I just noticed the Twitter bio of a certain NYT writer who tells us that she "quit cocaine & heroin in 1988." This got me thinking some heretical thoughts, which I formulated in the following Tweets, at the risk of a mass exodus of my five loyal followers... if five followers can be said to exit "en masse." But that's kind of like saying, "I was attacked by a horde of two, maybe three ruffians!" ... Er, but that's not important now.
Oh, and there's some notes to follow.
When people write "quit cocaine in 1988" in their bio, that's fine. That was a big moment for them given their psychological makeup and environment. For me, tho, the bio snippet would read: "Hopes to try cocaine in 2025." That makes as much sense since coke CAN be used wisely!
The problem is, many people who write that confession in their bio ("quit cocaine") figure that they've discovered a universal law: that cocaine is necessarily wrong for everybody. That evinces an unimaginative view of the psychological diversity of human beings.
I "quit valium" in 1994, but I don't include that in my bio because I don't think it's a huge thing. The only reason that quitting was "a big ask" for me was because all better drugs were outlawed -- including many that are non-addictive.
Please, nobody take offense. I just believe that in a sane world, "quitting" a given drug would not be such an earth-shattering event. When all drugs are re-legalized and used wisely, we would not find occasion to obsess about or blame any one drug.
Focusing like that on any one drug as evil (heroin, cocaine, etc.) is just the flip side of what the Drug Warrior does in demonizing them -- blaming the drug instead of prohibition, which outlaws of all of the endless alternatives to a given use pattern.
Confessions like "I quit cocaine in 1988" -- at least when featured prominently in a tiny bio -- turn cocaine into a real colossus, giving it powers to destroy that it would never have in a free world -- one in which we seek to use all psychoactive substances as wisely as possible. Again, I recognize that I do not know the person behind this particular biographical snippet, but in general, such confessions smack of the way that Drug Warriors turn drug use into a morality play. It's just, in this case, the morality play has a happy ending1 -- but the assumption behind the snippet at least seems to be that the villain of the piece was cocaine or heroin -- whereas I believe it is our failure to be adults about drugs and to learn everything we can about safe use, meanwhile legalizing the seemingly endless substances that provide the transcendence of heroin without unwanted dependence.
I would go on to state why I want to use cocaine in 2025, but that rarely spoken resolution is bound to arouse so many mistaken assumptions in the average bamboozled reader that it would take me another entire essay to unpack them. Suffice it to say, my goal in using cocaine would be to think as clearly as possible and to be productive in my work. My goal is not to go gambling in Monte Carlo with a call girl on my lap and a pocket full of blood-stained dollar bills.
Author's Follow-up: May 18, 2024
I should have mentioned, this writer actually specializes in writing on drug-related topics. With this in mind, the confession in her bio seems to be signaling the following: "I too believe that drugs are the problem and I have experience in overcoming their evil, so listen to me." So as friendly as she may be to decriminalization, she is arguing on the back foot, tacitly expressing the stubborn beliefs of the Drug War that the problem "is drugs," not prohibition and our failure to be adults and learn about substances and to use them wisely.
It's also interesting that this author specializes in neuroscience. Only in the west could a neuroscientist be deemed an expert in drugs that inspire us both psychologically and spiritually. Drug prohibition is all about limiting my ability to express myself and to live the sort of psychological and spiritual life that I want to lead. A neuroscientist has precisely zero expertise in such areas.
Someday folks will realize that there are very good reasons that one might wish to use cocaine. The idea that it can only be misused is a superstition. The superstition is basically made true, however, by prohibition, which outlaws alternatives and refuses to teach safe use.
And, of course, if all that doesn't ruin your life, then the DEA and company will do the ruining for you by putting you in a cage. That's why I say we live in the Dark Ages, where attempts to achieve great mental clarity are punished with lengthy prison stretches.
In fact, nothing against "drinkers," but there are far more good reasons to use cocaine than there are to drink whiskey. Except, of course, that whiskey drinking won't get you thrown in the pen and treated like a scumbag.
Cocaine
Cocaine can be used wisely, believe it or not. You have been taught otherwise by a lifetime of censorship -- and by an FDA which dogmatically ignores all positive aspects of drug use, including increased communicative skill and endurance.
1 Of course, even this statement is problematic. Is it really a "happy" ending merely because one is no longer using cocaine? That's a Christian Science belief, not a logical conclusion. It may well be a happy ending in a given case, but we have no reason for assuming that it is unconditionally so. (up)
The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?
The scheduling system is a huge lie designed to give an aura of "science" to America's colonialist disdain for indigenous medicines, from opium, to coca, to shrooms.
The FDA uses reductive materialism to justify and normalize the views of Cortes and Pizarro with respect to entheogenic medicine.
Amphetamines are "meds" when they help kids think more clearly but they are "drugs" when they help adults think more clearly. That shows you just how bewildered Americans are when it comes to drugs.
Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.
Critics tell me that drugs have nothing to offer us. What? Not only are they being psychologically naive and completely ahistorical, but they are forgetting that the term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they connote.
Of course, prohibitionists will immediately remind me that we're all children when it comes to drugs, and can never -- but never -- use them wisely. That's like saying that we could never ride horses wisely. Or mountain climb. Or skateboard.
I'm told that science is completely unbiased today. I guess I'll have to go back and reassess my doubts about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
It's an enigma: If I beat my depression by smoking opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag subject to immediate arrest. But if I do NOT "take my meds" every day of my life, I am a bad patient.
Drug War censorship is supported by our "science" magazines, which pretend that outlawed drugs do not exist, and so write what amount to lies about the supposed intransigence of things like depression and anxiety.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, I hope to use cocaine in 2025: and other confessions of a drug war heretic, published on May 19, 2024 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
You have been reading an article entitled, I hope to use cocaine in 2025: and other confessions of a drug war heretic, published on May 19, 2024 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)