I read a short story last night entitled "Tomorrow" by Eugene O'Neill. As might be expected from that author, it was touching and yet extremely depressing. The title "Tomorrow," of course, refers to the eternally renewed resolution of the drunkard to reform tomorrow, which is, of course, a tomorrow that will never come.
If Americans truly felt that laws had to be concocted to protect Americans from substances, then the story would read as a clarion call for the outlawing of liquor. But it will never be read that way by Americans today, subject as they are to the media's constant whitewashing of liquor and their constant demonization of all of liquor's many less dangerous alternatives. How? By lies, half-truths and (above all) censorship, thanks to which one never sees a demonized drug used responsibly and efficaciously on TV or in the movies 12 . Said use is always either portrayed as a dead-end street or a childish undertaking worthy of laughter and, ultimately, disdain, at least from the grown-ups of the world. Meanwhile, the very fact that drugs were used efficaciously by folks like Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius is routinely suppressed from biographies.
This negative attitude toward drugs is beginning to recede today when it comes to psychedelic substances. In fact, while I was writing this blog entry, I received a heads-up about a brand-new article in the New York Times entitled "The C.E.O.s Are Tripping. Can Psychedelics Help the C-Suite?".
But the penny still has not dropped for the western world. The real problem is prohibition itself, which advances the absurd and cruel proposition that a drug that can be used problematically by white American young people must not be used by anyone, anywhere, for any reason whatsoever. The world is full of silent and unnecessary suffering thanks to that anti-scientific postulate -- not just because of the withholding of existing protocols but because of the vast array of imaginative empathic/shamanic protocols that we dare not even imagine today thanks to the Drug War orthodoxy of substance demonization.
And so Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but the real headline is that drugs have never been evil at all, that the evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about them. And how do we talk about them today? With the superstitious and self-serving hypocrisy promoted by cynical politicians.
Imagine if there were drugs for which dependency was a feature, not a bug. People would stop peddling that junk, right? Wrong. Just ask your psychiatrist.
Irony of ironies, that the indignant 19th-century hatred of liquor should ultimately result in the outlawing of virtually every mind-affecting substance on the planet EXCEPT for liquor.
Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" are horrible because they encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.
Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.
Someone tweeted that fears about a Christian Science theocracy are "baseless." Tell that to my uncle who was lobotomized because they outlawed meds that could cheer him up -- tell that to myself, a chronic depressive who could be cheered up in an instant with outlawed meds.
MDMA legalization has suffered a setback by the FDA. These are the people who think Electro Shock Therapy is not used often enough! What sick priorities.
No substance is bad in and of itself. Fentanyl has positive uses, at specific doses, for specific people, in specific situations. But the drug war votes substance up or down. That is hugely anti-scientific and it blocks human progress.
UNESCO celebrates the healing practices of the Kallawaya people of South America. What hypocrisy! UNESCO supports a drug war that makes some of those practices illegal!
Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks: J'excuse! People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took your prohibition to accomplish that! Stop arresting, start teaching safe use!
Here's the first step in the FDA process for evaluating a psychoactive drug:
Ignore all glaringly obvious benefits
Imagine if there were drugs for which dependency was a feature, not a bug. People would stop peddling that junk, right? Wrong. Just ask your psychiatrist.
