A rational person is lost for words upon reading such news headlines. But one thing's for certain: drug warriors are going to eventually invoke a "final solution" for the "drug war" if folks who know better continue to straddle the fence on this issue. Rodrigo Duterte is already proudly calling himself the Drug War Hitler in the Philippines, and he's on record as saying that drug users deserve the same punishment that's meted out to drug dealers (namely death in his country -- and soon in ours too if Trump returns to power). That's why I wrote the Holocaust Museum two years ago to ask them to fight back, if not against the drug war itself then against the language of dehumanization that it promotes. This abusive language is omnipresent in America today. The new movie 'The Runner' by Jason Chase is full of it. The "hero" Detective Wall refers to a teenage black kid as "a waste," who is "not worth another thought." And Detective Wall was true to his word, because his thoughtless raid on a band of unarmed teenagers "inadvertently" killed the boy (if one can be killed "inadvertently" by a hail of bullets) -- a raid for which Detective Wall got a medal, by the way!
But it's not just guys who are literally treating substance users like dirt these days. Marci Hamilton of the Wall Street Journal gives us to understand that drug users... wait for it, folks... are no better than child abusers!
This gives us a very different take, indeed, on famous opium-users, such as Ben Franklin and Marcus Aurelius -- and makes us question the entire Vedic religion, which was inspired by the psychoactive insights provided by plant medicine.
For more on these topics, please see the following essays here at abolishthedea.com: