In my driver's ed class back in high school in the 1970s, we students were forced to binge-watch short films from the Ohio Department of Transportation featuring gory, uncensored scenes of real-life traffic accidents. The apparent goal was to frighten us into driving safely -- although the first message that I took away from the celluloid blood-fest was that I should never drive a car in the Buckeye State. Virginia roads seemed so amazingly peaceful by comparison!
Looking back now, fifty years later, I see an enormous irony in those classes. When high schools started having classes to quote-unquote "educate" kids about drug use, they also showed films about the gory consequences of not being safe -- and yet they wanted the kids to come away with a very different conclusion after watching those films. They wanted them to conclude that safe drug use is impossible, that it is a contradiction in terms.
Imagine if driver's education classes were conducted like drug education classes. The teacher would show all those gory films and then address the students as follows:
"You know what, kids? All these bloody dead Ohioans that you have just seen sprawled out on the asphalt had one thing in common: they all thought that THEY could drive safely. Well, guess what, cupcake: NO ONE CAN DRIVE SAFELY!!!
All right, class dismissed. Tomorrow, we will be taking an in-depth look at the aftermaths of some high-speed head-on collisions on Interstate 71 between Columbus and Cleveland, involving buses, tractor-trailers, farm vehicles... and yes, folks, even motorcycles. [class sighs] I know, right? So schedule your lunch breaks accordingly!"
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
In Mexico, the same substance can be considered a "drug" or a "med," depending on where you are in the country. It's just another absurd result of the absurd policy of drug prohibition.
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.
Laughing gas is the substance that gave William James his philosophy of reality. He concluded from its use that what we perceive is just a fraction of reality writ large. Yet his alma mater (Harvard) does not even MENTION laughing gas in their bio of the man.
In the age of the Drug War, the Hippocratic Oath has become "First, do no good."
This is why we would rather have a depressed person commit suicide than to use "drugs" -- because drugs, after all, are not dealing with the "real" problem. The patient may SAY that drugs make them feel good, but we need microscopes to find out if they REALLY feel good.
It's already risky to engage in free and honest speech about drugs online: Colorado politicians tried to make it absolutely illegal in February 2024. The DRUG WAR IS ALL ABOUT DESTROYING DEMOCRACY THRU IGNORANT AND INTOLERANT FEARMONGERING.
The drug war normalizes the disdainful and self-righteous attitude that Columbus and Pizarro had about drug use in the New World.
Just think how much money bar owners in the Old West would have saved on restoration expenses if they had served MDMA instead of whiskey.
I thought mycology clubs across the US would be protesting drug laws that make mushroom collecting illegal for psychoactive species. But in reality, almost no club even mentions such species. No wonder prohibition is going strong.
There would be almost no recidivism for those trying to get off drugs if all drugs were legal. Then we could use a vast variety of drugs to get us through those few hours of late-night angst that are the bane of the recidivist.