Combatting the Drug War is like peeling an onion. Each of the Drug Warrior's harebrained assumptions turns out to be based on yet other harebrained assumptions, which have to be identified in their turn if one is to have any hope of convincing the mind-muddled masses, who continue to follow the logic-challenged ghost of Richard Nixon like he's the Pied Piper of Drug-Free Hamelin.
Take the following drug-war proposition, for instance:
"Substances should be illegal if they are subject to misuse."
What nonsense. Should driving be illegal because that privilege can be abused?
The Drug Warrior thinks that's a bad analogy, of course, but only because they fail to recognize that Mother Nature's pharmacy is the birth right of all residents of planet Earth and that the so-called drugs it contains have been used for religious and psychological purposes for millennia, not just for "getting high" as the Drug Warrior seems to believe. One of the world's first religions was founded around the worship of a psychedelic plant-based substance known as Soma. The Eleusinian mysteries lasted 2,000 consecutive years and sharpened the minds of Plato and Cicero1. Benjamin Franklin used opium to spur his creativity. HG Wells and Jules Verne swore by Coca Wine in writing their famous stories. Francis Crick used liberal amounts of psychedelic to think "outside the box," and thus he discovered the DNA helix. It's only in the suspicious and parochial mind of Drug Warriors like Richard Nixon that we associate psychoactive substances exclusively with riffraff -- by which we generally mean those ethnic groups that the Drug Warrior hates. Thus opium was outlawed because it was associated with the Chinese, just as cocaine was outlawed for its association with blacks, and marijuana for its association with Mexicans.
Yet we still say that "Substances should be illegal if they are subject to misuse"?
I don't know how the Drug Warrior can make that statement with a straight face, given the fact that more than 1 in 8 American males are chemically addicted to modern antidepressants 2 and 1 in 4 American females -- and these drugs can be harder to quit than heroin 3 - Yet the average Drug Warrior has absolutely nothing to say about that fact. It's an addiction problem that the APA (the American Psychiatric Association) and Big Pharma "hush up" by claiming that these drugs need to be taken for life. That's fine, except that the coalition never started making that claim until the addiction problem was first noticed. Only then did it conveniently occur to the drug pushers in question that these drugs required lifelong administration. What a coup by psychiatrists: they thus rendered lawsuits moot, while casting themselves as the saviors of the patients that they themselves had turned into addicts - not to mention the fact that the shrinks were now guaranteed to have clients for life.
But then under this rationale, we could solve the heroin problem in one fell swoop by announcing that heroin has to be taken for life. Problem solved. If we notice withdrawal symptoms, so what? It just means that the addict hasn't taken his or her daily meds yet. (But don't hold your breath waiting for psychiatry to "sign off" on this corollary to their self-serving logic on addiction.)
Putting aside this corporate-biased hypocrisy, why should the physical and emotional needs of millions of law-abiding Americans be ignored in favor of cracking down on a minority of those who cannot use a substance responsibly? For make no mistake: many currently illegal drugs have positive effects -- as Benjamin Franklin knew about opium , as HG Wells knew about cocaine , and as the American Air Force once knew about amphetamines. As for psychedelics, they have been repeatedly shown to produce the sort of self-critical insight that has been the holy grail of psychiatry for the last 50 years.
And yet we still say:
"Substances should be illegal if they are subject to misuse"?
Nonsense.
Drug warriors always try to muddy the water with lies, false premises and newspeak. But there is only one thing that the critics of the Drug War have to know: that is the fact that it was a violation of natural law to criminalize Mother Nature's bounty in the first place.
But if you Drug War critics want to know more, now hear this:
When viewed closely, you will find that all the so-called drug problems that we claim to be fighting are actually caused by the Drug War itself, by its vindictive and anti-minority criminal penalties, by its willful lies about Mother Nature's plant medicine, and by the fact that it bars us from using all manner of natural godsends that when, used wisely, could provide us with self-insight and happiness while being immensely less addictive than the status quo: that status quo that ironically makes America the most addicted country in the world for all its Drug War posturing -- addicted not to opium 4 , not to cocaine , and not to psychedelics, but rather to Big Pharma meds, pills which doctors even have the nerve to tell us that it's our duty to take every day of our life.
Of course, the moral thing for them to do would be to recognize that they've addicted Americans in droves and to acknowledge and apologize for that glaring and outrageous fact, but since they're determined not to commit professional hari kari, they string Americans along with the myth of their scientific infallibility, a message that Big Pharma keeps spreading on shows like Oprah with the help of the highly paid psychiatrists that they have hired for that purpose.
Since the Drug Warrior thus has no problem with addiction whatsoever, we can only conclude that their real problem is with freedom itself: they don't want Americans to get too much of that, especially when that freedom could lead to the use of plant medicines that help people see through the shortcomings of 21st-century American life, perhaps to the point where they become less-than-perfect consumers from the point of view of the Fortune 500.
September 14, 2022
To put it another way, the Drug Warriors don't want to get America off drugs -- they want to get America on the RIGHT drugs from the point of view of Big Pharma 56 and Wall Street. Julian Buchanan justly refers to this state of affairs as Drug Apartheid.
This is religious tyranny disguised, because the Drug War bans precisely those kinds of medicines that have inspired entire religions in the past, as Soma inspired the Vedic-Hindu faith.
Author's Follow-up: October 27, 2022
Here's another thing that Drug Warriors don't want us to know: that even crack cocaine 78 and methamphetamines can be used non-addictively. That's hard for Americans to believe because they have been taught the following lie by Drug Warrior propaganda: that any drug that CAN be used addictively MUST and WILL be used addictively. If that is true, it is only because of a self-fulfilling prophecy caused by the fact that Drug Warriors never educate users how to use substances wisely: instead they focus on arresting folks who dare to use demonized substances at all.
To treat opioid use disorder (which is really prohibition disorder syndrome) we should normalize the peaceable smoking of opium at home as an alternative to drinking alcohol.
As such, "we" are important. The sun is just a chaos of particles that "we" have selected out of the rest of the raw data and declared "This we shall call the sun!" "We" make this universe. Consciousness is fundamental.
All mycologists should denounce the criminalization of mushrooms. Those who don't should be drummed out of the field.
We throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.
Rick Strassman reportedly stopped his DMT trials because some folks had bad experiences at high doses. That is like giving up on aspirin because high doses of NSAIDs can kill.
That's so "drug war" of Rick: If a psychoactive substance has a bad use at some dose, for somebody, then it must not be used at any dose by anybody. It's hard to imagine a less scientific proposition, or one more likely to lead to unnecessary suffering.
The MindMed company (makers of LSD Lite) tell us that euphoria and visions are "adverse effects": that's not science, that's an arid materialist philosophy that does not believe in spiritual transcendence.
Ug! Fire bad!
There were 4,731 fire-related deaths in America in 2023.
Learn more at the Partnership for a Death Free America.
Let's arrest drug warriors, confiscate their houses, and deny them jobs in America -- until such time as they renounce their belief in the demonstrably ruinous policy of substance prohibition.
"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau
To treat opioid use disorder (which is really prohibition disorder syndrome) we should normalize the peaceable smoking of opium at home as an alternative to drinking alcohol.
