Welcome to the DEA Lounge. My name is Adderall Zoloft.
Never fear, I passed a thorough drug test before appearing on stage tonight. I am so proud!
I don't mean to brag, but the drug testers in the lab actually praised me for having a great combination of drugs in my digestive system: they told me that I was apparently using drugs wisely for important purposes and that I should be proud of myself. They reminded me that drugs that inspire and elate have been used for religious reasons for millennia and that my wise use of the same showed that I actually cared about being all that I can be in life.
And here I was thinking that I was going to have to borrow urine samples from the Amish in order to pass muster with America's Drug War Gestapo.
I understand that Kevin Sabet is in the house tonight. I wonder if he would like to come up to the microphone and apologize to all the mothers in inner cities who have lost children due to the drug prohibition that Kevin champions. No? You sure, Kevin? Don't be shy.
Oh, yeah, I forgot: being a Drug Warrior means never having to say you're sorry.
Yeah, that's right. Whenever there are problems caused by prohibition, you Drug Warriors can always blame those very problems on drugs themselves.
I'll tell you what, Kevin, how about I tell the mother of 15-year-old Niomi Russell that you are sorry for having promoted a drugs policy that led to her death by a drive-by shooting in Washington, D.C. in 2024?
I mean, hello, Kevin! There was no machine-gun-fire in American streets until Americans enacted liquor prohibition. And yet these prohibitionist clowns will actually blame inner-city violence on drugs rather than on the drug prohibition that so obviously caused those deaths by incentivizing violence.
Tell the truth and shame the devil, Kevin, that's my motto.
You know what Ann Heather Thompson wrote in the Atlantic in 2014, Kevin:
Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence 1 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist.
Kevin may not like the fact that I refer to prohibitionists as clowns, but you know what they say: if the big, floppy clown shoe fits, wear it.
Hurry hurry! Step right up! See the most counterproductive and hateful drugs policy in human history! Watch as imperialist and racist politicians demonize the kinds of godsend medicines that have inspired entire religions!
Drug prohibition began as a racist attempt to prevent so-called "miscegenation." The racist's fear was not that a white woman would use opium or marijuana or cocaine, but that she might actually fall in love with a Chinese, Hispanic or Black person respectively.
Drug prohibition fails even on its own terms. Instead of protecting white American young people, it has exiled them to the city streets where they are sacrificed on the altar of the American religion of substance demonization.
Most enemies of inner-city gun violence refuse to protest against the drug prohibition which caused the violence in the first place.
I've found that no one thinks I "have standing" when I comment about drugs. I'm just a guy who's been turned into a patient for life thanks to drug prohibition. People think that the real experts are the doctors and scientists who profit from the status quo.
We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!
A law proposed in Colorado in February 2024 would have criminalized positive talk about drugs online. What? The world is on the brink of nuclear war because of hate-driven politics, and I can be arrested for singing the praises of empathogens?
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.
The worst form of government is not communism, socialism or even unbridled capitalism. The worst form of government is a Christian Science Theocracy, in which the government controls how much you are allowed to think and feel in life.
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.
Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful.