Americans need to acquire a whole new philosophy about drugs, and hence about life itself. Otherwise, drug law reforms will cause new problems and Drug Warriors will blame those problems on the reforms. This vicious circle is inevitable since drug law is all about keeping social problems out of sight by blaming everything on drugs. Once drug laws are lifted, the real social problems start to become glaringly obvious. When police stopped arresting street people for drug use in Oregon, it became clear that there was a housing problem in that state as well as a lack of meaningful health care services1. And so Drug Warriors were screaming for us to put the bandage back on those real problems so that no one would see them. They had no interest in addressing real issues. They wanted to return to the troglodytic option of arresting people for their health-related problems and so pretend that everything is right with the world of unfettered capitalism 2 .
We also need wholesale drug law reform. Rather than just decriminalizing opiates, we need to both legalize and facilitate the use of regulated opiates at home so that those who are determined to use such substances on a daily basis can rejoin society in a time-honored way. Opium has been smoked peaceably at home for thousands of years to various extents and in various societies, notwithstanding the outrageous lies of western missionaries. For more on that latter topic, read "The Truth about Opium" by William Brereton3. Meanwhile, the critics of reform must be reminded that the more potent varieties of opiates were first created precisely because opium had been outlawed in the early 1900s. The outlawed opium proved difficult to sell illicitly, being somewhat bulky in nature, hence the sale of morphine 4 and heroin 5. We need to return to 1913, when an opium smoker could still be a good citizen in America and had not been demonized in the name of anti-Chinese bigotry.
Meanwhile, US drug policy remains in aggressive denial. We outlawed the peaceable use of opiates at home, and now we are upset that opiate users are on the streets.
The message is clear: drugs are not the problem, criminalization is the problem.
Americans need to grow up and realize that drug use is just one of millions of risky activities, like mountain climbing, like car driving... indeed, like alcohol drinking, which accounts for 178,000 American deaths per year in the United States alone6. Like all those other risky activities, drug use, too, will always have its victims. But we can avoid increasing the number of those victims by resisting the temptation to criminalize drugs, which only incentivizes drug dealing, which in turn subjects users to contaminated product and uncertain drug supply and a total lack of information about safe use. If drug criminalization "saves" junior from a drug overdose, it only does so by outsourcing death to other communities -- like Black inner-city neighborhoods which we call "no-go zones" today thanks to the drug-war-inspired violence that they contain. Drug warriors also "save" white American junior by passing laws which lead to the corruption of governments in central and South America and the creation of drug cartels, which have brought about the disappearance of 60,000 in Mexico alone over the last 20 years7.
Drug warriors actually love this, by the way, because they do not believe in peace, love and understanding. Witness their hatred of peace-loving hippies in America in the 1960s, at a time when conservatives were frantically amassing an enormous thermonuclear arsenal, one which may yet hoist America by its own petard. Witness their contempt for the peace-loving ravers in England in the 1990s8. There is nothing that bothers a Drug Warrior more than seeing people using drugs in order to facilitate peace, love and understanding. That seems to be their biggest complaint about psychedelics and Ecstasy, for all the pseudoscientific mud that they've thrown at such drugs. It never occurs to them that drugs which inspire compassion could be used strategically to help end school shootings, prevent suicides, and even pull the world back from the brink of armageddon 9 by inspiring worldwide cooperation. But then there is no violence in such outcomes, no chance to self-righteously use one's guns and bombs on minorities and foreigners.
Speaking of which, we have to stop pretending as a country. We need to acknowledge that drug use has glaringly obvious benefits, a fact which is proven by anecdote, by history, and by psychological common sense, a quality which is in rare supply these days, however, thanks both to drug-war prejudices and to the misguided application of materialist principles to human behavior that we find in today's government-subsidized ivory tower. We need to remind two groups in particular about the inconvenient truth that drugs have glaringly obvious benefits: first, the stealth Christian Scientists in Baptist churches across the country who consider the hypocritically defined category of "drugs" to be evil in and of itself; and second, the behaviorist scientists at the NIH, the NIMH, and NIDA, who insist that the truth about psychoactive drugs is to be found under a microscope and not in the uncensored testimony of actual users -- millions of whom still manage to use drugs wisely10 despite the 24/7 effort of government to do everything it can to make such use dangerous11.
Yes, the problem is drug criminalization -- but America's desire to turn drug use into a criminal matter in the first place is the real pathology here. To respond to this illness, we have to confront the patients with the palpable insanity of their world view, meanwhile offering them an alternative way of looking at the world. The details of such an alternative mindset are beyond the scope of this essay, but at least some of its basic principles can be found in the Cosmovision of the Andes, a philosophy dedicated to wholeness and the ultimate oneness of all nature, humans included. The gist of that holistic philosophy can be gleaned from the following citation by Ilona Suran, member of Our Common Cause:
"The main point tends to be the awareness that we are part of an interdependent whole in which each element plays a specific role within the Earth ecosystem. A Whole, which is intrinsically penetrated by a cosmic and divine force, the very matrix of Life, regularly represented as God, here implied without particular religious distinction.12"
In other words, we are all one and love matters, etc.: you know, the very things that our pathological Drug Warriors hate to hear.
Fortunately, there are many medicines that can help them to understand this viewpoint and to cast off their violence-prone selfishness. But that is a topic for another essay.
If there is an epidemic of "self-harm," prohibitionists never think of outlawing razor blades. They ask: "Why the self-harm?" But if there is an epidemic of drug use which they CLAIM is self-harm, they never ask "Why the self-harm?" They say: "Let's prohibit and punish!"
Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.
What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.
"Abuse" is a funny term because it implies that there's a right way to use "drugs," which is something that the drug warriors deny. To the contrary, they make the anti-scientific claim that "drugs" are not good for anybody for any reason at any dose.
The December Scientific American features a story called "The New Nuclear Age," about a trillion-dollar plan to add 100s of ICBM's to 5 states, which an SA editorial calls "kick me" signs. This Neanderthal plan comes from pols who think that compassion-boosting drugs are evil!
The most addictive drugs have a bunch of great uses, like treating pain and inspiring great literature. Prohibition causes addiction by making their use as problematic as possible and denying knowledge and choices. It's always wrong to blame drugs.
@HKSExecEd The use of Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace and love to the British dance floors in the 1990s. When are political scientists going to acknowledge the potential for such substances to pull our species back from the brink of nuclear annihilation?
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.
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.
They drive to their drug tests in pickup trucks with license plates that read "Don't tread on me." Yeah, right. "Don't tread on me: Just tell me how and how much I'm allowed to think and feel in this life. And please let me know what plants I can access."
If there is an epidemic of "self-harm," prohibitionists never think of outlawing razor blades. They ask: "Why the self-harm?" But if there is an epidemic of drug use which they CLAIM is self-harm, they never ask "Why the self-harm?" They say: "Let's prohibit and punish!"
