Yesterday I traveled to Blue Plate Books in Winchester, Virginia, one of the largest used bookstores in the region. My plan was to buy books that would help me flesh out my understanding of drug-related issues. This was naive of me, however. Even though the store features tens of thousands of books, the vast majority of the authors of those books ignore the fact that drug prohibition even exists. The few books that treat of demonized drugs do so from the point of view of addiction and abuse. There are no books about how opium can improve your love of nature or about how phenethylamines can make the suicidal wish to live or about how the use of laughing gas can change your views of reality -- as the use of laughing gas eroded William James's dogmatic fealty to passion-scorning materialism and behaviorism.
Americans love to hate heroin. But there is no rational reason why folks should not use heroin daily in a world in which we consider it their medical duty to use antidepressants daily.
Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.
As great as it is, "Synthetic Panics" by Philip Jenkins was only tolerated by academia because it did not mention drugs in the title and it contains no explicit opinions about drugs. As a result, many drug law reformers still don't know the book exists.
Your drug war has caused the disappearance of over 60,000 Mexicans over the last 20 years. It has turned inner cities into shooting galleries. It has turned America into a penal colony. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and put bureaucrats in charge of deciding if our religions are "sincere."
In the Atomic Age Declassified, they tell us that we needed hundreds of thermonuclear tests so that scientists could understand the effects. That's science gone mad. Just like today's scientists who need more tests before they can say that laughing gas will help the depressed. Science today is all about ignoring the obvious.
His answer to political opposition is: "Lock them up!" That's Nazi speak, not American democracy.
The FDA should have no role in approving psychoactive medicine. They evaluate them based on materialist standards rather than holistic ones. In practice, this means the FDA ignores all glaringly obvious benefits.
If drug warriors were serious about saving lives, they'd outlaw guns, cars, and all pleasure trips to Mars.
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.
America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own depression by making opium and cocaine illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.
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