I have been consoling myself lately over my online invisibility by thinking of my essays as so many manuscripts in a bottle, so many instalments in a diary written initially for myself, but with the hope that it might someday inspire others. This perspective not only helps me to cope with my online ostracization, but it helps me to live like a saint as well, insofar as the transcendent viewpoint has historically counseled human beings to speak truth without expectation of either gain or praise, but rather merely because it was the truth. Of course, I have never fully lived up to that lofty goal. I often get the feeling of "why bother" when I see zero statistical progress in my attempts at online proselytization. I have to keep reminding myself that I am writing a sort of diary and that I can only have faith that it will someday make a difference to somebody but myself. "Yeah, that's it," I tell myself, mentally mimicking the whining voice of Rico, the petty hoodlum played by Edgar G. Robinson in his 1931 breakthrough hit called Little Caesar. "It's a diary, see? Yeeeeah."
No wonder conservatives are terrified of drugs. It is not safety that worries them, else they would demand education. They are terrified of new ways of seeing life. The outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of whole mindsets. It is a meta injustice.
Had the FDA been around in the Indus Valley 3,500 years ago, there would be no Hindu religion today, because they would have found some potential problem with the use of soma.
If we can go overseas to burn poppy plants, then Islamic countries should be free to come to the United States to burn our grape vines.
Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.
Materialist scientists are drug war collaborators. They are more than happy to have their fight against idealism rigged by drug law, which outlaws precisely those substances whose use serves to cast their materialism into question.
The search for SSRIs has always been based on a flawed materialist premise that human consciousness is nothing but a mix of brain chemicals and so depression can be treated medically like any other physical condition.
Whether we judge people only by the words that they say or only by the substances of which they partake, we are ignoring the most important things: what they really mean and how they really behave.
Most people think that drugs like cocaine, MDMA, LSD and amphetamines can only be used recreationally. WRONG ! This represents a very naive understanding of human psychology. We deny common sense in order to cater to the drug war orthodoxy that "drugs have no benefits."
In a compassionate world, we would give laughing gas kits to the suicidal just as we now give epi pens to those with severe allergies.
It's always wrong to demonize drugs in the abstract. That's anti-scientific. It begs so many questions and leaves suffering pain patients (and others) high and dry. No substance is bad in and of itself.
(up)