumphed in seizing control of all roads of communication with the divine and restricting traffic. But sleep and death cannot evade the great dream of being and the victory of the bureaucrats of illusion is only an illusion of their separate world of consciousness."
--Allen Ginsberg, as quoted by Oliver Harris, editor of "The Yage Letters Redux"
It is evil to give the depressed drugs to help them die while barring them from using drugs that could make them wish to live.
Problem 2,643 of the war on drugs:
It puts the government in charge of deciding what counts as a true religion.
I hope that scientists will eventually find the prohibition gene so that we can eradicate this superstitious way of thinking from humankind.
Attention People's magazine editorial staff:
Matthew Perry was a big boy who made his own decisions. He didn't die because of ketamine or because of evil rotten drug dealers, he died because of America's enforced ignorance about psychoactive drugs.
America is an "arrestocracy" thanks to the war on drugs.
If we can go overseas to burn poppy plants, then Islamic countries should be free to come to the United States to burn our grape vines.
The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.
If drug war logic made sense, we would outlaw endless things in addition to drugs. Because the drug war says that it's all worth it if we can save just one life -- which is generally the life of a white suburban young person, btw.
The best long-term treatment for OUD would be to normalize the nightly smoking of opium at home, not to addict the user to government-supplied drugs that render them impervious to the benefits of the poppy plant.
The confusion arises because materialists insist that every psychological problem is actually a physical problem, hence the disease-mongering of the DSM. This is antithetical to the shamanic approach, which sees people holistically, as people, not patients.