Some Thoughts about the Formal Recommendation for drug policy changes by Harm Reduction Specialists
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 14, 2024
Pull over to the side of the web page!
You're probably wondering why I stopped you? Well, according to Google Analytics, we are getting a lot of bouncers at this web address and so we've launched a campaign to crack down on such traffic. Yes, of course, you have a right to bounce away from any page that you like, or that you don't like for that matter, but you might at least stop and listen to what you're going to miss by doing so.
This page makes some great points, after all. Of course, if you think you already know all this stuff, fine, but the least you can do is check out our discussion questions at the bottom of this page to make sure that you truly have the requisite understanding.
Now then, how about I check your car for drugs? You glove compartment, maybe? How about your trunk -- or boot, as the Brits would have it. I want to make sure that you are not using any godsend medicines from the Inca, for instance. I mean, Coca-Cola may have the legal right to use the coca leaf, but mere mortals like you can be slammed in the pokey for having truck with that naughty plant.
What's that, I can't search your car for drugs? Oh, so then you have something to HIDE, do you?
I'm just playing with ya, dude! Oh, I love my job in the age of drug prohibition! I just love making people squirm!
I agree with the plan1 entirely. I love the idea of the economic impact that legalization would have on neighborhoods previously penalized by drug laws. But I do have a few caveats. These are not so much criticisms as they are "riffs" on the various topics broached in the document.
1) This document is presented as a strategy in "harm reduction," which is understandable given the current accepted narrative, according to which there is no rational reason for "drug use." Therefore we have to have harm reduction strategies in place to help save users from at least the worst possible consequences of their bad decisions2. This, of course, represents a Christian Science attitude toward drug use, however; therefore I hope that we can eventually transcend this way of framing the situation and begin talking about "benefit creation" of drug use, for drug use can actually have benefits, despite the fact that we have been indoctrinated since grade school to believe the opposite. As William Brereton notes in "The Truth About Opium,"3 nightly smokers of the drug have long lives, steady jobs, and they do not beat their wives. These are benefits.
2) This brings up a corollary issue: the document also calls for educating children in non-use. Now, that's fine if we are talking about non-use by children, but I do not think that our goal should be to make sure that children grow up as abstainers. It's one thing to worry about the safety of kids; it's another to impose our philosophical and religious principles upon those kids as adults. The fact is that smoking opium can be done safely, despite the endless lies of the Drug Warrior, and that such use does have benefits, of a poetic and temperamental kind -- real benefits -- especially when compared to the opiate derivatives which were created in response to the outlawing of opium. Moreover, we are a society in which 25% of American women take one or more Big Pharma 45 meds every day of their life6. It is strange that we should think that this is fine -- indeed it is their medical duty -- while yet telling them to keep away from opium, a drug that medical men from Avicenna to Galen to Paracelsus considered to be a panacea.
3) I am also leery of the "prescription requirements for higher potency opioids," which essentially means the continued criminalization of the same. I think the take-home message of America's drug problems is that criminalization is the problem, so I see no need for this exception. This does not mean that we need to make higher potency opioids available on every street corner, but we need to finally learn the lesson that prohibition causes far more problems than it solves -- and so such an exception to the idea of legalization is going to have its own downsides, downsides that we never seem to take into account when we make such caveats.
4) This leads naturally to my next concern, that we have to consciously start thinking of all the many Drug War DOWNSIDES whenever we contemplate the subject of legalization 7 versus criminalization. We cannot simply calculate the number of white American kids whom we think will or will not be "saved" by our drug laws: we must also think of the many stakeholders that we always seem to ignore. Our current opioid policy has had a ruinous effect on healthcare in India, where most hospitals no longer carry morphine 8 . Why? Because fearmongers in the States have so demonized such drugs that hospitals have been burdened with red tape and expenses whenever they wish to use them. And so we ignore the needs of pain patients around the world when we outlaw drugs in the states9. Other stakeholders include the artists who would like to benefit from opiate insights. Another stakeholder is the philosopher, whom William James himself told us should investigate altered states. In other words, when we criminalize drugs, we think that we're just "saving junior," whereas we are actually inflicting pain and censorship on the rest of the world. But, alas, in Congress, no one can hear them scream.
5) By the way, punishing people for using drugs should be recognized as the non-sequitur that it is. We may as well harass people and remove them from the workforce for failing to follow a government approved diet.
6) We also need to limit employee drug testing 10 to the goal of finding impairment, rather than it being a fishing expedition in search of demonized substances. It will do little good to legalize opiates if we continue to deny people jobs for actually using opiates.
7) One of the best ways to stop UNNECESSARY or FRIVOLOUS use of opiates would be by providing alternatives, and so we should legalize drugs like MDMA 11 and laughing gas 12 as part of our opiate program. For if opiates are the only way available for people to achieve self-transcendence in life, we should not be surprised if a lot of those people choose opiates.
Discuss the issues raised in this essay about the hateful policy of drug prohibition.
1) Explain why prohibition is the problem and not drugs.
2) Explain why saying "Fentanyl kills" is the philosophical equivalent of saying "Fire Bad".
3) Everybody wants to judge drugs out of context and come up with their own list of substances that we should outlaw. Harm Reduction folk have less items than most on their list, but they have still fallen for the idea that we must use prohibition for some substances. Americans have to learn that prohibition is the problem, not drugs. Societies from the caveman days to the 20th century have survived without telling people which substances they can ingest. It is amazing that the one country founded on individual freedom should be the first country to insist that we change that status quo all over the world -- and so in our attempt to save a relative handful of young white Americans, we throw the freedom and healthcare of every other citizen of the planet under the bus. Explain.
4) Cocaine could end the chronic depression of millions in a trice -- as Sigmund Freud well knew -- but self-interested doctors demonized the drug based on rare misuse, never even asking the depressed what they thought about the drug. The medical industry is a beneficiary of drug prohibition and apparently likes it, given its refusal to protest the policy on behalf of the millions that it turns into wards of the healthcare state. Explain. Discuss. Protest. Make this point of view known so that I am not the only person on the damned planet who even recognizes these issues.
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.
If I have no right to mother nature's bounty, then I surely have no right to manmade guns. If hysterical fearmongering justifies the eradication of the Fourth Amendment, then the Second Amendment should go as well.
My local community store here in the sticks sells Trump "dollar bills" at the checkout counter. I don't know what's worse: a president encouraging insurrection or an electorate that does not see that as a problem.
M. Pollan says "not so fast" when it comes to drug re-legalization. I say FAST? I've gone a whole lifetime w/o access to Mother Nature's plants. How can a botanist approve of that? Answer: By ignoring all legalization stakeholders except for the kids whom we refuse to educate.
"I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.
Someone tweeted that fears about a Christian Science theocracy are "baseless." Tell that to my uncle who was lobotomized because they outlawed meds that could cheer him up -- tell that to myself, a chronic depressive who could be cheered up in an instant with outlawed meds.
Drug warriors have harnessed the perfect storm. Prohibition caters to the interests of law enforcement, psychotherapy, Big Pharma, demagogues, puritans, and materialist scientists, who believe that consciousness is no big "whoop" and that spiritual states are just flukes.
That's why I created the satirical Partnership for a Death Free America. It demonstrates clearly that drug warriors aren't worried about our health, otherwise they'd outlaw shopping carts, etc. The question then becomes: what are they REALLY afraid of? Answer: Free thinkers.
Imagine the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."
Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.
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