Do you know that the aptly named National Institute on Drug Abuse has a ground rule that forbids it from ever advocating the legalization of any outlawed substance? The Institute is not allowed to do that. And no wonder. As its very name suggests, the institute is dedicated to drug bashing, to only pointing out the downsides of drug use1. Combine this with the fact that the media refuses to publish positive reports of drug use and the result is that the American population is completely indoctrinated to hate drugs. And perhaps the most hated drug of all is cocaine, which could have cured my depression in a trice2. Instead, I have been shunted off onto a Big Pharma drug that is far harder to kick than heroin 3: one, in fact, which has a 95% recidivism rate 4 for long-term users (a fact of which my ex-psychiatrist informed me shortly before he was terminated by his employer for his honesty on that topic).
So let's look at what your outlawing of cocaine has done. (I say "your" because odds are that you are a prohibitionist when it comes to cocaine like almost everybody else in the west.)
By outlawing cocaine, you have destroyed inner cities around the world and turned folks like myself into patients for life. Far from keeping folks off drugs, you have forced me to use a drug every single day of my life!
Say, here's an idea: instead of playing a trillion-dollar game of whack-a-mole5 with every new dangerous substance that comes on the public radar, let's treat drug use like every other dangerous activity in the world: let's teach safe use and best practices for achieving various desired results!
I know, it sounds crazy, right? Using education to solve problems?
You guys want to save everybody, and what's the result? Your prohibition has killed millions since 1914 totally unnecessarily6, not only through contaminated product but through lack of education and the eruption of gunfire at country borders and on city streets. And yet you have the nerve to shudder at the election of Donald Trump? You (you prohibitionist) brought him to power by sitting by while prohibition put hundreds of thousands of minority voters in jail for using substances of which politicians disapprove.
I'm picking on independents and democrats here, because the insurrectionists of our time apparently know what they're doing and don't give a damn.
IMAGINE
Imagine if there were a drug that killed 3,000 citizens a year in the United Kingdom alone! Wouldn't we want to ban it at once?!
Er, not exactly. Because the drug in question is called aspirin -- and we all agree that aspirin has positive uses7.
Now, who is telling us that cocaine has no positive uses. Answer: Doctors. No one asked the depressed what they thought about cocaine before doctors started their op-ed demonization campaign.
The premise of the doctors seems to have been this: If we can save 400 people from cocaine issues, then hundreds of millions of the depressed can go to hell8!
This is a calculation that nobody questions.
No other risky activity on earth is evaluated in this puerile way.
Horseback riding could easily be outlawed if we held it to such standards, since horseback-riding is the main cause of sports-related traumatic brain injury in the United States9.
But everyone agrees that freedom is more important when it comes to horse lovers. Somehow, freedom is not important when it comes to the rights of the depressed. We have to remain depressed for life because drug prohibitionists are determined to hold cocaine to unheard-of safety standards.
Sure, cocaine is not for everyone. Neither is penicillin. But it does not follow that it should be for NO ONE. And that is the depressed-damning conclusion that our doctors have reached on behalf of folks like myself. And, of course, my ideas on the subject can be ignored because I am just a patient. What counts are the opinions of those with endless titles beside their names who write papers full of nepotistic footnotes and place them behind expensive academic firewalls. They don't have to take into account anything but their own theories and footnote-supported prejudices -- and to hell with the depressed.
By placing scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine, the whole discussion on such topics has moved to the ivory tower -- giving Google and everyone else an excuse to ignore the people who suffer based on the prejudices of academia -- based on their absolute refusal to hear from those who pay the price for their assumption-laden ideas about mind and mood.
Cocaine is one obvious treatment for depression. Obvious! And yet when I search the web for "cocaine and depression," what do I see? There is nothing about using cocaine for depression -- but rather I find wild speculation about how cocaine might actually CAUSE epression.
But then drug law does everything it can to make cocaine a problem drug -- by refusing to educate, refusing to regulate, and refusing to offer other drug choices for those who don't really need cocaine or who (for whatever reason) cannot "handle" cocaine.
This pretend concern for the safety of young drug users is bizarre in a country that does not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.
"Dope Sick"? "Prohibition Sick" is more like it. The very term "dope" connotes imperialism, racism and xenophobia, given that all tribal cultures have used "drugs" for various purposes. "Dope? Junk?" It's hard to imagine a more intolerant, dismissive and judgmental terminology.
Someone should stand outside Jefferson's estate and hand out leaflets describing the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello to confiscate poppy plants. That raid was against everything Jefferson stood for. The TJ Foundation DISHONORED JEFFERSON and their visitors should know that!
To treat opioid use disorder, we should re-normalize the peaceable smoking of opium at home as an alternative to drinking alcohol.
I'm going to get on the grade-school circuit, telling kids to say no to horses.
"You think you can handle horses, kids? That's what Christopher Reeves thought. The fact is, NOBODY can handle horses!!!"
Until we legalize ALL psychoactive drugs, there will be no such thing as an addiction expert. In the meantime, it's insulting to be told by neuroscience that I'm an addictive type. It's pathologizing my just indignation at psychiatry's niggardly pharmacopoeia.
In the Atomic Age Declassified, they tell us that we needed hundreds of thermonuclear tests so that scientists could understand the effects. That's science gone mad. Just like today's scientists who need more tests before they can say that laughing gas will help the depressed. Science today is all about ignoring the obvious.
The DEA has done everything it can to keep Americans clueless about opium and poppies. The agency is a disgrace to a country that claims to value knowledge and freedom of information.
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.
The best harm-reduction strategy is to re-legalize drugs.
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