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).
"My faith votes and strives to outlaw religions that use substances of which politicians disapprove."
Drug warriors do not want to end "addiction": it's their golden goose. They use the threat of addiction to scare us into giving up our democratic freedoms, like that once supplied by the 4th amendment.
If Americans cannot handle the truth about drugs, then there is something wrong with Americans, not with drugs.
The term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they denote.
Big Pharma drugs have wrought disaster when used in psychotherapy, but it does not follow that the depressed should become Christian Scientists. The use of outlawed drugs can obviate the need for shock therapy.
The benefits of outlawed drugs read like the ultimate wish-list for psychiatrists. It's a shame that so many of them are still mounting a rear guard action to defend their psychiatric pill mill -- which demoralizes clients by turning them into lifetime patients.
The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.
The American Philosophy Association should make itself useful and release a statement saying that the drug war is based on fallacious reasoning, namely, the idea that substances can be bad in themselves, without regard for why, when, where and/or how they are used.
America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.
In America, they save the depressed from cocaine and opium by turning them into patients for life with dependence-causing "meds." Now 30-year-old doctors get to treat 67-year-olds like children, with new visits every damn three months.
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