Click the link above to listen! American Top 40: Drug War Edition!
The fact that drugs have positive uses for human beings is a psychological corollary of Husserl's phenomenology and Whitehead's philosophy of organism.
Many psychonauts (like Terence McKenna) praise psychedelics while demonizing other psychoactive substances. No substance is bad in itself. All substances have some use at some dose for some reason for some people in some circumstance.
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.
The drug war outlaws everything that could help both prevent addiction and treat it. And then they justify the war on drugs by scaring people with the specter of addiction. They NEED addiction to keep the drug war going.
Someday those books about weird state laws will be full of factoids like: "In Alabama, you could be jailed for 20 years for conspiring to eat a mushroom."
I never said that getting off SSRIs should be done without supervision. If you're on Twitter for medical advice, you're in the wrong place.
Being less than a month away from an election that, in my view, could end American democracy, I don't like to credit Musk for much. But I absolutely love it every time he does or says something that pushes back against the drug-war narrative.
Americans love to blame drugs for all their problems. Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal. The prohibition mindset is the problem, not drugs.
I have nothing against science, BTW (altho' I might feel differently after a nuclear war!) I just want scientists to "stay in their lane" and stop pretending to be experts on my own personal mood and consciousness.
We give kids drugs to improve their concentration -- but if adults use drugs to concentrate, we call them names and throw them in jail.
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