This is perhaps the most irritating essay of all in the entire "Hallucinogen" reader2. Ralph Metzner demonstrates clearly that he is completely bamboozled by Drug War propaganda. He agrees with the Drug Warrior notion that drugs can be judged up or down, outside of all context, especially by westerners who have never used them before and who have been blocked from reading positive usage reports for their entire lifetime! And so he tells us that the time-honored panacea called opium3 can have no legitimate uses for anybody, anywhere, ever - except when administered for physical pain by a board-certified doctor. WHAT?! Ralph is thereby signing off on drug prohibition which brought incredible gunfire to inner cities and destroyed the rule of law in Latin America. A substance that might be misused by a white American young person when used at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reasons.
"One of the problems in the United States is that psychedelics have been mistakenly lumped together with the addictive drugs -- heroin, cocaine, and crack."
"I only wish we could turn our drunkards into opium smokers. If the change would only save those wretched wives and their helpless children from ill-treatment by their husbands and fathers, we should have secured one valuable end." --William Brereton, The Truth about Opium / Being a Refutation of the Fallacies of the Anti-Opium Society and a Defence of the Indo-China Opium Trade17
"My impression has been that the use of cocaine 18 over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine19 20
As Carl Hart reports21, most people use drugs wisely, despite the government's ongoing attempts to make drug use as dangerous as possible, by discouraging honest drug education, refusing to regulate product, and refusing to allow for drug choice."It is said that the Government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea. People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with tobacco or with twenty other things. And there is no escape for the hygienic logician except to restrain and regulate them all. If he is to control the health of the community, he must necessarily control all the habits of all the citizens...." --GK Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils30
In "Psychedelic Refugee," Rosemary Leary writes:
"Fueled by small doses of LSD, almost everything was amusing or weird." -- Rosemary Leary
In a non-brainwashed world, such testimony would suggest obvious ways to help the depressed.
All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.
There is an absurd safety standard for "drugs." The cost/benefit analysis of the FDA & co. never takes into account the costs of NOT prescribing nor the benefits of a productive life well lived. The "users" are not considered stakeholders.
Prohibition turned habituation into addiction by creating a wide variety of problems for users, including potential arrest, tainted or absent drug supply, and extreme stigmatization.
Let's pass a constitutional amendment to remove Kansas from the Union, and any other state where the racist politicians leverage the drug war to crack down on minorities.
The Holy Trinity of the Drug War religion is Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and John Belushi. "They died so that you might fear psychoactive substances with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."
I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.
People are talking about re-scheduling psilocybin, but they miss the point. We need to DE-schedule everything. It's anti-scientific to conclude in advance that any drug has no uses -- and it's a lie too, of course. End drug scheduling altogether! It's childish and wrong.
All of our problems with opioids and opiates could have been avoided had the busybody Chicken Littles in America left well enough alone and let folks continue to smoke regulated opium peaceably in their own homes.
I can think of no greater intrusion than to deny a person autonomy over how they think and feel in life. It is sort of a meta-intrusion, the mother of all anti-democratic intrusions.
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