The interests of capitalism dictate what politician-led Americans can think about substances. Psychoactive plant medicine need merely cause a problem for one demented youth and our politicians easily convince us that the substance must be eradicated from the face of the earth. Meanwhile if a Big Pharma 12 antidepressant causes weight gain and suicide, we dismiss these as "bad reactions," essentially blaming the victim for their oddball reaction to the drugs, while insisting that the substance in question is a godsend for the vast majority of the depressed.
This is not surprising since unfettered capitalism has a history of keeping problems from being solved if the solution would negatively affect stock values. That's why we have no quick answers to heart problems and cancer, since the obvious solution would be for Americans to cut back drastically on red meat, and yet the American Heart Association is supported by precisely those industries that would lose out given such a truly scientific approach. Therefore such agencies are like OJ Simpson vowing to spend his life searching for the guy who killed his wife. If they truly wanted to find the reason for heart disease (etc.) in America, they'd take one long look in the mirror.
We'd have been driving electrically powered cars a century ago, using free electricity and cell phones too, except that capitalism quashed these inventions because they merely empowered humanity rather than the all-important stockholder.
Author's Follow-up:
It seems that capitalism requires a Drug War to exist. capitalism depends on the glorification of things and the money to buy them -- and if we legalize the sorts of medicine that inspired the Hindu religion, God knows how American priorities would change. Surely, the need to keep up with the Jones's would be jettisoned.
In "The Man in the Crowd," Edgar Allan Poe quoted the philosopher La Bruyère to the following effect:
"Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul."
In other words, the main problem with today's Homo sapiens is their inability to be alone, that is, to live with themselves. I think of this quote whenever I see male protestors on the street wrecking the place in the name of doubtful causes. It is interesting that these are usually males, by the way, that women generally seem to be able to live with themselves and stay at home without feeling that they are missing out. These arsonists and vandals are people who never feel so alive as when they are in a crowd and acting up -- but place them at home alone with themselves with time on their hand, and they go crazy.
Now, drugs that elate and inspire can actually change that status quo. If you allow a human being to see a world in a grain of sand -- or simply to see Mother Nature more clearly and profoundly -- their need for superfluous commodities would be mitigated -- or rather they would suddenly be aware of the superfluous nature of many if not most of the commodities that the capitalist requires them to purchase.
No wonder capitalism outlaws drugs that elate and inspire. Such drugs inspired the Hindu religion. The capitalist does not want their potential customers to reimagine the world in a way that money and products matter less. Hence the obvious connection between capitalism and the Drug War.
This is something that you can bet is not covered in most political science classes: i.e., capitalism 's inherent antagonism to the legalization 3 of psychoactive medicine. But the connection is obvious and has consequences. Just go into any drug store and check out the shelves: what you will see there are treatments for discrete human ailments based on a totally non-holistic and disease-mongering approach to human illness, one that ignores the ability of holistic-working psychoactive substances to improve overall health. capitalism has to ignore such holism, otherwise these drug-store shelves would disappear, and all the profits with them.
capitalism 4 requires disease-mongering -- and disease-mongering requires the suppression of medicines that work holistically, that work by improving mood and elating the individual AND THEREFORE improving their health overall.
Like when Laura Sanders tells us in Science News that depression is an intractable problem, she should rather tell us: "Depression is an intractable problem... that is, in a world wherein we refuse to consider the benefits of 'drugs,' let alone to fight for their beneficial use."
For most drugs, dependency is a bug. For Big Pharma antidepressants, it is a feature.
The U.S. government created violence out of whole cloth in America's inner cities with drug prohibition -- and now it is using that violence as an excuse to kick the people that they themselves have knocked down.
In "Four Good Days" the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of mother nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.
Racist drug warriors make cities dangerous with drug prohibition -- then they use that danger as an excuse to send in the National Guard.
Prohibitionists are responsible for the 200,000-plus killed in the US-inspired Mexican drug war in the 21st century.
Materialist scientists cannot triumph over addiction because their reductive focus blinds them to the obvious: namely, that drugs which cheer us up ACTUALLY DO cheer us up. Hence they keep looking for REAL cures while folks kill themselves for want of laughing gas and MDMA.
"The homicidal drug is booze. There's more violence on a Saturday night in a neighborhood tavern than there has been in the whole 20-year history of LSD." -- Timothy Leary
I knew all along that Measure 110 in Oregon was going to be blamed for the problems that the drug war causes. Drug warriors never take responsibility, despite all the blood that they have on their hands.
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!
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