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."
The fact that some drugs can be addictive is no reason to outlaw drugs. It is a reason to teach safe use and to publicize all the ways that smart people have found to avoid unwanted pharmacological dependency -- and a reason to use drugs to fight drugs.
The most addictive drugs have a bunch of great uses, like treating pain and inspiring great literature. Prohibition causes addiction by making their use as problematic as possible and denying knowledge and choices. It's always wrong to blame drugs.
The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.
Michael Pollan is the Leona Helmsley of the Drug War. He uses outlawed drugs freely while failing to support the re-legalization of Mother Nature. Drug laws are apparently for the little people.
The fact that drugs have positive uses for human beings is a psychological corollary of Husserl's phenomenology and Whitehead's philosophy of organism.
Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!
Prohibitionists are responsible for the 200,000-plus killed in the US-inspired Mexican drug war in the 21st century.
A lot of drug use represents an understandable attempt to fend off performance anxiety. Performers can lose their livelihood if they become too self-conscious. We only call such use "recreational" because we are oblivious to the common-sense psychology.
"If England [were to] revert to pre-war conditions, when any responsible person, by signing his name in a book, could buy drugs at a fair profit on cost price... the whole underground traffic would disappear like a bad dream." -- Aleister Crowley
What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.
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