Okay. Take a load off.

Oh, really? And you have no problem just saying no to medicines that have inspired entire religions?

The Vedic-Hindu religion was inspired by soma. Coca inspired the Inca religion. Psychedelics gave Plato his view of the afterlife.

Bingo.

He's got you there, Michael.

And you want to do that at the expense of denying me my religion?

Nay, worse: you've denied me the religious impulse that such substances create, thereby preventing me from even conceptualizing new religions, let alone joining them.

Yes. Real WHITE lives in the American suburbs.

How about the 'real lives' of the thousands of Mexican kids who have lost their parents to the War on Drugs that America exported to the world beginning in the early 20th century?

How about the thousands of black Americans who are killed every year by the heavily armed gang violence that prohibition has caused in inner cities?

Besides, if you're worried about the negative effects of drugs, why aren't you fretting about the psychoactive drug called sugar, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of diabetes deaths in Mexico over the last decade, thanks to that country's massive imports of Coca-Cola and American processed foods?

Well, that always happens to me: whenever I spout an incontrovertible truth, my critics always clam up on me, and henceforth cut me entirely, I might add.

But I thought you were in favor of the Drug War.

Oh, really?

Oh, here we go.

Yes, and do you know why it's Toke City, today, baby?

Because you Drug Warriors have outlawed almost every other psychoactive substance on the frickin' planet!

And you've thereby outlawed my religion, which holds that the unexamined life is not worth living.

No.

"Stoned" is your prejudiced and derisive terminology. I have to be inspired by medicines to reach states that help me see outside my own limited understanding of the world in which I dwell, both psychologically and physically speaking.

Why?

Why is a state of sobriety the ultimate goal in your life? Gunmen shoot up schools when they're sober; they commit suicide when they're sober; they launch nuclear weapons when they're sober.

Do you know what?

I wish there were some undiscovered country that I could set sail for in emulation of my Mayflower ancestors, so that I could found a country based on the idea that psychoactive medicine should be used for the benefit of humanity without being stigmatized either by politicians or the sensation-seeking tabloid press.

What's more, I would be setting sail for the same reason my ancestors did: to found a country wherein they could exercise religious freedom and freedom of conscience.

I'm sorry Michael, but "kind of" doesn't cut it. In fact, with friends like you, we opponents of the Drug War don't need enemies.

That's true, unfortunately, and the consensus view is very confused indeed.

The average American senses that the Drug War is full of crap, but they can never really grasp the full evil at work here because they have been programmed from birth to hate and fear psychoactive medicines rather than to understand them.

The propaganda of omission has kept them from learning about the positive uses of mind medicine because TV, films and academia only ever talk about misuse and abuse, never about positive use, whether theoretical or historical.

This keeps us from grasping an obvious truth: that the Drug War is wrong through and through. Why? Because it tells us there are substances that have no positive uses for anyone, ever, at any time, in any place, for any reason, at any dose.

And guess what?

There are no substances of that kind. Moreover, to insist otherwise, is anti-scientific because it keeps us from finding the very uses that could disprove the theory.

In other words, the Drug War is just a superstition.

A superstition that keeps me from practicing my religion and following the Platonic imperative of knowing myself and the world around me.

Gee, that's swell, fellas. NOT! As for me, I'll keep writing articles on the Internet in an attempt to waken America to the obvious: that the Drug War is wrong root and branch...

Yes, and that it is a violation of my religious liberty.

And you, with your quaint 19th-century British tropes: don't you realize that the Drug War is the enforcement of the drug-hating religion of Christian Science with respect to psychoactive medicine?

Oh, yes, Michael, I'd be flattered.